strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive

Adventures with an unreliable narrator.

Oct 10 04: re-entry

So. I got back from Viable Paradise yesterday afternoon, and spent the evening trying not to bump into the furniture any more than could be helped, nor to slump senseless into the take-out Afghani pulao. I am better now. Hi.

What an incredible experience. Six instructors spent six days cramming as much of their collective wisdom as possible into the heads of nineteen aspiring SF/fantasy writers. We had lectures and colloquia on plotting and exposition and the ins and outs of the publishing world. We learned how to set up a plan of attack when researching subjects we knew nothing about—and the topics that writers who don’t do their research always get wrong. (Guns and horses are particularly fraught.)

We had one-on-one sessions in which our instructors—professional writers and editors all—anatomized our work. We sat down with an instructor and three of our fellow students and listened to them pick our stuff apart. We had long impromptu discussions on topics central and secondary (and tertiary, and quaternary) to the matter at hand. We learned new games. We ate together. We begged each other for manuscripts to read and discuss. We had a group reading of Henry V that featured lots of beer and silly accents. We stayed up with our roommates until 3:30 in the morning, our heads bowed over our laptops, the only sound the frantic clicking of keyboards. (I came home with two new stories that weigh in at about 3,500 words total. Curious parties should contact me.) We laughed a lot. A couple of times we went down to the seashore by night to see the stars in their multitudes above our heads, and the luminous jellyfish in the water at our feet.

Our instructors gave freely of their experience and their expertise and their whiskey. The staff ran themselves ragged printing our manuscripts and providing us with crock-pots full of dinner.

Oh, and people were pretty enthusiastic about my stuff. That was nice.

If Teresa still requires any reassurance that we, her students, learned anything, I would say that at least for me the answer is a resounding yes. The technical stuff was useful; the factual stuff will doubtless come in handy in all sorts of ways. But in my case, foremost among all the things I took away is this: I learned that I really can sit down and go from no-ideas-in-my-pretty-head to completed story that makes people laugh and/or want to know what happens in the end. If I knew this going in, I didn’t believe it. So: time and money well spent.

I am now required to act upon what I have learned. I think it’s going to be fun.

Would-be liars should be aware that the submissions queue for VP IX opens on January 1, 2005, and plan accordingly.

Commentary

Hi! You WILL get your work into print. You WILL remember your VP friends (aka ‘the little people’) when making your many award acceptance speechs in the future. You WILL remember that I live in the Orlando area when you visit Florida—I’d like to take you & your husband to dinner at the very least!

And thanks for moving this blind lady out of the bicycle’s path…

posted by Valerie, Oct 11 04 6:22 AM

[0 trackbacks]