Friday, 09 November 2001

No new writing progress today. I got a lot done at my day job and ended up feeling like a break.

I'm reading Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell by Pat Murphy, the week four Clarion instructor this year. It's delightful--funny but also a little spooky. Great fun. Max Merriwell says, "Fiction writers are all liars. People tend to forget that." Pat read two brief excerpts from the book at her reading and it has been a lot of fun to recognize those scenes and reread them in context.

The chapters all begin with quotes from one of the books written under one of Max Merriwell's pseudonyms. The chapter where I've stopped for the night begins with someone beginning to tell a story about a young woman "who left her home and family and went out to seek her fortune."

People don't do that much any more. Of course, most young women pretty much never did, but even most young men didn't. They stayed home and took up their father's trade, or maybe were apprenticed off to learn some other trade. People still do that, I suppose, if not so many as before.

But what interests me is that so many people leave their home and family and go out into the wide world--but with so little thought of making their fortune. Surely, if you're going to go to all that trouble, making your fortune ought to at least be a goal.

This month's Locus arrived today, with the group photo of the Clarion 2001 class. The first of many appearances for many of us, I'm sure.