A cheer (woot!) to Jay Lake for his novel contract with Tor. It's already a cliche to say I knew it would happen.

The official news of this came on the same day as workshop night. And at the Wordos on Tuesday night, a photographer came by (following up after the Register-Guard reporter visited last week) and took photos of the group and our publications. You see, everyone brought in either all the books and magazines they were published in or just a portion of them. We also brought in awards, both workshop and outside ones like Writers Of The Future. Unfortunately, Jay couldn't make it.

I'll put the link up to the Register-Guard when the article and pictures show. We had a quite a pile of publications and awards. And it was fun to watch the photographer hovering about as the critiques were going on. Every so often he would raise his camera and zoom in on a shot.

I got to thinking about the workshop and the phases it goes through. It's a lot like Saturday Night Live, actually. About every ten years it seems Loren Michaels gets a completely new cast with all new talent and faces and new writers. '85 that happened when he returned to the show after being gone a few years. Then in '95 or so you got the cast with Will Ferrel and Cheri O' Teri. I haven't watched SNL much in the last couple of years but with what I have seen, SNL might be ready for another whole new cast.

The workshop is very different than it was five years ago. Sure there are several faces still there from 2000, but there are a dozen or more new faces. And when we started meeting at Tsunami Books in '95 and became the Wordos, well, that group was a lot smaller than today. Even before we became the Wordos, the group met at G. Willikers and that was different yet. There are a few faces from the G. Willikers days still meeting every Tuesday night at Tsunami. So I guess, unlike SNL, the workshop goes through phases around the five year mark and new faces come in and some regulars leave. Also, unlike SNL, we don't have a producer hiring and firing talent.

This is a roundabout way of saying I've seen many changes and new writers in the twelve years I've been going to the workshop. I think Jay Lake has the fastest moving career of anyone in the workshop. Indeed he is a rocket and he was launched the year he arrived at the Wordos and I don't mean the Wordos launched him, no, it was his own hard work and workshopping a story (sometimes two, maybe three) a week, as well as mailing a short story a week. I'm talking about DRIVE. He's been working for about five years. Where will he be in five more?

Congrats Jay! It will be exciting to see where you go next.

It's also now a cliche to say, "I knew him when."