June 19th: Monday, Monday

Last night I stayed up until about three finishing my story "Builders".  About half past one in the morning, I debated going to sleep and finishing it today, but I pushed on through to complete it.  One reason is that I would like to stay on pace for two stories a week through the first four weeks.  I wanted to have a productive Clarion, and so far I am.  The surprising thing is, so is everybody else.

Twelve stories were turned in today.  Twelve.  That's a lot.

This precipitated a discussion on how to best handle the workload.  We decided (in a roundabout way) to put a cap of four stories a day on the critiquing schedule.  The rest roll over, with preference given to people who have not been critiqued by the visiting instructor yet.

If we stay on this pace (about 30 stories a week), we'll have about 180 stories by the end of the workshop.  I don't expect that will happen, as some people will inevitably burn out or slow down (I hope I am not one of those).  But there is a high probability that we will be one of the most prolific Clarions ever.  Unfortunately, quantity does not always correlate with quality, but we're trying our best.

For my next story (the one Sean prompted, but probably won't be here to read), I plan to write a story from the perspective of a net reporter with recording implements grafted into their body (eyes, ears, etc.).  I will try to write the story mostly as dialogue, to practice that aspect of my writing.  We'll see how it goes.

Some of us played a couple of games of Scrabble last night in the third floor lounge, and Sean Stewart joined in for a game.  It was fun.

I'm unofficially taking the day off from writing, though I will probably do a little planning and outlining.  Later, a few of us will probably go out to dinner (the longer I'm here, the more I see a need for getting off campus for awhile).