All Hail the Weekend

I thought writers were antisocial folks! After this last weekend, I’m beginning to doubt the veracity of that.

Friday was our last day with Paul Park as instructor. We read over and discussed a few more of the plot exercises, and afterward we had out first set of stories to critique. So that afternoon I critiqued one of the stories. Most of that I did by myself in the creepy basement, until I realized that the twitching motion I could see in the corner of my eye was actually a quarter sized spider scuttling dangerously close (read:within one hundred yards) to me. I whipped off my shoe and smote him mightily, then got the hell out of the basement.

That evening a large group of us took the bus to Seattle Center, where we sat in for a pair of delightful readings from Connie Willis and Terry Bisson. Afterward there was the first Clarion West Friday party, in honor of Paul Park and in conjunction with the Locus Awards. After I got a beer in me it was great fun, even though I was already tired from missing my afternoon nap. I got back to the house a little before eleven, then spent some time Skyping with my husband before I fell asleep.

Only to wake up at seven the next morning in order to go out for breakfast with said husband and a good friend of hours, at Toulouse Petit. After an hour and a half of yummy food and conversation and coffee I was dropped off at the hotel where the Locus awards were being held. There were a couple panels in the morning. Comedy in Fiction and The Near-Future of Publishing, descriptions of which I’m sure you can find elsewhere. One note from the publishing panel, though. Mary Robinette Kowal proposed the idea of having an iTunes like store available for short stories, opening the ability to purchase one short story at a time. I think that’s a cool idea for the eReader crowd.

After the panels there was a coffee run and some milling around, wherein Connie Willis granted badges to those of us who had dared to not wear a Hawaiian shirt to the awards. Since I was wearing a shirt covered in skulls, and Connie didn’t buy my explanation as to how my shirt really was Hawaiian, I got a badge.

Then, luncheon, Nancy Kress in a grass skirt, Gardner Dozois in a coconut bra and poetry sung to the tune of Gilliigan’s island. At one point Connie called me to the podium, and asked me to tell everyone what I’d said when she confronted me about my lack of Hawaiian shirt.

“It’s my Pearl Harbor shirt,” I said, which earned me a room full of groans. Not to mention a heady, burning blush in my cheeks.

After that merriment the Locus awards got underway. Congratulations to all the winners!

By this point I was feeling quite fatigued, but there was still the SF Hall of Fame inductions! So we wandered over to the EMP, where it is held, and filed into the auditorium to listen to some very good speeches. A little more than halfway through, as I was enjoying Neil Gaiman’s semi-meta piece about his relationship with Harlan Ellison (who was inducted but couldn’t attend) I started getting really warm. And nauseous. By the end of everything I was pretty convinced I was going to puke.

I’m glad I held it together, though, because it would have been very bad for to get sick when Neil complimented me on my shirt in the hallway, as I was waiting for my ride to assemble. As it was, I went straight home, washed off my makeup and crawled into bed. Aside from a couple hours around midnight I slept until ten am the next day, and feel much better for it.

The moral of this story, that I should remember with tenacity, is that it does not pay to shirk on my sleep obligations. For those currently attending Clarion West, and those who will be in the future, I think it’s an important thing to remember. Writing when exhausted is hard. Giving critiques in that state of mind is hard. Existing on the same plane as the ret of humanity is hard.

I knew I was starting to crack around Thursday, and then I just kept pushing it. I’m glad, at least, that I learned the error of that early on, when my responsibilities to this workshop could forgive it.