Write-a-thon in progress

My extended time is up...I still lack one story draft.  However, one of the poems that I wrote and submitted during the WAT was accepted!  I hope that everyone had a productive WAT--whether you reached your goals, or simply got something done!

POETRY

Goal: 6 new drafts (could be rough, intermediate, rewrite, or final--current final drafts are marked with an asterisk)

--"The Confession"*

--"The alchemist works furiously upon the death of his love"*

--"Code Blue"

--Untitled ("Hellcat")

--"Deliverance"*

--"Alabaster"* (and accepted by MindFlights, http://www.mindflights.com/) 

FICTION

Goal: 6 new drafts (rough, intermediate, rewrite, or final--current final drafts are marked with an asterisk)

--"Last Boat to Heaven"

--"In Dreams I Open"

--Untitled (modern black-cat fairy tale)

--"Why We Love T. E. Lawrence"

--"Caught in the Maze"*

Lyn C. A. Gardner

.. it came around and hit me from behind.

No excuses: it was simply a case of letting other things pile up, one on top of the other and my forum participation was buried somewhere beneath life's sediment.

However, while I regret that I didn't get stuck into the forum as I did last year - which was itself so rewarding that I can't understand why I didn't do it this year - I did reach most of my (rather modest) goals, including a rewrite on a story that's been lurking around ever since my own Clarion in 2002. The motivation to get that particular story wrapped up was definitely linked in with the Clarion zeitgeist. I hope to finish it in the next few weeks and send it off into the wilderness.

My sincerest congratulations to all the other participants, and to this year's fine crop of writers.

All the best everyone,

Lynette Aspey. 

I have been slow in posting progress updates, mostly due to the fact that I'd been trying to catch up.  I finally threw in the towel last Sunday, having finished 5 of the 6 chapters I'd been planning on writing.  I started Chapter 6 on Sunday, but I ran up against the wall of "Where is this going?!?!" a few too many times, so I finally capitulated.

However, 5/6 of my goal is much better than I've done in past years, so yay!

I haven't gotten any pledge updates, even though I think I was one of the first XX to sign up, so I thought I got something for that?  Yes?  No?  Anyway, I need to go stalk my donors until they fork over the cash.  Vague/veiled threats probably won't work.  What does work?

I have to agree with Eileen -- and have to plead guilty at the same time that I was not participating on the boards as much as in previous years. But in my own defense (as I explained upstream) I had not been anticipating that the German translation of a 195,000 word novel would land in my inbox smack dab in the middle of WAT. :-/ 

Nonetheless, I managed an average of over 2500 new words a week for the duration. What I didn't manage were the story rewrites I had intened to do -- those were supplanted by Flamme und Harfe. 

And the round-robin story started out so fun! Sorry I had to crawl away into reading and revising a humungo novel! 

Ruth Nestvold

www.ruthnestvold.com

This was less a full-bore Write-a-thon for me than in previous years, as I became distracted by personal matters more easily. (Not stressful matters, necessarily, just distractions. Some days I simply forgot to write, and some days I was just empty of words.)

It might be that the low number of particiants posting to the Forum here was a factor. In previous WATs, I felt encouraged by seeing all the other WATters tallying up their scores, and this year that was missing, so it seemed less a group effort. (BTW, the CW Web Team is already checking out the options for improving the Forum interface: this was its first real test since the redesign.)

All-in-all, I produced 7515 words in the last six weeks, including finishing a story with Michael Swanwick, "The Armies of Elfland," which we started writing in public at the Write-a-thon last year (just like Harlan Ellison!) and almost finishing "Carry Water, Chop Wood" (aka the golem story), which is always just two days away from completion. I did some work on a couple of books for children, wrote several poems (which JT Stewart has said I must not talk trash about), and particpated in the round-robin. I also saw the publication of a poem, "To the Moon Alice" in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and, in Fantasy and Science Fiction, an epistolary short story, written unwittingly with Michael Swanwick during last year's Write-a-thon: "Shed that Guilt! Double Your Productivity Overnight!"

So this has been a productive Write-a-thon for me, even though I kept downsizing my word-count goals in medias res. The round-robin story was great fun, and I'm glad it turned out
as coherent as it did. (Its coherency is fairly labile, however.)

Much thanks to everyone who has contributed money and creative juices!

Eileen

Eileen Gunn

Vice-Chair

Clarion West Board of Directors

Poetry: completely rewritten versions of poems "The Confession" and "The alchemist works furiously upon the death of his love"; have been revising others, but this completes my count of six drafts of poems for the WAT

Fiction: intermediate draft of "Last Boat to Heaven" (newly written, but will need at least another draft with rewriting, cutting, and integrating with the original draft)

skeleton first draft of "In Dreams I Open"--which may very possibly turn out not to be a short story at all, but part of a comic series

rough draft of a story as yet untitled, drawing on cat fiction & folklore, currently called for reference purposes only "The Black Cat" 

I lack drafts of two stories to complete my actual goals.  However, I was out of town for a week and a half, part of that for a funeral...

The WAT has been successful for me in this at least: that I'm producing new drafts now, instead of simply doing a few minor revisions to existing works.  This has been a hard year for a number of reasons and I'm glad to be producing again. 

Since it's possible that I might complete new drafts of two of the stories I've been working on during the next week and a half, I'll check in again then.  I realize that technically the WAT is over, but since I'm still working extra long hours to make up for the time I was traveling, I'm giving myself another week or so to wrap things up.   At that time I'll put the whole list in one place, including mention of which drafts were actually final ones (which material is in circulation now) and what the other drafts might need to take them there.  Mostly for my own enlightenment...

Lyn C. A. Gardner

Well, I'm very happy with how the Write-a-thon turned out, though I did not accomplish all that I might have. My accomplishments were:

 Finished a first draft of "Chasing Mundanity" which clocked in at ~13.5k words, (with about a 6k head start).

Revised approx half of that story. There are still 2 scenes that require major surgery (probably adding 1-2k new words) and then the slicing begins in earnest because I think in the end this should be about 11k.

 I only got a couple of paragraphs written on the other story, "Serving Girl," but that was enough to find the voice and the proper focus for the story. As well as realize why the title is the title.

 Figured out a system to measure my daily writing progress, which I'll be able to keep going forward. This is one of those things that seems like it ought to be easy, but the way I tend to interweave writing and revising means that I was ending up with negative word days, even as I was adding scenes. My accountant brain was very happy to have a measurement problem to crunch on, and I ended up with some spreadsheets and graphs that are doubtless far more complex than they need to be, but which will give me good output going forward.

For the record, I met my goal of writing "a measureable amount" 5 days out of every 7. I ended up with an average of 175 net words per day (including non-writing days) and an average of 275 net words per writing day.

The best part is that this is a completely sustainable rate, which is far ahead of what I was doing pre-Write-a-Thon. 

Phoebe 

900 words today, bringing the Week Six total to 3300. I've exceeded my Write-A-Thon stated goals every week, and that's a good thing.

Now, to write 29 more chapters and go to WorldCon. I may not make myself-imposed  September 1st deadline...

484 words.  One over target.  Because I really, really, really did not feel like writing today.  Come to think of it, I NEVER feel like writing.  But I do it anyway.  CONGRATULATIONS EVERYBODY!!!!!

I am done. I wrote every word I promised and then some. I am amazed at how productive I have been, and not only in writing, but finishing short stories and sending them out. I have submitted four stories in the past month, with the encouragement of Mary Kay Kare. The trick will be continuing with this now that Clarion West is done for the year. I am hoping that the submit a story a week compact will sustain me. This experience has been wonderful for me. Writing on "Trouble Ensues" was delightful. I have never done something like that before, or have I ever collaborated on fiction with someone. I would think about it very seriously based on this experience, although the other participants are so great it's breathtaking.

Kate, I gather from other posts that perhaps you are putting together an accomplishments list. Well here are mine:

Wrote 6 blogs for Amicus Agraria (http://amicusagraria.blogspot.com), plus Xposted one, and while I was at it, started a new business blog (which I haven't seen yet since they do the actual posting) on www.EntreAlliance.com.

I started and finished two short stories:

The Leprechaun Lady's Funeral, (3,000 words) (a suspense/mystery) which I submitted this week to The First Line (had to cut it from 7,000 words)

Rules for Everyday Life (1,000) (a flash fiction suspense/mystery) which I will be sending out in the next two weeks.

Revised per editor, Brick House, which was accepted in an anthology during the second week of Clarion (a mystery) (took out 100 words, put in 200 words roughly) (I have been writing and had just started submitting)

Started three other stories including two fantasy and an SF story. These are good starts and have a story attached.

Worked on two longer works, one is a novel and the other is a mystery short story about illegal gambling.

Comments about the Write-a-thon

Perhaps I have gone on a bit much about submitting stories, but after being occassionally published in the 80s and 90s, I quit sending anything out. Mostly this was due to time. My father's health failed, my professional work boomed, then I inhertied the family farm (see Amicus Agraria), then I got sick, and sick, and sick (nothing written about that, but I played a lot of computer games), and there was the farm, and the CSA, and the farmers markets, and oh, yeah, I still have a consulting business with clients. I know that submitting stories is not an accomplishment that you put on your vita, but it is how you get to those published works.

There is something cripplingly demoralizing about not doing something that you want to do more than anything else. For me, being a writer is much the same as being an oxygen breather. Moving into a healthy writing place was probably my greatest accomplishment in the past six weeks, and it is due to Kate Schaefer who asked me, as one of the founders of Clarion West, to participate in the Write-a-thon. I don't even know if she remembers doing this at the Bill Gibson/Nancy Pearl reception. Kate, thank you. I also thank Nisi Shawl, who said, "you can do it."

M
A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in filigrees of silver.
Prov. xxv. 11

1500 words over the last two days.

Chapters 49 and 50 done. I suspect I'm going to abandon the source's chapter structure in the first rewrite, and condense a lot of these little chapters. Or, maybe not.

In retrospect, maybe I should've set myself tougher goals.

I spent the day mostly working on my column for Science Fiction World in Chengdu. That's 1,443 words. Which added to running total makes 4,517. This has really been an education for me in exactly how productive I can be if I don't allow myself to goof off. I begin to think I may actually do this thing.

Kate, for listed accomplishments, you can include the "Trouble" or "Trouble Ensues" or "Castle Dementia" story and also that Eileen and I finished a collaboration, "The Armies of Elfland," which we began a year ago, during the 2007 Write-a-Thon.

There's one day left in the Write-a-thon proper, and then we go into bonus days (for Write-a-thon participants using the Clarion Diego calendar), Worldcon days (for Write-a-thon participants going straight to Worldcon -- hi, Steve! Hey, Roz! Yo, Christopher!), sick days (for Write-a-thon participants who got sick or broke bones during the Write-a-thon), maternity leave (I think there's only one participant who qualifies for that, but I could be wrong), and The Seventh Week.

Remember, you can do it. Give yourself whatever healthy combination of push and slack you need to meet your goals within the bounds of reality. We're rooting for all of you.

I took on a lot (for me) for the Write-a-Thon, but the work-in-progress has benefited greatly from it!  I'm closing in on the end of the first draft at last!  This two-year, often-interrupted project is dear to my heart, and pushing myself to meet my Write-a-Thon goals has been a big help.  There were a couple of weeks I didn't quite make it . .  but I'm making up for those now.

I added 857 words to "Trouble," which is currently undergoing retitlization (current lead-runner -- in my head, at least -- Castle Dementia), not all of which were in the new section I posted.  And another 151 words on Goblin Lake.  What's with these two-word titles?  Anyway, that makes a respectable day rate of 1008 words, bringing my total to 3,074 toward my end-of-this-week goal of 5,000 words.It's gonna be a squeaker.  I'll get it off to a bad start now by going over the final draft of my most recent collaboration with Eileen, "The Armies of Elfland," and prepping it for publication.Michael 

My daily goals got a little weird on Week Five, but I finished 1264 words, an average of 250 words in a 5-day week, for a total of 7515 in the five weeks thus far.

All in a day's work for Michael Swanwick, but a reasonably productive five weeks for me.

Eileen Gunn

Vice-Chair

Clarion West Board of Directors

I have completed all my Write-a-Thon goals except this week's word count. I have 1800 more words to write.  

M
A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in filigrees of silver.
Prov. xxv. 11

So I've just barely been able to keep up on my word count goals during the write-a-thon, but the stories rewrites etc. had to be sacrificed to reading the galleys of the German translation of Flame and Harp. The translation in and of itself is actually very good, the prose flows and it reads very well. But man, am I glad I'm in the position to be able to read this! The strange little mistakes that slip in, even when a very excellent translator is at work...

But I think I will give myself credit for this, since I didn't know it was going to be plopped down in front of me right at the beginning of the write-a-thon. I wish I could have done the story revisions I wanted to do, but this novel has to take priority for now. There will be time for revision in August, hopefully.

Ruth Nestvold

www.ruthnestvold.com

Well, I began my day by breaking my glasses. Then I put in 259 words on "The Trains That Climb the Winter Tree," making it a significantly weirder story than it was before. (Brace yourself, Eileen!) Then I went to the eyeglass outlet and discovered that my lenses have gone out of fashion (!) and they had no frames that would fit them whatsoever. And then . . .

To make a long story short, I finally got a pair of badly-fitting glasses, got out the boxes of Hope Mirrlees materials from the basement, and spent the rest of the day wallowing through correspondence with Prince Robin and feminist papers on "Paris: A Poem" and making notes for the revision of the essay. Total wordage: 0. But wonderful fun.

I also spent some time prepping my schedule for Denvention and realized that instead of having a goal of 5,000 words by the end of Friday, my proper functional goal is 7,500 words by the end of next Wednesday.

So that's 2,068 words written and 5,432 to be done in one week! Roughly four pages a day. The wolves are closing in and the campfire is guttering out. Our hero has his sidearm with a partial clip of ammo in one hand and a clasp knife in the other. Will he survive????

Tune in tomorrow for the next exciting episode of Writers of the Purple Sage!

Chapter 48 done: a short one, 800 words.

Here we are in the homestretch, I think. At least of the write-a-thon. I remain deep in mid-manuscript, but at least it's moving, now.

Another chapter down, and 1300 words. If I can keep 5 chapters a week happening, I should still be able to finish by mid-September...

Today I put in 1,050 words on "The Trains That Climb the Winter Tree," another of my many collaborations with Eileen Gunn. Then I put in 116 words on "Goblin Lake," my Simplicissimus metafiction. So that's 1,166 words. Combined with the 724 words I put in before taking off all of last week, that makes 1,809 words toward my two-week goal of 5,000 words.

This would bode terribly well for me, if it weren't for the fact that while I was not-writing, I was also accumulating non-writing chores. I learned at Readercon that next year's Dead Guest of Honor (I'm going to change that to "Posthumous" in any dealings with the family) is going to be Hope Mirrlees. So Henry Wessells (Temporary Culture) is moving up his planned publication of a chapbook of Hope-in-the-Mist, my lengthy essay on her and her life and work to make the book available for the convention. Which means that, having added another 30% to the essay since its original publication in Foundation, I've got a great deal of tidying up, documenting, and revision to do. Sigh. I think I'll go dig out the archives right now.

But at least it helps to keep the suspense alive!

Michael

So, going into either the fifth or sixth week (I've lost count), I started from a position of 724 words ahead of target from a blizzard of short additions to various partially written stories scribbled down at the last moment between mad bouts of packing. Then I wrote nothing at all because I was on vacation (high spots included Parnassus Bookstore and Titcomb's Books), leaving me another 1,776 words to write on Friday if I didn't want to fall behind . . .

BUT I had to do a reading on Friday at Robin's Book Store to help promote the 25th volume of Gardner Dozois's YEAR'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION and my story in it ("The Skysailor's Tale") was a novella. So I spent the day cutting a fifteen-minute story from the flanks of an hour-and-a-half one. This I achieved by leaving out the main plot, most of the characters, my father's madness and death, and a rather touching if somewhat rowdy romance, and focusing on a relatively minor character named Tacey Brown.

The reading went over well (Tacy is a terrific character), and those who were there or tuned into the podcast were able to hear a story that will probably never see print. But since I added nothing to the total corpus of my work, I gained not a word toward my goal

So this week, to keep faith and save face, I must write 4,226 words -- toughly seventeen pages. A sustained level of production I almost never manage to achieve.

Look! High above! The aerialist flies from the one trapeze, straining to reach the other. His expression is, if not worried, at least tense. Every muscle is tensed. There is no net, and the fall would kill him. Can he do it? The audience hold their breaths.

What good fun!

Finishing the week with 2500 words, and incidentally crossing the 50K line on the manuscript as a whole.

I just made my goals last night. I wrote my last three Amicus Agraria blogs, too, and crossposted the current one with another site where I owed a blog posting. You can read my Amicus Agraria writing at http://amicusagraria.blogspot.com/.

I have had to add my word count up this week in small pieces. Last night I needed to rewrite, not revise, the end of a short story based on the editor's evaluation that the ending was weak. He actually gave me 200 more words to wrap it up since I was at the maximum. Woohoo. It feels good to have a story really liked.

After telling Eileen to over write, I have to admit that over writing by 2X+ is a bad thing. I spent a lot of time cutting and cutting this week. Don't over write like that.

I will miss everyone at tonight's party. I have to go to the ranch, and getting from the party in Redmond to Kitsap is too much. Boohoo. I was ill Tueday night from my adventures with epinephrine after a sever allergy attack at my allergist's, so I missed the reading, and I missed Brenda and Jay's reading last night because I am still feeling the effects that kept me home Tuesday.

M
A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in filigrees of silver.
Prov. xxv. 11

Last week I was pages ahead of target.  Since then I've written nothing.  BUT i have observed that Mattapoisett, Massachusetts has a serious osprey problem.  Those bastards are everywhere!  They're going to have to turn in an exterminator.So I'm far, far, far behind schedule.  Can I catch up? Stay tuned and  find out!     M. 

Progress still slow, 700 more words for the week's total. I'm beginning to understand why drinking one's self to death is a traditional writerly hobby.

Bad stuff, Week Four. I put up a super new issue of the Infinite Matrix (Cory Doctorow reprint from 2003, plus new stories from two spectacular writers from Eastern Europe: Serbian Jasmina Tesanovic and Ukrainian Yana Dubinianska), which cost me two 18-hour days, leaving no energy or drive for my 400 words. After that, the excuses get even more lame. (Househunting in San Francisco? Give me a break! A lead-pipe cinch, because you can't afford doggone anything. Stop complaining, it just makes you look naive.)

So, in Week Four, I produced a pathetic 1181 words of fiction. I still beat out Week Two, but who's counting? (Oh, you are? Might not be the best strategy,)

Oh, yeah -- I might not have made the daily word-count, but I did finish a rewrite of a story that Michael Swanwick and I started at the Write-a-thon last year, and sent it back to him for the Master's Touch.

Also, I got a copy yesterday of the September issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, with a real paying SF story by me and Michael Swanwick, which he crafted out of emails that the two of us had exchanged during last year's Write-a-thon. I did almost nothing on this, yet my name is on the*cover* of F&SF. How good does life get?

So, I don't understand why more Write-a-thon writers have not contributed to this year's round-robin story, Trouble Ensues. Please don't make me and Marilyn Holt write the whole thing, because Michael could whack it into shape at the last minute, and who knows what might ensue? Hugo Awards? Pulitzers? Nobel Prizes?

Anybody can join in.... Gord? Timmi? Anyone else? Do it!

Eileen Gunn

Vice-Chair

Clarion West Board of Directors

Slow progress over the last two days. Chapter 44 is done, with 1100 words for the week so far.

I'm hesitant to start predicting the final size of this thing, but if the statistics hold, my impact point should be somewhere in the vicinity of 90K words, which seems like a good number. Of course, there's still revision ahead...

I found a market to which I wanted to submit a story, but I have to use their guidelines so that meant a new story. Well, I did it, and while it is not finished, yet, it's too long, I am done with this week's pledge work. I also did a new Amicus Agraria (http://amicusagraria.blogspot.com) post.

Eileen, over write, it works to get the damn draft done. Ok, you have to edit it down, but it works. I know you can do this. I am only saying this because there are too few Eileen Gunn stories available.

M
A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in filigrees of silver.
Prov. xxv. 11

Took three days to finish this chapter, a lot of time spent on only 1600 words. That brings me to 2600 for the week with another full day left, yet I still feel as if I'm falling behind.

Okay, so I lost half a day yesterday running around to buy a freezer for Marianne for her birthday. (What a romantic guy I am!) But I wrote a little more on "The Dala Horse" and a moderate amount more on the Pushkin story and rather a lot more on "Goblin Lake," so that at the end of the day I had 995 words. Seeing which, I opened up one of the stories and added another half-sentence, bringing the total to 1001 words, or just over four pages. Bringing my weekly total to 2,540 words, which means that I've already met this week's goal, but still have all of next week's (when I'll be on vacation) to get through.

Can I do it? Wait and see.

This is fun.

Michael

An unambitious Tuesday. I put in 63 words on "The Angel" and another 750 on "Goblin Lake" for a total of 813 words, or 1539 for the week so far, so I'm ahead of schedule, even taking into account the fact that I'll be on the road Friday, traveling to Readercon with Marianne and famed raconteur Tom Purdom, so I won't be writing a single word then. On the whole ... pretty good.

Except that I forgot that I'm going to be taking off all of next week, lazing in a hammock or else canoe on a private pond in the old whaling town of Mattapoisett on beautiful Buzzard's Bay. So, really, my goal this week is 5,000 words, not 2,500. Yikes! I'm already four pages behind schedule.