...and then it was done.

I got to hang out with one of my favorite instructors for another week, drink out of an absolutely absurd Margarita glass at a Mexican restaurant on State Street, learn some stuff about my writing and meet some cool people, including fellow Clarionite (East Lansing, not Seattle, 2002, not 2006, but still a member in good standing of the quasi-freemasonic extended clique of Clarion grads) Brendan Day, who was also taking the class. Very talented guy, whose stuff you will doubtless be seeing more of in print in the future. This afternoon at lunch, I also got to meet his lovely fiancee Angela Rydell, who was teaching Write By The Lake's poetry section this year.

I mostly wrote abysmal crap in in-class exercises, although that itself doubtless has its own value as a, well, exercise and as a way of burning off some of the drek that sits on the prose surface of the brain. I did have one good moment, where I actually wrote something for an exercise that people liked and which I can actually re-read without cringing. (It was a remix of one CW06ers reading this may recognize. Along with a couple of other changes, we had Josh instead of Petra, but it was the same idea. Which is not to say that it wasn't useful. Like any other sort of exercise, writing exercises are useful more than once.) Since it's exactly eight sentences long, and not attached to any sort of actual story I plan on writing, I'll offer it up here as a technopeasant freebie (the p.o.v. character is a very little boy named "Josh," and it's first-person present tense recollected):

"There I am, squirming into my mother's coat, wishing that I could cover my whole body with it. I can't. My fingers are too numb to work right. Everything changes. Back home, in America, on days like this my mother would make me hot chocolate. My father would come in from the outside, hauling piles of logs and shaking snow from his boots, and make a fire. Then I'd snuggle between them on the couch and the world would be a warm and perfect place. Everything changes. Now, I'm halfway around the world, in a dead woman's coat, watching my breath float in the still air."

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I also finally got a chance to read "The Lincoln Train," one of the stories I hadn't read yet from "Mothers and Other Monsters," which is now probably on my top 10 list of favorite skiffy stories. Read it. Best last two sentences of all time.

In a very different corner of the genre, I've been reading through some recent issues of Analog that my wonderful sister brought me as WisCon. Since problem-solving hard-sf isn't particularly what I think of as my thing most of the time, I was pleasantly surprised at some of what I read there. Sure, not everything. If I edited Analog, some of these stories aren't necessarily the ones that would have spoken to me enough to publish them. Then again, as the traditional Yiddish saying goes, "Az der bubbe vot gehat baytzim vot zie geven mein zayde." (If my grandmother had balls, she'd be my grandfather.) I'm not Stanley Schmidt, for better or for worse, and Stanley Schmidt is not me.

I did, however, like some of the stories. To anyone whose eyes glaze over when they read a certain kind of hard sf but who wants to read an Analog story they'd like, I'd particularly recommend "The Face of Hate" by Stephen L. Burns, from the January/February issue, which personally I found genuinely moving.

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Yesterday, I had my conference with Maureen. Which was fucking awesome, as one might predict.

Previously, she'd read and given me some comments on the beginning of some stuff I was working on this week (not the same project I've mentioned here, but something developed from an exercise we did in class.) I think that managed in its own way to be analytically useful, but only in a fairly limited way, since it was something that seemed like a *hilarious* idea to me for my first five minutes of writing it, but that I started to actively loathe by about ten minutes in.

Anyway, agreeing that it would probably be more useful for her to read something that I wrote while I was on top of my game (thus providing a vantage point for looking at the current limits of the game), she read an older story (but one that post-dates the last most recent stuff she'd read from me.) While her specific crit of that story was potentially useful--it's about 4K she wanted me to add on about an extra thousand words, which I'll definitely do *if* its rejected at a couple of places I want to try it at that cap out at 4K--her discussion of that story was exponentially more useful as a general diagnosis of what the issues are with my writing, why it hums when it hums, why it falls flat when it falls flat, and what sorts of things I need to think about to improve even the hummy stuff. Rock music, Byronic poetry, Tarantino, academic philosophy and Neuromancer all came up in the analysis.

She also gave me a very specific assignment for my next story, which included (this is an absolute historic first for me as a writing directive) *NOT WRITING ANYTHING FOR TWO WEEKS.* No kidding. I'm allowed to revise, but I'm not allowed to do any new writing for a two-week period post-Wisconsin, so as to allow the intuitive juices to ferment and the writing project to turn over in my head.

(Can't you just picture the conversation-with-supportive-friend that could come out of this? "Gee, Ben, should you really go out to South Beach tonight?" "Sure, why not?" "Well, shouldn't you be, I don't know, writing?" "No." "No?" "No. Maureen Fucking McHugh specifically instructed me not to write tonight. I'm obliged to go out and get smashed, so I won't be exposed to the temptation to write." "Well, if you say so...")

Just for the sake of burning through old material and not leaving the previous project hanging, I do think I'll probably try to write tonight before flying back tomorrow, interpreting the two weeks as starting when I get back to Miami, but even so.... Very strange.

Now, you might be wondering how this affects my writeathon performance. Two points on that--even with the two-week break, I should be able to at least get up to the halfway point, and a couple of foolish people have already pledged to donate if I even get to half of my goal. Secondly, I might still be able to pull it off, if after this story and the Maureen-mandated story that's coming up in two weeks, I try to do some little 500-words-or-less flash pieces before the deadline. I have, in fact, a fairly specific idea for a series of teeny pieces like that, in fulfillment of a challenge my classmate Meghan gave me almost a year ago. As per usual for Meghan challenges, I suspect that if I pull it off, she'll be slightly bemused and tell me that it's not quite what she had in mind, but it might be fun anyway.

In any case, I'm done with this.

As President Bartlet likes to ask, "what's next?"