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What if you can’t go to Clarion?

Acceptances and rejections for Clarion are going out about now, so the writer blogs and twitter feeds are full of excitement and dismay.  Those who get to go to Clarion are in for a wonderful, magical...

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Clarion at home: Planning

This is part 1 of a series on what to do if you can’t go to Clarion, which provides my thoughts on how you can capture part of the magic of Clarion—even if you can’t attend. This post is on planning...

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Clarion at home: Writing

This is part 2 of a series on what to do if you can’t go to Clarion, which provides my thoughts on how you can capture part of the magic of Clarion—even if you can’t attend. This post is on the...

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Clarion at home: Reading

This is part 3 of a series on what to do if you can’t go to Clarion, which provides my thoughts on how you can capture part of the magic of Clarion—even if you can’t attend. This post is on reading,...

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Clarion at home: Critiquing

This is part 4 of a series on what to do if you can’t go to Clarion, which provides my thoughts on how you can capture part of the magic of Clarion—even if you can’t attend. This post is on critiquing....

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Clarion at home: Expertise

This is part 5 of a series on what to do if you can’t go to Clarion, which provides my thoughts on how you can capture part of the magic of Clarion—even if you can’t attend. This post is on developing...

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Clarion at home: Summation

This is part 6—the final post—of a series on what to do if you can’t go to Clarion. I’ve talked about my thoughts on how you can capture part of the magic of Clarion—even if you can’t attend. This post...

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Created a “Clarion at home” page

To gather up the various posts that formed my “Clarion at home” series, I created a Clarion at home page with some introductory text and links to each of the posts. If you’re inclined to link to the...

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Ten years since my Clarion

Ten years ago today was the first day of class at the 2001 Clarion. Steve Barnes talked about plot. (The stuff he talked about that day, together with some some ideas I got a few weeks later from Geoff...

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Strategies for writing and revising

One cluster of particularly good bits of advice that I got at Clarion came from James Patrick Kelly. (That link goes to my Clarion journal entry for the day I wrote about it.) Among other things, he...

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Race and the fictional character

One of my Clarion classmates, Nnedi Okorafor, tweeted today wondering why sometimes authors won’t just say what race a character is. I doubt if she was thinking about me, but I’m one of those writers...

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Applications open for Clarion 2013

Every year there’s a new Clarion class. Every year I’m a bit jealous of the new batch of students getting to study with the new batch of teachers. There’s a little overlap this year—one of the anchor...

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Genevieve Kierans

Genevieve at the Clarion Reunion in 2002. I just learned that Clarion classmate Genevieve Kierans died earlier this month. It was great to have her in the circle at Clarion. Nobody was nicer or happier...

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Clarion 2001 poster

All the writers who taught at my Clarion did readings at the Archives Book Shop, a local bookstore in East Lansing. To advertise the readings, the Clarion office folks printed up a poster with the...

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Packing lists

When I was in boy scouts, one of the scoutmasters suggested creating a packing list for camping trips. His key suggestion was to update the list after a trip, adding anything you’d wished you’d had,...

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Clarion Workshop for 2009

Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop Through March 1st, Clarion is taking applications for its 2009 workshop. If you’re working seriously on the craft of writing science fiction or...

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Quoted about Clarion

Mishell Baker has an article up at the new Fantasy Magazine website on looking ahead to attending Clarion this year while pregnant, Cautiously Expecting: On Creating Life and Fiction at Clarion–which...

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Clarion open for applications

Clarion, the science fiction and fantasy writers workshop, is open for applications for 2010! As usual, it looks like they’ve got a great line-up of instructors. I attended Clarion in 2001 and found it...

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Clarion journals findable again

Since the demise of Hilary Moon Murphy’s Clarion Ex Machina site, there hasn’t been a good collection of links to all the various Clarion journals.  Now Liz Argall has fixed that with her page of...

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Thinking about Clarion

It’s hot today. Writing when it’s hot always reminds me of Clarion—of the many sweaty hours sitting at my desk in Owen Hall, writing fiction. And I was already thinking of Clarion. In 2001, Clarion...

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First meeting of the incognito writers group

A few of us here in Champaign-Urbana are trying to get a local writers group going again. Caleb Wilson, Kelly Searsmith, Charlie Petit, and I got together last night at the Urbana Library for the new...

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Applications open for Clarion

If you’re a writer of speculative fiction, you’ve probably already heard of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop—and probably already spent some time wishing you could go. At...

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On (not) playing to your strengths

During week two at Clarion, I wrote a story that played to my strengths—one where the story was strengthened by being told from the viewpoint of a character who was almost affectless, so the story...

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Rejoice: The sun returns!

The solstice snuck up on me this year. The calendar shows it as being today, which it is if you live east of the United States. But it was actually a few minutes before midnight on the east coast and...

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Busy writing

Because it was so precisely in my wheelhouse, I simply had to submit a story for the Universal Basic Income short story contest Into the Black. I plugged away at a story most of October. In particular,...

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Applications open for Clarion 2018

I have written a lot about Clarion, the science fiction and fantasy writing workshop I took back in 2001—in particular my Clarion journal and my six-post series on what to do if you can’t go to...

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Running my own server again

A year and a half ago, my brother gave me a Raspberry Pi 3 as a birthday present, suggesting that I should use it to run my own server. I used to run my own server. A friend who liked to build such...

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Fixed my Clarion journal

Some time ago (trying to fix something else) I switched my web host to run PHP version 7.2, and didn’t notice that doing so had broken the glue code that made my Clarion Journal entries work. When I...

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Recommended reading: Deep Work by Cal Newport

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport. At some level, I’ve always understood deep work—the sort of work where you sit down and focus on your task for 20 or 60 or 90...

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