Today was Geoff's last day in an official capacity here, and the mood was kind of subdued. He's organized a party tonight, with more hand-made food and drinks, at around 7:00. If a squirtgun fight breaks out again tonight, I'm going to have sit this one out. As I was walking back from the session this afternoon, my left foot was really hurting. I had to turn down going on a bike ride with Janet because it hurt so much. When I got back to the room and got my sandal off, I saw that the skin on the bottom of my foot had split, and was seeping blood. I washed it out and put a big band-aid on it, but I won't be doing any running around for a day or so.

It's been great having Patrick Nielsen Hayden here for the last few days. He's been able to give us some good insights as an editor on what grabs his attention. My conference with him is on Monday at 3:00, and I have no idea what we'll talk about. I'm going to try and solidify some ideas for my novel, An American Symphony, and get the whole what's-it-about question answerable in a concise paragraph. I'm not counting on any kind of response from him on whether he would be interested in the novel, but I can ask him about getting an agent and some advice on the kinds of books he looks for.

Since I was down to the absolute minimum of clothing today, I did laundry and read through the three stories for Monday. I'll have to go back and read them again and make critiques, but at least I've gone over them once already.

"China Life" has ground to a halt at just under 700 words. It simply does not want to written at this time. So I think I'll start on "In the Valley of the All-Father", an idea I brought from home. There's a subdivision on the way into Charlotte, NC called Valhalla that my friend John has told me about, and I thought, wouldn't it be funny if that's where all the Norse gods went to after people stopped believing in them. And since I haven't really written a comedy here ("Eat, Drink, and Be Merry" was originally intended to be a comedic romp but ended up going a totally different way, and "One" was kind of a dark comedy with some funny bits in it, but was more or less serious), I think it's time I did one.

Oh, and Deirdre said today that past classes of Clarion appeared in the November issue of Locus after their stay at Clarion. If I find out differently, I'll let you all know on my regular personal journal (since I'm ending this one at the end of the workshop).

And I heard from writing buddy Richard Butner yesterday that he thought we should be playing Thing, since Mafia is such a 90's thing. This was said in jocularity, rather than snottiness. But, not one to want to stay behind the times, I will try and find someone who knows how to play Thing, since Richard says it's about ten times better.