Monday, 09 July 2001

Woo hoo for us! In particular, woo hoo for Theodora Goss. Our very own Dora sold a story to Shawna! Look for it in the January Realms of Fantasy.

I think you're going to see a lot of published fiction from members of the Clarion 2001 class in the near future. In fact, the only reason you wouldn't see at least eight or nine of us published in the next year and a half would be if a bunch of us quit writing or didn't send stuff out to editors.

Got email today that galleys for Bones of the World are going out. They're hoping to get the book out in time for Worldcon, which would be great.

I finished a first draft of what will be my last Clarion story. I would have liked to hold it over night and then revise it tomorrow, but I didn't. I let it sit over dinner, read through it one time, and then printed it. I'll turn it in tomorrow morning for critique (probably) on Wednesday.

When I came back from dinner I found I had email from Tim Pratt, poetry editor for Speculon. He had been reading my journal, observed that I'd written a sestina, and urged me to consider sending it in.

I had, in fact, been planning to do just that. I had seen his note on the Speculations Rumor Mill, and had asked Dora to take a second look at the sestina and give me a critique of it. (The group hasn't been critiquing the poetry that we've written.) Dora kindly obliged and I had just made my changes based on her suggestions a couple hours before Tim Pratt's mail came.

So, that's neat.

Our final week is slipping away. On the one hand, I'm really anxious to get home and be with my sweety again. On the other, I'm really sad at the idea of this wonderful time coming to an end. On the gripping hand, I'm really glad to have finished my last Clarion story. The pressure is off now. I'll still have critiques to do, but that's nothing compared to trying to do that and write.

The number of critiques we're doing has dropped off a lot, too. Here's an update to the chart I've put up a few times before:

Note that the count of stories critiqued is the number I've done critiques for, and therefore excludes the stories written by me. Everyone else will have critiqued a roughly similar number, depending on whether they are more or less prolific than me.