I HAVE AN AGENT!

29th January, 2016

The title says it all, or most of it anyway. I HAVE AN AGENT! I am officially an AGENTED WRITER-TYPE PERSON! It honestly still doesn’t feel real. Not to be too cliché, but I keep expecting to find out someone drugged me with an experimental hallucinogen and my trip involved career advancement instead of bloodthirsty unicorns or whatever.

So, how did this happen? Mostly in the usual way, but I’ll give you the whole story anyway. Just in case you’re interested.

This doesn’t start with me as a child dreaming of the day I’d publish a book. I didn’t grow up scribbling stories or daydreaming about characters and adventure and magic. Beyond a few (truly horrendous) fanfics in high school, I didn’t write for fun. There are a few reasons for that, some of which I’m still parsing out, but the big one was that it never occurred to me to try.

Not until college, when my writing-major BFF suggested I take a creative writing elective. I figured it might be a fun way to spend three credit hours, but didn’t think too much of it. COLOR ME SURPRISED when I discovered, wait a minute, I’m really really really into this. Between that class and another one I took later, I also figured out I might have a knack for this whole stringing words together thing.

I kept writing, but I wasn’t doing it in any serious way. I toyed with the idea of writing a novel, and I wrote maybe 5,000 words on two different ideas before moving on. I was getting a political science degree! I was going into a nonprofit master’s program! I wasn’t A Writer.

Until halfway through said master’s program when I realized, no, wait a minute, I absolutely am a writer. Not only that, but it’s what I want to do for my career.

After graduating, I was accepted to the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in San Diego. I’ve talked at length about the experience before, but suffice it to say this was the single greatest boost to my writing up to that point. Not only because of all that I learned and the people I met, but because it solidified my previously shaky confidence in my dreams and abilities.

A few months after I got home from those intense six weeks, I decided I was finally going to write a novel. I started it in November 2014 and by January 1, 2015, I had a finished draft of a middle grade contemporary. I sent it to my betas, revised through February, sent it to them again, and did one more smaller revision in early April.

And then I started querying. I sent out my first batch at the end of April. My first two responses came less than a week later within an hour of each other, and they were both full requests! That was more than a little unexpected.

Also unexpected? The terrifying and painful health stuff that hit me in June. Suffice it to say that I was out of commission for the entire summer. I didn’t send out any more queries, and when the (really very lovely) rejections on the fulls came in, I couldn’t quite bring myself to care. When you suddenly can’t eat anything and you realize you’ve been dealing with depression for months on top of that? Querying becomes significantly less of a concern.

But I eventually got feeling better and I started sending out more queries. I got more and more full requests, along with some more wonderful rejections. (Seriously, personal rejections are the greatest gifts.) I didn’t query systematically, though. I kept a spreadsheet, but I didn’t update it as regularly as I should’ve. I didn’t send out planned batches of queries so much as periodic, spur-of-the-moment ones. I did my research on everyone, of course, but I did it in a spread out, unorganized way. A lot of times, I’d see an agent tweet something that made me think they’d be a good fit and go from there.

So when I saw Beth Phelan was hosting a query contest for diverse writers on MLK Day, I immediately researched her interests. Lo and behold, she wanted middle grade contemporary, and my particular flavor of it, too! I honestly don’t know how I’d missed her before this. I’d looked into The Bent Agency and even queried other agents there, but somehow Beth had slipped past me.

I queried her on that Monday, MLK Day. Something like an hour later she requested the full! This was super exciting, but I’d had enough “I really like it but I’m not the right fit” rejections on fulls by this point to know not to get my hopes up. Plus, since she promised personal feedback to everyone who entered, I didn’t expect her to read the manuscript anytime soon. I settled in to wait with more caution than optimism.

Wednesday night, I woke up and checked my phone for the time. It was almost 1am and I had an email from Beth. I knew such a fast response had to mean a rejection, but I felt a weird flutter of hope regardless. I opened the email. Read the email.

It wasn’t a rejection. It was an offer.

I legitimately didn’t know how to react. You have to understand I was still half-asleep. This could SO EASILY have been a really cruel dream, but I kept staring at the email and it didn’t go away. When I woke up the next morning (although, let’s be real, I didn’t get much sleep), it was still there. She really wanted to be my agent!

We talked that afternoon, and it was perfect. She fully understood the story, the characters, the themes, everything. I could tell her edit suggestions would make the book even stronger, and I honestly wanted to start working on revisions right then. But I told her I’d get back to her in a week.

Nothing about the next week felt real. I think my brain was experiencing so many feels–excitement, fear, anxiety, euphoria, disbelief–that it shut down entirely and refused to process any feels at all. I spent a few days in a haze, not a bad one, but a haze nonetheless. All the agents who still had my full started responding, saying they loved it, but they’d step aside for the greater interest.

I talked with Beth again and it just made me even more sure that she was The One. When I hung up, all I wanted was to sign with her as soon as I possibly could.

And this morning, sign is exactly what I did!

I am so honored and thrilled to say that I’m now represented by Beth Phelan of The Bent Agency! I can’t wait to start this next phase of my career with her. Time to get started.

I’m Terrible at NaNoWriMo…
and I’m (Sort of) Participating Anyway

31st October, 2015

I’m terrible at NaNo. Just complete and utter garbage at it. I’ve tried for the past several years to be less garbage-like, but I inevitably quit a week in with nothing but a few thousand words and absolute disgust for myself, those words, every blazing atom in this disgusting universe.

It’s not pretty, is what I’m saying.

And yet…I’m doing NaNo again this year!

No, it’s not because I actively enjoy wanting to douse my laptop in accelerant and toss a lit nutmeg and spice candle on it. It’s not even because I like a challenge, or because I think I’ll be better at it this year.

It’s because I love the atmosphere, the community, the creative joy practically pulsing out of the internet. That collective drive is more motivating than a picture of the Avengers telling you to write and more energizing than the venti-est of pumpkin spice lattes.

But before I could commit this year, I needed to figure out a new strategy. Because attempting to bang out 50K words of trash is the fastest way for me to lost interest in a story. It’s happened every time: after NaNo, I never touch that story again. I’ve finally figured out it’s because language is my way into a story. Yeah, crafting beautiful sentences that you might delete later seems like a waste of time. It goes against not just most writing advice but the very spirit of NaNo to spend an hour fidgeting with a single paragraph. To lose a day to restructuring a scene for better clarity, tone, flow, etc. To hunt for the perfect metaphor even as your peers zoom past you with 5, 10, 15, 20K. But that’s my process. If I don’t love the words I’m using, I won’t love the story I’m telling.

So this year, I’m trying something new.

Instead of aiming for 50K (or even a reduced word count), I’m resolving to immerse myself as deeply into my story as possible. I’m going to spend the majority of every day hunkered into this dark, beautiful, terrifying world I’m building. I’m not promising myself words this year. I’m promising myself focus.

Yeah, it’s a bit more nebulous a goal (and a helluva lot harder to track), but I’m hoping this strategy will let me participate without sabotaging myself.

If anyone else wants to join me in my rebellious ways, please do. Because the real gift of NaNo isn’t a pile of words; it’s the fact that for one month every year we assert–as a community–that stories matter. And when I inevitably feel guilty for not plowing through my draft as fast as I can just to hit that 50K mark, I’m going to remind myself of that assertion:

Stories matter.

The speed at which you create them doesn’t.

But Maybe I Shouldn’t Write

26th September, 2015

If you’re at all involved in the YA community, chances are you’ve seen some conversations recently about diversity. If you’re heavily involved (and heavily invested in diversity in YA), then you’ve seen lots of these conversations over the recent months. They’ve covered a wide range of distinct but related questions:

What does “diverse” mean?
How should that word be used, if at all?
Who has the right to write which stories?
Who makes that call?
What should criticism look like?
Has criticism become so critical as to be unconstructive?
Does it matter if it has?
Who makes that call?
How can we support each other and also demand we all do better?
What does “better” look like anyway?
Who makes that call?
What is our responsibility as writers?
What’s our responsibility as people in power, people who are marginalized, and (like most of us) people who are both?
Are these conversations even useful?
Again, who makes that call?

There’s a lot in there to unpack and no concrete answers to find. Because these questions aren’t meant to be answered so much as meant to generate discussion, exploration, and intentional thought.

I’m thrilled these conversations are happening so often and with such passion. I think they’re important even if their effectiveness is questionable. I don’t know how much these discussions are changing the industry, if at all. I don’t know if we’re all just shouting the same things over and over at one another in some inescapable Diversity Loop. I don’t know if we’re doing any good for this community, for readers, for writers, for the wider culture. I don’t know.

But I do know what effects these conversations have had on me.

I think about power a lot.

In what ways do I hold power?
In what ways (intentionally or otherwise) do I wield it?
In what ways do I lack power?
What effect does that lack have on me?

Pretty basic questions, but the discussions in YA over the past several years have led me to start thinking about power within the specific context of writing. I eventually came up with a sort of personal philosophy on How To Write:

Write responsibly, respectfully, and intentionally.
Strive to do no harm, but accept that you will fail.
When you fail, listen, apologize, and try to do better next time.

Over the years, I’ve considered each of these points thoroughly and found them to be useful. I’ve even shared them and felt fairly confident that they would be helpful for others, too.

But lately I’ve been thinking about the underlying premises of this seemingly straightforward philosophy. First, it assumes I’m writing from a position of power. That assumption is true—I’m always writing as a white, cisgender person—but it isn’t the whole truth. I’m also always writing as a disabled, queer woman—aka from a marginalized position.

Second, it assumes all stories are available for me to tell. This philosophy says that as long as I write “responsibly, respectfully, and intentionally,” I’m doing my due diligence and can proceed. This ignores the possibility that due diligence may not be enough sometimes. It ignores that some stories, no matter how carefully I approach them, are not mine to tell.

Third, it assumes my greatest responsibility as a writer is to minimize harm. If you try to do no harm but also accept occasional, inevitable failure, the best you can do is to minimize harm, right? Wrong. There’s another option.

One of the most recent conversations in the YA community asked whether we’re scaring off writers (both marginalized and in power) from trying to write diversely at all. This is a messy question and it led to a messy conversation. (I’m going to attempt to summarize various points I’ve seen, but I’m sure I’ll get some of it wrong and it will certainly be incomplete.)

Some folks feel the tenor and/or content of critique in the community has become too unforgiving (for lack of a better word). There’s no room for that second step in my philosophy anymore: failure. And there’s even less room for the third: second chances. This, they say, will frighten off writers from trying, resulting in no representation at all. Typically, those in this camp feel bad representation done in good faith is better than no representation, and that we should be careful not to constrict voices.

Others feel critique is both necessary and useful regardless of how it’s presented. They’re wary of tone-policing the marginalized who have been hurt time and time again. Typically, this camp feels no representation is better than bad representation, and that if writers can be so easily scared off from trying with just the possibility of critique, then they shouldn’t be trying to “write the other”.

My philosophy as outlined above rests on one other crucial premise: that I’m writing, specifically with the goal of publication. The idea that the best I can hope for is to minimize harm is only true if you assume I’m writing at all. I could just not. I could abstain entirely. I could either never write another word, or else write just for me.

If I’m not writing, my stories can’t do harm. If “do no harm” is the goal…well, that’s about the only way to do it.

I seriously considered never writing again. I considered it for a long time. I don’t want to do harm, and I know that any story I write (even those within my own experience!) will hurt someone somewhere. I’m fallible. I can try, but no matter how much good faith I have, I will fail.

On top of that, me being published at all could do harm. I hold power in certain specific ways, and I know that if I get published I’ll benefit from that. For instance, I’m white. I know that if I write characters of color, I’ll see more marketing, more praise, more support than a person of color writing those characters would. More than that, “diversity slots” are still limited and my voice (on the axis of race) is privileged over others. I could take one of those rare slots open for people of color. That’s harm.

So, if I don’t want to do harm, and if my stories will inevitably do harm no matter my intentions, and if the very act of sharing those stories will harm the careers and opportunities of others… Should I write?

I think it’s a useful question to ask ourselves, and one we’re not usually encouraged to explore. During these diversity conversations, I often see people responding defensively, as though they’re being told they shouldn’t write X topic. That’s almost never what anyone is saying, but I think it’s worthwhile to ask yourself if you should write at all. Interrogate yourself, your goals, the costs to you and others if you pursue them and if you succeed. Should you write?

I decided yes. It took a long while and it was an agonizing journey to get to that answer, but I decided yes.

A big part of that rested on the fact that while I am in a position of power in significant ways, I am also marginalized. There are stories I can’t tell, but there are also stories only I can tell. There are nuances about my life that I’m especially well suited to share. There are so many parts of me I’m afraid I’ll never see on the page if I don’t put them there myself. I decided yes largely because I need to write myself into the world. (Although I want to stress that that isn’t the only legitimate reason to make this decision.)

Of course, like most marginalized folks, I don’t want to be limited to writing only about my marginalizations, and I don’t want to write any world that excludes people different from me. Which means I will sometimes be writing from a position of power. Which means I will inevitably do harm.

So let’s return to that philosophy of mine. I’ve modified it some, and I think it better reflects where I’m at now:

Acknowledge your power and your marginalizations.
If you choose to write, do so responsibly, respectfully, and intentionally.
Strive to do no harm, but accept that you will fail.
When you fail, listen, apologize, and try to do better next time.

I choose to write. Maybe someday I’ll choose to stop, but not today.

This post isn’t meant to be prescriptive. I’m not saying anyone can’t or shouldn’t write. I am saying it’s useful to consider why you write. I’m saying it’s important to consider the harm you could do and whether the reason you write is enough for you to risk that harm. I’m saying these conversations—these fraught, difficult, complicated, important conversations—led me to realize that just because I can and want to write isn’t a good enough reason for me to do it.

I’m saying I’ve found a good enough reason.

I don’t know what the reason is for you. I’m not here to tell you what is or isn’t enough. No one could ever tell you that but you.

I’m just here to ask some questions.

Good Writing Days and Incomplete Writing Advice

17th September, 2015

I wrote my first original fiction in my junior year of college. I’d written some fanfic—a handful, maybe—before that, but mostly because my friends did it. I didn’t think of myself as a writer. It certainly never occurred to me to create anything of my own. But then I took Intro to Creative Writing and suddenly I loved writing.

Or, well, I suppose I loved the idea of writing most. I was the only non-writing major in the class, and the only upperclassman. Everyone else had been writing their entire lives. They talked about being in kindergarten and writing little novels. About the awards they’d won in middle and high school. About the books they planned to publish and the careers they planned to build.

I didn’t talk much.

But I listened. And I was fascinated by this world I’d never thought about. I’d always been a reader, but it honestly hadn’t crossed my mind to wonder where the books came from. Who they came from and how. So I started exploring. I read every article, blog post, and Twitter feed I could find on process. I was particularly interested in the commiseration posts. The writing is hard, here’s how to deal with it posts. I memorized all the tips and tricks for squeezing words from your brain like blood from a rock. I loved seeing my favorite authors tweeting their writing woes and encouraging their followers to push through when it gets rough.

Everywhere I looked people were trying to help me survive writing.

They were offering me a lifejacket.

So I figured I ought to be drowning.

I worry that our (the writing community’s) desire to be helpful, to encourage, to tell young writers they aren’t alone is more harmful than we realize. Because writing is hard. It can be draining and miserable and frustrating. But that’s not the goal.

All those pieces I read, all those writers commiserating together and reaching a hand out for me to join them, made me think that’s what writing should be. That if I wasn’t miserable, I was doing it wrong. And I don’t just mean on a subconscious level. There were so many times when writing felt easy and fun, and I stopped myself. I scrapped what I was doing or I thought of ways to make it more difficult, because if I’m enjoying myself then it’s not worth it. Then it’s not good writing.

That’s bullshit.

Those times when the words come out of you light and free? When you know it’s coming out right and you can’t type fast enough? When you’re bursting because this is so. much. fun? That’s the ideal. That’s the goal.

It’s not going to happen all the time. And I do think there’s value in commiseration, because we all need support. We all need to know it isn’t just us.

But we all need to know it isn’t just us when it’s easy, too.

I think part of why this aura of difficulty exists is two-fold. One, what I’ve already mentioned: we want to show it happens to everyone and provide ways to deal with it.

But also two: no one wants to look like they’re showing off. (That’s a sweeping generalization, but you get my point.) It can feel like bragging to say, “Wow I wrote sooooooo much today and it was sooooooo easy!” I think this is even truer for women. We’re trained to demur, to be “humble”, to downplay our accomplishments and skill so as not to make anyone else feel bad. It’s not necessarily a conscious thing; it’s just the done thing. So we talk about how hard writing is, and we stay silent about the times it’s easy.

I worry about how this all has affected my process. Last week I wrote a really personal essay, and it came out in all of thirty minutes. It came out exactly as I wanted it to on the first shot. I barely even had to correct any typos. I almost trashed it right then. It was only a half-second hesitation, but I worried it had been too easy. Except sometimes it is easy, and I’m trying to relish it more when that happens, not question it.

I’m not saying we should talk less about the hard stuff. I’m just saying we shouldn’t ignore the easy stuff. When we do, it can give the dangerous (and unintentional) message that difficulty and misery are what make your writing legitimate.

(There’s also a whole other side to this discussion about how ableist and physically/emotionally damaging a lot of writing advice can be. India Valentin talked about this beautifully the other day on Twitter, which you can read here. I particularly like her point about “competitive suffering.”)

I’m going to try to be more open about the good days, about the joy in my process, about how much fun writing can be. That doesn’t mean I won’t also mention the rest and reach out for comfort and commiseration when I need it. But I want to start publicly celebrating my victories, if for no other reason than to prevent another young writer like me from feeling ashamed of her good days.

Clarion 2014: An Overview

22nd August, 2014

This summer, I attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. I spent six weeks in La Jolla, CA with 17 other writers from across the world. We wrote, critiqued, and learned from six incredible instructors. Our first night, Greg Frost (our week one instructor) told us Clarion was like an entire MFA squished into six weeks. I remember thinking, “He doesn’t have to sell us; we’re already here,” because clearly he was exaggerating. He wasn’t—not even a little bit.

I knew going in I wouldn’t be able to blog while I was there. I figured I wouldn’t have the time to devote to it, which was true, but I also didn’t have the emotional or mental capacity to process everything as it was happening. Truth be told, two weeks after getting home, I still haven’t processed it fully, but I wanted to blog while it was still relatively fresh in my mind.

I’ve decided to structure this as a series of posts each focusing on a different aspect of my experience. I think it’ll be easier for me to stay focused if I pull out one thread at a time.

I’m writing these posts for two reasons:

I want to record my experience for my own benefit, because I have a terrible memory.
For any future Clarionites who stumble upon these posts, preparing for their own adventure by reading about those who ventured before them. Like I did when prepping.

That said, this week I want to provide something of an overview of my whole experience while focusing on our fabulous instructors. I realize that sounds a little contradictory, but roll with me here.

Week One: Gregory Frost

As mentioned above, Greg started us off with some truthbombs about what Clarion is (writer boot camp) and what it isn’t (“like any other workshop out there”). He told us from his own experience that while we should absolutely focus on our writing, we should also party. We should take the opportunity to get to know our Clarionmates, because these are relationships that would likely last a lifetime, and we’d never be together in the same way we would be at Clarion.

One of the things I most appreciated about Greg was that he knew how important it was that we all bond, and quickly. He drank with us on the roof Monday night, went to (and killed) the first of many karaoke nights on Tuesday, left his door open for us anytime, and stayed up with us his last night, hanging out, offering advice, and (as would become a theme for us) drinking.

But Greg also taught us a ton in his lectures and the one-on-one conferences. Perhaps my favorite aspect of class this week, though, was the prompts he gave us. Before Clarion, I thought idea generation was one of my weaknesses, and I was terrified I’d have nothing to write about even in the first week. But Greg threw a bunch of prompts at us and encouraged us to play. Several of us turned the snippets created in those sessions into full-fledged stories. The first story I turned in for Clarion (not to mention the most well-received of all my stories) came from one such prompt.

Greg’s week, for me, was all about embracing the unknown:

Who are all these people?
MY NEW FRIENDS.

What am I gonna write about this week?
STUFF. AWESOME STUFF.

Should I embarrass myself at karaoke?
OBVIOUSLY.

Should I trust myself?
Yes. A million times, yes.

Week Two: Geoff Ryman

It was cure how in week one, we were all like, “Man, this isn’t so tough!” Yeah, that’s because Greg was letting us get our feet wet. Then Geoff turned everything up to eleven, and suddenly we all had this excited and terrified look in our eyes.

We’d started critiquing toward the end of the first week, but by week two we were critiquing four stories every day. We’d spend the morning going over the stories in workshop. Afternoons were dedicated to reading for the next day (if the stories were up early) and/or writing. After dinner, Geoff led lectures/discussions for an hour or two, and then it was critiquing until bed. (One of the precedents Greg set was for us to read each story twice. That was an excellent strategy for thorough critiques, but it doubled the time it took to finish.)

I absolutely don’t want you to get the wrong idea here, though. Was this schedule tough? Yeah. But it was exactly what we needed to kick us into gear. Our group was particularly ambitious as we all had designs on writing six stories (a goal I did not meet, but more on that in another post). That meant a heavier workload than we might have otherwise had, but it didn’t feel like a sacrifice. It felt like a challenge we all wanted to beat.

Also, Geoff taught us so much. My favorite parts of his instruction were somewhat related. First, I absolutely loved the lectures he held in the evenings, which were guided, line-by-line readings of various stories. Each story was selected to teach us specific lessons. For instance, we did a deep reading of “Hills Like White Elephants” to learn how dialogue is action, how it is plot. To learn how a reader takes the words on the page and fills in the rest, and how no two readings will be exactly the same—even if the same conclusions are reached—and that’s okay. To learn the difference between the reading protocols of literary and speculative fiction. We did this kind of intense reading/discussion almost every night.

My other favorite aspect of Geoff’s week came in my individual conference with him. We had one-on-one conferences with all the instructors, and it was fascinating how they differed depending on the instructor. All were immensely valuable for different reasons, but Geoff’s was the starkest departure from the others. In our conference, he took my story (which we’d critiqued that morning in workshop) and went through it line by line. He broke my story down the same way he approached teaching the stories in his lectures. In workshop, we never focused much on line-level issues because this is a first draft, but Geoff said he would treat it as a final draft so we could get the most from our time with him. So not only did his method provide incredible feedback on that particular story, but it was unspeakably validating for him to treat my story with the same respect and care and attention he did with the classics he taught us.

Geoff’s week for me was about validation, about feeling like I belonged here. My first story would end up being my most successful, and Geoff’s particular brand of critique reinforced that I belonged, not just among my peers but also among writers in general. This would be a recurring them of my Clarion experience, but this was the first time I felt it acutely.

Week Three: Catherynne Valente

Cat was probably the number one reason I applied for Clarion at all. I figured there was no way in hell I would get in, but I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t try, because Cat would be there. So, I was really impressed that I didn’t fangirl too terribly much her first night, or any day after. (Although, Cat telling me my rapping was “fucking amazing!” at karaoke was definitely a highlight of, like, my life.)

Cat’s week was a fantastic combination of the social feel of Greg’s week and the academic feel of Geoff’s. In workshop, we worked. Cat especially. Her critiques were so thorough (and passionate) that she’d usually talk for 20 minutes per story, and I think I speak for all of us when I say we’d have been happy to listen to her critiques forever. She was intimidating in a way that made me want to step up my own critiquing game.

Outside workshop, though, she was ever-present and ever-ready for adventure. Karaoke that week was perhaps the most enthusiastic all around, and I fully believe it’s because she was so into it. Not to mention into us, into getting to know us.

I felt it most strongly in my one-on-one with her. She was so invested in me, in my writing, in my interests and desires and goals. I definitely got teary in our conference, and that was only 30% because of the early stages of exhaustion. Mostly it was that I couldn’t believe this woman who I so admired was so interested in how she could help me. (Especially since this was the week I turned in my most epic failure of a story, which could have been devastating, but she somehow made me feel good about the concept even if the execution was less than perfect. Which, let’s be clear, is a laughably nice way of putting things.)

Cat was endlessly encouraging to all of us, as a group and on an individual level. Her last night (which was perhaps our rowdiest…and definitely my drunkest), as each of us trickled out of the common room for bed, she’d say, “Can I hug you?” I came to Clarion hoping I wouldn’t make a fool of myself in front of Cat, and at that moment I realized I’d made a friend.

(Man, this post is getting cheesier and cheesier, but whatever! Let’s embrace that cheese. It’s delicious, or something.)

(Ooooh, speaking of delicious things, Cat definitely made us scrambled OSTRICH egg. He was our sacrificial plotstrich. We ate him and consumed his powers. And he was super tasty.)

Week Four: N.K. Jemisin

Oh, week four. We were warned that week four was traditionally the hardest week—the week when people started breaking down from mental, emotional, and physical exhaustion. And while our week four apparently wasn’t quite as explosive as others have been, we were not immune.

Thankfully, Nora came to our rescue! I honestly don’t think we could’ve made it through week four as gracefully as we did if we’d had any other instructor.

Nora was kind and caring. She listened and counseled us both individually and as a group, but she also put up with exactly zero bullshit. It was exactly what we needed. It was what I needed anyway. Week four for me was more physically draining than emotionally, but in our one-on-one, Nora hit on one of my major writing insecurities and called me on it without hesitation. She essentially told me to quit putting myself down, to believe in my writing, in my ideas, in my talent, and in my effort. (Noticing a pattern yet?)

Nora also brought so much knowledge. She talked with us about empathy, worldbuilding, writing the “other”, proof of concept stories, etc. What was really cool that week, especially in workshop, was that her critiques frequently led to group discussion/impromptu lectures, because we all wanted her to expand on what she’d said. Friday night, she also gave us our first real discussion on the business side of things.

Annnnd then she doused us with water. We all needed a night off, a way to let loose, and she provided that via our one and only water fight. I will never forget Nora slowly putting on some shades, pulling out a massive water gun, and warning us, “You have sixty seconds to choose your weapon…and then I’m coming for you.” It was, again, exactly what we needed.

She was exactly what we needed.

Weeks Five and Six: Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

I’m combining the final two weeks, because honestly? Those weeks are all kind of one big blur, so I’m not even going to attempt to figure out what happened when.

All you need to know is that Ann and Jeff are fucking fantastic, k? K.

One of the coolest things about critiques with Ann and Jeff was that they both brought an editorial view to them. We hadn’t had that perspective before. They were able to tell us where in the story as an editor they’d lose interest and why. They’d tell us if the market was saturated with a certain kind of story, and if we brought something new to the table. (One of my proudest moments was when Ann and Jeff both said I’d created a concept they’d never seen before.)

They also taught us so much about the industry. I can’t tell you how incredible it was to just hear them talk about their experiences, to ask questions, to absorb all of their advice. They scheduled several sessions outside of class for these discussions, and also also made time in class to go over any other topics we wanted covered more. Those two weeks were a crash course in The Industry from two of the best.

While I will be forever grateful for all of that, I’m perhaps even more grateful for their talk on our last day of workshop. They told us to be generous with ourselves. We’d gone through an intense experience unlike anything else, so we need to be kind to ourselves, to allow ourselves time to recover and process.

They also told us that while Clarion is a once in a lifetime experience, it isn’t the best one we’ll have. This is only the beginning, and we have so much more to look forward to in our careers.

I’ve been home for two weeks now, and they were more right than I expected about that first part. I needed a lot of time to recover. I’ve had a hard time reading, watching TV, focusing on much of anything. I haven’t written anything (apart from this, of course), and I imagine I won’t for some time still. And that’s all okay. I’m trying to be generous with myself.

But I believe they were right about the rest, too. I couldn’t be more excited about the future, about putting everything I’ve learned to use, about practicing and improving for the rest of my career.

And that might be the biggest point I want to make. I knew I wanted writing to eventually be my career when I started Clarion, but thanks to these incredible people and their belief and encouragement, I know now that it’s not some distant goal.

Writing is my career. Now.