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Clarion Week 5: My Fifth Clarion Story July 27, 2006 Finished today at 7AM. Another attempt to be funny. The initial idea for this (pseudo-outlined a few years ago; it wasn't working then, but I figured out a way to make it work now, maybe) came from a half-serious place, so maybe some of my crappy attempts to stuff poignance into a humor piece will actually show up in the draft this time. I hope Nancy Kress would forgive me for starting with exposition; if she ever reads it, I'll try to convince her that I did it ironically. Still not very comfortable with torturing my peers with such rough drafts, but it's all I can do to keep up with the faster writers here. And it really crystalized with me, hearing critiques of my Week 4 story, how many issues my classmates caught that I wouldn't have ever caught, even if I had another six weeks on the story to polish it and get it to pass my own high-but-still-imperfect standards of quality. Rahul just realized a pattern in his wordcounts, where his fiction submissions to the Clarion workshop have been consistently getting shorter, starting at 7,700 words and dropping to 2750 by week 5. For me, my wordcounts had the opposite pattern: Week 1: 700 words Week 2: 3500 words Week 3: 4100 words Week 4: 5000 words Week 5: 5100 words Granted, the flash fiction of Week 1 could be a fluke. I just wanted to turn something in quickly so I wouldn't have to inflict any of my 3+ year old application stories on the workshop (and my story ended up being the first non-application story workshopped here, though that was luck. Steve B. also turned in new story for that day, but Chip happened to choose to start with my shorter one). I wonder if this means I'm just getting more used to working at Clarion, since novelette is my natural length, and, on a long enough timeline, I might actually be able to produce one of those stories while I'm here. Or it's possible that once I finish revising the above stories, they'll all top 10,000+ words or more, and I just need the time to flesh them out. My Week six story is going to be an experiment and challenge in a couple of ways, but I'm almost positive I'll top this week's wordcount with it, assuming it works out. Filed under Clarion, Journal  
Comments: Discuss this entry at LiveJournalThat week 6 story better work out!! Posted by: Felice at July 27, 2006 4:20 PM 
And if it fails, it will fail gloriously! Posted by: Alex at July 27, 2006 9:36 PM
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