keyan_bowes | Entries tagged with clarion

You don't have to be a Clarion grad to join Clarion's 5th writeathon, which runs from June 22nd for 6 weeks (paralleling the Clarion workshop). You only need to write, and get some sponsors. This fund-raiser for Clarion provides moral support and community as you write. Win-win-win! (The third win is for readers, who will get some good stories out of this.)

Here's the Clarion Foundation blogpost about it: The 5th Annual Clarion Write-a-thon

Here's the Clarion Writeathon website. where you can sign up to write, or sign up to sponsor writers by making a donation.

I'm a Clarion graduate (2007) and it was honestly life-changing for me. It takes years to unpack everything you learn, and a lot of it isn't even about the craft - you learn about the whole writing ecosystem, so to speak. The write-a-thon funds help to keep this workshop alive, and to sponsor writers who wouldn't otherwise be able to attend.

NEW IMPROVED WEBSITE

My friend and Clarionmate Justin Whitney's poured hours of work into revamping the Write-a-thon website. Here's what he says about it:

"The vast bulk of the work I did this year has been to make the site easier to use. Basically, it's finally begun operating like most other sites out there - lots of highly responsive javascript type of work. I created a bunch of web services so that I can save and retrieve from the database without the user ever leaving the page. I also added a bit of eye candy here and there. I imagine for most dot-coms it's pretty routine stuff. But then they usually have teams of specialists working on the different areas that have to come together. I'm rather pleased with the work I did but I'm not really sure how to promote that to new and past users. "It kind of looks the same, but the plumbing is WAY BETTER!"

"The most significant change was to address the chief complaint we've gotten over the years - the actual sponsorship process. On the fast end, you can now pledge toward a writer's goal with no more than 3 clicks (if you're already logged in) and without ever leaving the writer's page. On the slow end, a brand new visitor can sponsor a writer in about 5 clicks and a couple of short forms, again without ever leaving the page. And that includes both a one-time registration and a one-time credit card form (contact info only - no credit card information). After that, the credit card contact info will be prefilled and login will be remembered, so it's even easier. OR, she can skip registration entirely and go straight to payment - I created a way to keep track of visitors who sponsor multiple writers without ever registering, so it doesn't turn into a big mess on the back-end. Everything is integrated with the admin tools I built so that the entire Thon can be run by 2 part-time volunteers.

"Still, other than revamping the entire sponsorship process, the site looks almost the same as last year, albeit a LOT cleaner."

CLARION: The Best Broken Heart You'll Ever Have

Check it out! If you're a writer, sign up! If you can't, but can donate money to sponsor and encourage writers, that's great too. (And if you can do both, so much the better.)

If this post sounds like hard-sell Hurrah Clarion! - it's because that's how I feel about the workshop. There's a great blogpost from Sam Miller on the Clarion Blog, called The Best Broken Heart You'll Ever Have. Nails it.

If you're the kind of reader who enjoys the Sookie Stackhouse books, or Women of the Otherworld, or the Anita Blake series before they became soft porn....

... you have to meet Kit Melbourne. Part-time barista, freelance florist, serious karate-ka, Kit inherits a jeweled bindi that reveals that her boyfriend is an occasional bear, her best client is a goddess, and many of her clients at her brother's cafe are Otherfolk. The only hitch is that a lot of people, human and otherwise, know about this jewel, and are ready to kill her for it. All she has to do is find out who they are and how to stay alive.

Kit Melbourne is the heroine of Seeing Things, the first of the "Seabingen" novels by my friend and Clarionmate, Kater Cheek. (Seabingen is the name of the setting, a contemporary University town inspired by Seattle.) I've been one of the lucky early readers of this series, and it rocks. Kater's decided to e-publish the first three novels.

And... the first one, Seeing Things, is up at Smashwords. If you like urban fantasy, and want a fast fun read and a heroine with guts, smarts, and a neat sense of humor... go for it. It's FREE during the soft-launch period.

Here's the link (in case the other ones don't work and you need one to paste in your browser)
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/66778

Ladies and Gentlemen, start your computers! Here comes the Second Clarion Writeathon.

What's a Writeathon?

It's like a walk-a-thon, but with words instead of steps. You sign up, find sponsors who'll pledge donations, and write!
It runs for the duration of the famous Clarion Writers' Workshop, and it's intended to raise funds for the workshop.

Do you have to be a Clarion grad to join the Writeathon?

Nope. Anyone can play -- just click on the button to take you over to the Clarion Writeathon page. It's sort of like Nanowrimo, but with pledges thrown in.

Am I writing?

Nope again... there's too much going on in my life right now, and writing's gone on the back burner for a while. But I'll be supporting friends who participate.

Can anyone donate?

~~Hell~~ Heck yeah!

Some people advise beginning writers to move on from their "trunk stories" - those written long ago, lying unsold in metaphorically dusty files on your computer. The Crap Fairies* have probably been at them like a horde of marauding moths. The old stories are obsolete, dead, journeyman exercises in the craft. Move on, the advice goes, to new ideas, to better-written stories.

Not me. My dusty files have stories decades old. They're all alive, and when I'm in the mood, I take them out and revise them, saving every new version. Playing with possibilities is one of the delights of writing. The story's setting changes. The main characters change nationality, gender, sexual orientation, age, appearance, personality. The story's voice changes, and so do tense and person and length. Each of my stories has a multiple existence, going back years. (I think the max right now is 22 versions.)

Most of all, endings change. At Clarion, instructor Greg Frost proposed an interesting exercise. Write an ending to your story. Now put it away, and write a different one. Then another. And another. The first one, he suggested, is seldom the best one - because it's likely to be the most obvious. It's only when you force yourself to consider other endings that you fully explore the logic of the story.

Until it's sold, a story balances on the edge of many possibilities.

As they're published -- sometimes 20+ years after the first draft -- they crystallize. Their worlds, their people, and what becomes of them, are no longer indeterminate. Their secret alternate selves exist only in my files.

[*Crap Fairies: I think my friend Kater Cheek invented the term. They mess around with your old stories so when you re-read them you wonder how you wrote such crap...]

The Clarion Workshop has a freshly minted blog, launched May 1. It's a great read.

The regular bloggers are Mishell Baker (Clarion 2009); my Clarion mates Kater Cheek and Justin Whitney (2007). In addition, there'll be guest blogging by Clarion instructors, and from agents. (This week's is from Matt Bialer, literary agent from Sanford J Greenburger.)

(It's at http://clarionfoundation.wordpress.com/ - not to be confused with multiple other Blogs Called Clarion.)

Clarion's also following Clarion West in launching a Writeathon to raise funds, provide a venue for alumni involvement, and an incentive to write-write-write. Go the site for more details.

My Clarion friend Justin Whitney has a beautiful story in Emerald Tales. (It's online as a PDF.)

Set in his native Texas, this is a meditation on time and age and family and life. Pitch-perfect, engrossing, and one of those stories that feel true though they're fantasy.

"He looked out across his lawn. Where had they all come from? His tiny house perched on
top of the hill like a sassy hat cocked to one side. Watching them scurry over the grass, he
counted thirty, no thirty-five, no too many to count anymore, daughters and sons and their
husbands and wives and what all."

For anyone who has ever loved someone who's aging - this feels like a homage.

.....

Yesterday, I opened my copy of Weird Tales, and there it was - my Clarionmate Kater Cheek's story, Gingerbread House.

This was a Clarion story, a very creepy Fairy-Tale-Meets-Reality-Show. If you like creepy retold fairy tales, you have to read this one. Unfortunately, it's a paper magazine, so if you're not a subscriber, you'll have to buy, borrow or steal it. (The link is for the first option.)

So I'm thrilled. I've been keeping track of our published Clarion stories. Here we are, nearly three years later, and they're still coming out!

When I went to Clarion, I certainly hoped to improve my own writing, to take it beyond the not-quite-published plateau on which it was stuck.

I didn't expect that I would get so caught up in the work of other writers, that there was a whole community out there that I would get drawn into. I didn't expect Clarion to be a portal into a strange new place. It was as though the world twisted just a tiny bit, and everything was a little different.

I hope that the Clarion class of 2010, just announced, will find it as magical.

Congratulations to:

Gregory Bossert, Stacie Brown, John Chu, William Farrar, Erin Gonzales, Jessica Hilt, Jennifer Hsyu, Adam Israel, Dustin Monk, Tamsyn Muir, Laura Praytor, LaTisha Redding, Dallas Taylor, Leah Thomas, Karin Tidbeck, Tom Underberg, Kali Wallace, Kai Ashante Wilson.

The 2010 writers in residence are Delia Sherman, George R.R. Martin, Dale Bailey, Samuel R. Delany, Jeff VanderMeer, and Ann VanderMeer.

I'd be more jealous if half of them were not the instructors we had at Clarion 2007.

I should probably call this post, Keyan Bowes and the Insufficiently Immodest Author.

Browsing at Borders on a rainy evening, I flipped through the spec-fic magazines - and there, in Fantasy and Science Fiction, was a story by my Clarion 2007 classmate, Ramsey Shehadeh. It was called Epidapheles and the Insufficiently Affectionate Ocelot.

Before I explain my utterly gleeful reaction, I should say two things, okay three things: Many of our classmates keep each other informed when they sell stories. Ramsey isn't one of them. Many keep us informed when a story is published. Ramsey isn't one them either. And Epidapheles and the unsatisfactory ocelot wasn't a Clarion story.

However: We did workshop a different Epidapheles story at Clarion, and it was a delight. I'd say it's in the same genre of intelligent lunacy as Terry Pratchett. So this was a terrific surprise, and I'm about to read it with great anticipation.

[ETA: I read it. It's wonderful. Epidapheles has a familiar called Door, who's an invisible sentient chair. The story has sword-wielding vultures and a goblin army...

I believe F&SF will also be publishing other Epidapheles stories.

(And Ramsey: We'd love to know. In advance. So we can watch for it.)

[ETA: I can't believe I misspelled Epidapheles four different ways in this post... corrected now.]
[ETA2: I can't believe that not only did I spell Epidapheles five different ways, all of them were wrong.]

ETA 3: F&SF has put it on line!]

Peter Pan meets Michael Jackson in the blogworld!
Tweet all about it!

My friend and Clarionmate Kari has written an awesome story, and elected to post it on her blog instead of sending it out. It's part of her 12 stories in 12 months project. "None of the stories I’m posting are going to be rewrites or trunk stories. They’re all going to be fresh. I may end up staying in genre, I may not. The first story re-imagines Peter Pan as an American pop star, a year and a half rise and fall as told through online music blogs. I got the idea for it at World Fantasy back in October. It’s called 'P.an.' ”

You can read it here. (Or find it at http://karinotvery.net/wordpress/?page_id=2528)

... at Cabinet des Fees!

I'm particularly thrilled because "Nor Yet Feed the Swine" was first drafted at Clarion, and critiqued post-Clarion by Karen Joy Fowler...

It's changed a lot since then, but the essential framework of the story is exactly as I drafted it the week that Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner taught. (Thanks, both: especially for the year-and-a-day suggestion. It completely changed the pacing of the story.)

I'm delighted to have it in such a lovely publication.
The artwork with the story is a 2007 photograph by David Shankbone.

This is my first Clarion story to sell (though I've sold several other, non-Clarion, things in the 2.5 years since the workshop).

My Clarion buddy, Nick Wolven has a story in Asimov's. That's big news, but not the big news: After all, one of Nick's Clarion stories sold to them almost immediately.

The big news is that Nick's story is the cover illustration.

In Nick's blog, he says that it was a childhood dream of his to have a story professionally illustrated.

And then I googled the art - by Duncan Long - and in his blog, he says it was a childhood dream of his to have his art on the cover of a scf-if magazine.

So congratulations, both! Here's to childhood dreams and their realization!

My Clarion buddy Justin Whitney has a story up at Expanded Horizons.

It's called "Introducing Jim," and it's utterly delightful, an affectionate satire on Texas, relationships, and Dairy Queen...

With a djinn.

It was one of Justin's Clarion stories.

I remember when I first read it - walking from my room to the cafeteria, laughing out loud to the astonished glances of the civilians who had no idea about Clarion.

I am delighted to see it in print. Or pixel. Okay, in public.

Clarion Writers Workshop, that magical place, opened its admissions earlier this year. December 1. Today. (Actually, yesterday.)

It has an amazing line-up of instructors: Delia Sherman, George R.R. Martin, Dale Bailey, Chip Delany, and Jeff and Ann Vandermeer!

If you are considering going, send in your application soon!

My experience at Clarion was marvelous, and I'm very glad indeed I went. It was a portal to another world. BC, I had sold one poem. AC, I have a number of stories and poems out there. I'm not sure I'd still be writing (or at least, sending anything out) if it were not for Clarion.

Last night, I went to see a short film made from one of my stories, The Rumpelstiltskin Retellings. My story retells the fairy-tale as a series of poetic blogs by each character.

For those who don't recall the fairy-tale: ( it's here behind the cut.) )
Justin interpreted my story as on-camera interviews with the Queen, the Miller, the King, the Handmaid, and Rumpelstiltskin. I was totally blown away by how fresh it was, and yet how true to the spirit of my story. The acting was extremely good, the sets were perfect, and everything just worked. Justin "wrote, directed, produced and edited it. And yeah, [he] acted in it too."

His team was called Sea Urchin Productions, and they worked in collaboration with Scary Cow, a film-makers' collaborative which also arranged the screening.

The film was one of eighteen short films shown. They ranged from simple amateur efforts to professional-looking well-produced movies. This one was clearly one of the best.

ETA: It won an award and a cash prize!

------------

In other news: My story, The Intragalactic Shakespeare Festival, has been accepted for the Art from Art anthology. I'm thrilled. Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman's positive feedback at Clarion saved me from trunking it. Even though it's a favorite among my stories, I didn't know if anyone else would be interested in the intersection of science-fiction, fantasy, and Shakespeare.

The main event today at Wiscon was The Gathering, an indoor fair with a clothing swap, face-painting, tarot, palm-reading, some impressive-despite-the-noise shape-note singing, and a bookstore offering ARCs of books for a $1 donation (with a ten-book limit). I was trying to stay at the other end of the room from that one, but was pulled into its gravitational perimeter and ended up with three books. I had rather idiotically brought books from home to read... and I haven't even been to the dealer's room yet. My suitcase is going to look like the Library Thief's Last Moments.

I met more people I knew - some in person, some online. Among them were people from my Second Draft writing group, people from my online Codex writing group, and Clarion 08 people (with some overlap in these categories). My other Clarionmate

redcrowkater also came in, so she,

julieandrews , and I hung out. Kater knew a really great tapas restaurant. Thoroughly enjoyable.

I'd like to post a Wiscon photograph, but will first want to clear it with everyone in it. It's a Wiscon policy, and I'm impressed.

ETA: Okay, I have clearance from everyone except Geoff Ryman. (Geoff, if you object, I'll delete this).

Towering over everyone: Geoff Ryman .

Above: Kathleen, Keffy and Eugene (all Clarion 2008);
Kater, Keyan & Julie (Clarion 2007)

As I feared, there were too many choices to do everything I would have liked. I attended a panel on Cultural Appropriation 101, and then another called Tyrannosaurs in F16s! Also part of a fascinating music/ reading session, but something in the airconditioning made me sneeze and I had to leave. I ended up at the LiveJournal party, where someone from Clarion West 08 was amused by my Clarion 2007 Roman-must-die vest.

Liz Argall, Clarion 2009, is making a compilation of Clarion blogs. She's including Clarion West and Clarion South. I think this is going to be an amazing resource for anyone planning to attend any of these workshops (and an amazing time-sink for those of us who tend to nostalgia for the workshop we attended).

Thanks, Liz!

Taking a leaf out of the Ferret's blog, I am listing my Clarion entries here. (Our year wasn't encouraged to blog at the time, but I wrote these afterward from my notes.)

My Clarion-mates, as I never get tired of saying, wrote awesome stories. It's wonderful to see the Clarion stories getting published, and to remember that we were *there* when they were being written. Clarion was a very special place.

Nick Wolven's An Art, Like Everything Else, was in Asimov's in April/May 2008. I can't link to it since it's a paper edition. A moving story of digital mourning and death. His "The Love Sling" came out in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet.
Catherine (Kater) Cheek's She's Taking Her Tits to the Grave came out in June 2008 in Ideomancer. Funny, empathetic story about a zombie. ETA: It's been collected in The Living Dead anthology, edited by John Joseph Adams, which is already available.
Ramsey Shehadeh's story, Jimmy's Roadside Cafe, came out in Strange Horizons in June 2008. This wasn't a Clarion story, exactly, meaning it wasn't written at Clarion, but it was a submission story and discussed in class. A sweet postapocalyptic story with decaying corpses.
Peter Atwood's All In was published in Weird Tales in July/ August 2008. It's about gambling life and limb. [Edited March 09 to add: This story's been nominated for the Prix Aurora Awards]
My own Clarion submission story, Spoiling Veena was published in Expanded Horizons. It's about a designer baby growing up and wanting something different. ETA: It's going in the Eight Against Reality anthology, from Panverse Press.
Caleb Wilson's submission story, American Dreamers, was published in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and his Clarion story, Court Scranto, about a dead boy's post mortem presence, was published by Weird Tales. Unfortunately, both of these are on dead trees, not pixels, so linkless here.

And now:

Desirina Boskovich has her beautiful story Celadon up at Clarkesworld. It's a space colonization story with a difference, somewhere between science fiction and fantasy, and has some elegant imagery.

I'm pretty sure I've missed some, and I'll come back and edit them in later.
But even better: There will be more. They've already sold.

Watch this space.

I meant it!

Another of Desirina's Clarion stories, Sand Castles, is in the ~~final~~ April 09 issue of Realms of Fantasy. [No longer the "final" issue, thanks Warren Lapine.]
Jerome Stueart's evocative Clarion story, The Moon over Tokyo Through Leaves in the Fall is in the September 09 issue of Fantasy magazine.
Justin Whitney's delightful satire-with-a-djinn, Introducing Jim is in the December 09 issue of Expanded Horizons.
My own Nor Yet Feed the Swine is in the January 2010 issue of Cabinet Des Fees. This, then titled Curlylocks, was written at Clarion.
Shweta Narayan's Clarion submission/ discussion story, Pisaach, is in the Beastly Bride anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. (Paper edition, so no link, but its an awesome story. With snakes. Shapeshifting snakes.)
Kater (Catherine) Cheek's Gingerbread House showed up today in my new issue of Weird Tales (April 2010). Again, paper so no link, but it's a great story... one of my Clarion faves. A truly creepy fairy-tale meets reality TV.
Nick Wolven's On the Horizon is out in the August 2010 edition of Asimov's. It was a Clarion submission story, written specifically for Clarion. Haven't read it yet, but I am sure it's awesome.
Peter Atwood's Artifact about love and loss on an alien world is out in Apex (July, 2010). This was a Clarion 4th Week story.
Ramsey Shehadeh's Epidapheles and the Inadequately Enraged Demon is out in Fantasy and Science Fiction (July/August 2010). The hero is an invisible sentient chair call Door, who is a magician's familiar.
Justin Whitney's Clarion story, Dry Spell, is in the September 2010 issue of Cabinet des Fees. It's comic and charming and you have to meet Dot, a tough old fairy godmother who lives in a Texas trailer park. ("I love Dot to bits," editor Erzebet Yellowboy said.)
My own Clarion submission story The Souk of Dreams is also out in the September 2010 issue of Cabinet des Fees. (I'm toc-mates with Justin!!) The Souk of Dreams is a magic market in Dubai, and Dylan's there with a guy he hardly knows.

If you write fantasy and science fiction, if you're considering going to Clarion at San Diego in 2009 - the application period is approaching. Clarion will accept apps from Jan 2 to March 1.

You'll need to submit two short stories, so start polishing them now.... Scholarships are available. Additional information can be found at http://clarion.ucsd.edu. It has a great instructor line-up for 2009: Holly Black, Larissa Lai, Robert Crais, Kim Stanley Robinson, Elizabeth Hand, and Paul Park.

Definitely consider Clarion. I'm biased, of course. I've been burbling about Clarion for a year and a half. But I found it a life-changing experience. If writing fantasy and/ or science fiction is something you're considering as a profession or even a serious hobby: Definitely think about Clarion.

In other news: My poem in the form of a pantoum, "Nightwatch: A Poem for Two Voices" is up at a webzine for kids, Spaceports and Spider Silk. (Isn't the title irresistible? Of the webzine, I mean, not the poem.)

It's that time of the year. This time last year, we were all preparing for Clarion - rushing to finish stuff at home, preparing packing lists, looking for stories by our instructors, and beginning to make contact on the Google Group set up for us...

And now another batch of Clarionites is coming up - actually, several, considering Clarion West and Clarion South. My classmate Julie Andrews has posted a very good entry with pre-Clarion advice on her Livejournal site. I think the most important thing she said was the bit about clearing the time: Don't have outside commitments if you can possibly avoid it. Clarion is immersive and time-consuming, and it works because of that.

I'll add one small suggestion for Clarion Diego: If you're within driving distance, and can bring your car, do so. Much of the campus transport is on hold during summer, and it's difficult to get around without a car. Our group was lucky; there were just enough cars+ drivers to transport everyone. (If you're in a similar situation, the group as a whole might want to work out some arrangement for sharing gas costs - it's getting pricey.)

I'm jealous, you guys! It was an amazing experience. I hope your groups are as wonderful as ours.

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Keyan Bowes

Entries tagged with clarion

Clarion's 5th Writeathon is Open!

Seeing Things by Kater Cheek - Urban Fantasy, ePubbed!

The Second Clarion Write-a-thon Is About to Begin!

Shrodinger stories

Clarion has a Blog

Justin Whitney's "The Old Man and the Hill" in Emerald Tales

Kater Cheek's Gingerbread House in Weird Tales

Congrats and Welcome, Clarion 2010!

Ramsey Shehadeh and Epidapheles in F&SF

Pan meets MJ

My story, Nor Yet Feed The Swine is up...

Nick Wolven in Asimov's - with a cover!

Introducing Jim by Justin Whitney

Clarion Writers' Workshop - Admissions Open!

Rumpled at the Scary Cow screening

Wiscon 33 - Friday

A compilation of Clarion Blogs

Clarion Stories

Clarion Application Time!

Clarion Advice to Incomers