Archive for May 6th, 2010

April 2010 Oregon Coast Writing Retreat

Sorry for the lack of blogging lately. I have a bunch of stuff to blog about, too, and I’m going to try to clear out that backlog starting now.

One of the things I’ve been doing and not blogging about is that I went to the coast last week for six days of hanging out, walking on the beach, cooking and eating, knitting, and writing writing writing with the cool folks pictured above: Jerry Oltion, Spencer Ellsworth, Janna Silverstein, Amanda Clark, Tina Connolly, Camille Alexa, Kathy Oltion, David D. Levine, Kate Yule. Not shown: Carrie Vaughn. Photo by Jerry Oltion.

I wrote over 7500 words of draft on a new project, plus 2500 words of notes and outline, and had a great time.

We also shared bits of our most embarrassing juvenilia. For myself, it wasn’t the clunky prose in my early work that really made me hang my head in shame (13-year-old me suffered from Exposition Syndrome rather than the more typical addiction to Purple Prose — obviously, the tree grows as the twig is bent) but the sexism. I cannot help but recall that when I was a young sprout my favorite TV show had only two female characters, one of whom was mute.

What can I say? I got better…

My unpublished story “Citizen-Astronaut” won Second Prize in the 2010 Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest. My story “Galactic Stress” was named one of the Notable Stories of 2009 for the storySouth Million Writers Award. Alembical 2, including my novella “Second Chance,” is now available for pre-order and got a starred review from Publishers Weekly. And the sixty-minute Tech Talk about my trip to “Mars” I presented to the engineers at Google is now available on YouTube.