…or studying writing, or workshopping my stories, or something like that.
I’ve been focusing on doing an extended writing workshop since November of last year, at least. I sent in applications to Clarion and Clarion West in late February, and they both sent me the ‘we regret to inform you’ responses in March. Sent in my Odyssey workshop application in late March, and I landed on the waiting list, and waited, and waited, and waited.
About a week ago, while looking for information on ‘Writing conferences’, I happened to follow a link to the Center for Science Fiction’s short fiction workshop. It’s less high-profile than the other workshops were, and a shorter course - only two weeks as opposed to six. But I figured, “Hey, if they really still have spots, why not send in an application? What could it hurt? They don’t even have a processing fee?”
I spent a good chunk of the weekend working on polishing one of my short stories, and sent it off yesterday evening. The workshop leader emailed me back with the good news this morning.
So, I’ll be spending a little while at the University of Kansas campus in Lawrence, it seems, from late June to early July!
Next; you must be thinking of someone else. Clarion was not even on my radar before 2010. I heard about it around January-ish of that year, and thought idly of applying for 2010, but decided that I wasn’t comfortable with taking that much time off work at that point.
In the fall of last year, I decided to go ahead and get pre-approval for a leave of absence, in case I got accepted to a workshop long enough that I needed it. So it looks like I won’t be needing that; I get three weeks paid vacation, so that should cover CSSF and leave some days that I can draw on for other minor adventures, like DragonCon, the night of writing dangerously, and taking a full day off work for Fan Expo!
Sigh. You made me search. Turns out it was Bren_Cameron, who seems to be still active but only has posted a couple of dozen times since 2005. I blame Clarion. I couldn’t write for a year after Clarion because I was so self-aware that everything I wrote was blazingly, glaringly WRONG!
That’s apparently not uncommon. (Look, a litote!) Not a majority experience, fortunately. Two weeks shouldn’t be as bad, and I was admittedly too young to fully benefit. At best, I displayed a shred of promise, which put me well ahead of the kid who got told by Harlan Ellison that he should burn down his high school for what they had done to him. Jim Gunn will never say anything like that to you.
Anyway, the benefits from workshops vary wildly from shop to shop and student to student. If you are at a proper place in your career, and find teachers who click with you, and fellow students to bounce ideas and thoughts and stories off of so that they spark better ideas and thoughts and stories, then a workshop can be transformative and you’ll make lifelong friends. If all that is not present, a workshop should still be fun and informative. You will be, probably for the first time in you life, in a total immersion experience with like-minded obsessives. You will never forget it. A very few people get nothing at all, for a huge variety of reasons. That’s sad.