Today started off with a talk by Karen and Tim about setting and scenery. Since we only had three stories to critique, the talk went on for about an hour, which was good. Karen brought up the good point that it's almost impossible to skim through the story on a first draft, then go back and put in setting details later. The mind just doesn't work the same on the second go-around. I'm glad they talked about this, since there are some who need a little help in this area. (I'm not including myself, since setting is one of my strong points. In fact, when Geoff Ryman read my "Shiny Diner Blues," he really loved the setting and the atmosphere of the diner, even if there wasn't much of a story there.)

I stayed up until 3:30 AM last night/this morning to try and finish my Valhalla story, and I ended up only writing about 600 words before I collapsed from exhaustion. But I got a bunch written today, bringing the total up to 2400 words so far, and I hope to finish it tonight to toss in the box tomorrow.

Patrick gave another talk tonight, on anthologies and shared-world anthologies. Since the first week, the majority of us have been talking about trying to do a shared-world anthology, where we create the world and all its rules, and each story is confined to that. But after listening to Patrick tonight, that may be falling apart. The demand for shared-world stuff seems to have died out for the most part, with some very rare exceptions.

I rescheduled my meeting with Patrick for 8:20 tomorrow morning, and cranked the volume on my alarm clock to make sure I don't sleep through this one as well.