Category Archives: Clarion West

Clarion West Beg-A-Thon Week #4

Posted on July 9, 2017 by Pamela

Klamath River upriver from Orleans, July 2017

So to clarify, I am updating my progress for week #3. We are starting week #4 today.

My work flow was out of whack due to a my trip to California. But I did the following:

1. I finished the teaser story for the romance series. It’s shorter than expected but a clean draft so shouldn’t be too much work to get it ready for distribution.

2. I worked on polish and fixing on the romance manuscript. I also figured out a fix to some of the things that were bothering me about the ending.

3. I didn’t do the blurb. I can’t help it, I keep avoiding the blurb. I did epic administrivia and worked in the yard during the hottest part of the day. I found all sorts of things to do instead of work on the blurb. I’ve got 2 more weeks.

I am going to abandon the idea of revisions to the spec fic short story that I have been submitting. I only have 2 more weekends to get the manuscript finished so all my attention will be devoted to that.

Same general area. Klamath River upriver from Orleans, March 2017

The rental house next door is empty again. I am assuming it will be rented again. That will make the 9th tenants in 15 years. We’ve been lucky the last couple of times. We’ll see how our luck holds out.

We also had baby raccoons in the yard this morning. It was daylight so I was a little worried about them. We have a big hedge and no one is next door so I hope they found a safe place to hide. They make a cute chittery sound, like Tribbles.

Here’s all my classmates again if you’ve considered donating but haven’t gotten around to it yet:

Christopher
Owen
Eden
Carol
Shane
Maggie
Raj
An
Theresa
Pritpaul
Kira
Tracy
Douglas
Me

Posted in Clarion West, Orleans | Tagged | Comments Off on Clarion West Beg-A-Thon Week #4

Clarion West Beg-A-Thon Week #3

Posted on July 2, 2017 by Pamela

The sleepless trend continues although now I’m sleepless in Orleans. We don’t have a schedule here so I can stay in bed as long as I want if I fall asleep again. But still, by afternoon I have a fuzzy head.

At the last minute I decided to go to California for Fourth of July since it’s my Dad’s birthday and we wanted some family time. My sister is here, too. Here’s Summer. I was trying to get her to do her silly face.

I think I’m numbering these posts goofy because today is starting week #3 but I’m reporting on week #2.

I worked on the story, the blurb and the draft but made little meaningful progress. I don’t get a lot done on the weekdays anyway and then Friday I was in the car all day driving here. I listened to S-Town Podcast on the way which was fantastic for a long drive with heavy traffic. Yesterday I read some commentary on it — this could be a whole other post but I’m not up for it right now — let’s just say I had similarly complex reactions about the story.

Highly recommend.

Back to my write-a-thon progress. I have plenty of time in Orleans but I’m not always inclined to work. I like to be outside and listen to the river and relax.

Here’s the view:

My goal for week #3 is to keep on doing what I’m doing but more. I have a couple of days when I get back home when I can be productive.

If you’re thinking about donating but haven’t yet, I strongly recommend sponsoring Raj because he is giving away prizes. Here’s his post with all the details.

Here’s the list of my classmates who are participating. Go hug a writer.

Christopher
Owen
Eden
Carol
Shane
Maggie
Raj
An
Theresa
Pritpaul
Kira
Tracy
Douglas
Me

Posted in Clarion West, goofy face, Orleans, pamily | Comments Off on Clarion West Beg-A-Thon Week #3

Clarion West Beg-A-Thon Week #2

Posted on June 25, 2017 by Pamela

You know what loves this hot weather we’re having? The garden. This morning I wandered through and you could practically measure how much taller the tomatoes are today. Things are blossoming. It’s nice out there if you don’t mind the heat.

My writing goals do not slot easily into 6 week bits but this week I accomplished the following:

–> In early drafts I tend to use repetitive phrases and words. When I put together the early reader draft, I made a list of items to go back and look for. I did that and while doing that identified some others to work on this week.
–> I worked on the blurb. It’s not done but I have a start to work with.
–> I worked on the prequel story which I am spending way too much time on but I love these characters. I wrote about 700 words.

The plan is to continue on this course except maybe more faster on the prequel story.

As of this minute – these are my classmates who are doing the write-a-thon. The folks not listed are surprisingly strong at resisting my powers of persuasion. I think this is it. Fourteen out of eighteen is still pretty good. If you are inclined to donate, please pick any one of them. They would all love it.

Christopher
Owen
Eden
Carol
Shane
Maggie
Raj
An
Theresa
Pritpaul
Kira
Tracy
Douglas
Me

This is the main garden and looks like a mess because, as always, I didn’t pull enough of the sunflowers out. Colleague gave me some heirloom seeds that they handed out at a national tribal event, I can’t remember which one, and I have a couple of stalks of corn in there, too.

Posted in Clarion West, garden | Comments Off on Clarion West Beg-A-Thon Week #2

Clarion West Beg-A-Thon 2017 Week 1

Posted on June 18, 2017 by Pamela

Try to tell from looking at this photo, which two married couples came out of this group. Extra credit: can you find Neile?

Howdy Friends!

It’s that time again. Somewhere in Seattle a new group is getting started on their 6 week writing workshop. Sadly, the rest of us are not and we get to hang out and write at home.

These are my posts from the workshop: Overview, Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4 part 1, Week 4 part 2, Week 5 and Week 6.

I have been harassing all my classmates to sign up for the write-a-thon this year and here’s where we’re at so far. Consider sponsoring some of these incredible human beings who are all terrific writers and wonderful friends. They would love it and all donations are appreciated.

Christopher
Owen
Eden
Carol
Shane
Maggie
Raj
An
Theresa
Pritpaul
Kira

My sponsor page is here. This year I’m mainly working on activities related to getting pen name’s next romance novel finished and all the promotions set up.

I do have one spec fiction story that was out on submission and I’m going to make a few revisions and resubmit during the write-a-thon.

Updates every week.

Posted in Clarion West | Comments Off on Clarion West Beg-A-Thon 2017 Week 1

Beg-A-Thon Week #3 Progress Report

Posted on July 9, 2016 by Pamela

This week I did just over 11,000 words. I remain on target for my goals.

From here on out it makes no sense to measure by word count. I need to tidy up about 24K per week to get the draft to the beta readers by July 28th.

Now that I look at it like that, it seems impossible. Oh well. I’ll do my best.

So I wrote a complete (not pretty) draft since starting on May 20th. That’s pretty incredible. I’ve always considered myself to be a slow writer.

I had a fairly substantial outline to work from but I need to remember not to let myself get too gummed up at the beginning because I figure out a lot of stuff as I go along.

One of the things that makes this possible, like I said before, is letting everything else slide. This is agonizing for me but when you want one thing you have to sacrifice something else. Bob is out of school so he picks up more of the chores. I also (oh so painful) gave up about 90% of my reading time. I had time to power skim the New Yorker and that was it. I used my time on the bus to work out the next bits I wanted to write.

So if my outline says “woman discovers she’s really an alien.” Then while I’m on the bus I’ll write notes about how she figures out her craving for raw meat and the strange appendages she has growing out from behind her knees aren’t normal so she goes to the science library to do research but realizes she’s being followed by a purple Cadillac…

And so on like that so when I sit at the computer I’m ready to roll.

I try to preserve my back and neck and wrists by regular breaks.

I do any number of these things:

Shoulder Stretches with a belt.

Wrist and forearm work (This is a class preview. It might sound technical but watch the demo. These are great.)

Foundation training back exercises. I am generally the type to be put off by branded exercise systems but I’ve been doing the basic exercises regularly as part of my recovery from the back debacle of 2015 and I think it’s helped a lot.

Those are my secrets to writing a whole bunch in a short time. Although to be honest I’m not as confident in this manuscript as I was in the last one.

Thanks again to all my terrific sponsors. My report showed over $10K in donations already. Not for me but for the whole thing.

It’s not to late to donate.

This is what the tomatoes are doing. I’m going to put the cages up this afternoon. I did a half-assed job of throwing them out there and have ignored them ever since so probably not going to be a big tomato year. (Again.)

A couple more links.

I’m not a big pork eater but I’ve been anxious to try out a new recipe and this Cuban Roast Pork caught my eye. Right now the house smells amazing.

For a huge portion of my career I worked with the Metlakatla Indian Community in SE Alaska. This is a terrific article and photo essay about basketball in the Community.

That’s this week’s update.

Posted in Clarion West | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Beg-A-Thon Week #3 Progress Report

Beg-A-Thon Week #2 Progress Report

Posted on July 3, 2016 by Pamela

It’s hard to believe that I’m disappointed with 15,209 words this week but I had a little blip yesterday and pooped out my productivity streak. A blip meaning I had trouble writing. I was here with the butt in the chair most of the day.

I had hoped to finish out the 1st draft yesterday. I’m hoping I can do that tomorrow. I’m behind my schedule but I built in some padding so I’m not in a full panic yet. Today went much better but still no first draft.

What? Oh, yeah. That was 15,209 words this week. They weren’t pretty but I’m getting the work done.

In other news, the cough is down to an occasional gurgle and I can finally exercise again. I also learned from the full body coughing that my back is at about 98% at this point, too. It took a year but that’s better than never.

The flip side of 15K words a week is I have let everything else slide including my personal relationships. Sorry!

Thanks again to all my fantastic donors. I continue to promise to send you a love note soon.

And it’s never too late to donate. Even a few bucks is appreciated:

Click here to donate!

Current progress:

Posted in Clarion West | Comments Off on Beg-A-Thon Week #2 Progress Report

Beg-A-Thon Week #1 Progress Report

Posted on June 25, 2016 by Pamela

Week #6 2008 — This is my Clarion West class with Chuck Palahniuk

I wrote 9,723 words this week. I should sit here and work until I hit 10,000 but I also tidied up my entire manuscript and I have shocked even myself with my capacity to sit here and work all day long on a weekend.

Time for a break. Tomorrow is another day and I want to beat that work count next week.

Here are my rock star classmates participating in the Write-A-Thon:

Maggie Croft

Christopher Reynaga

Carol Ryles

Kira Walsh

Rajan Khanna

Caren Gussoff

Me again

And our workshop administrators

Neile Graham

Les Howle

Here’s the status of the project of August:

I need to pay attention to my poor neglected husband.

Super huge thanks to everyone who has donated so far. I will send you a personal love note soon.

Posted in Clarion West | Tagged | Comments Off on Beg-A-Thon Week #1 Progress Report

It’s Beg-A-Thon Time!

Posted on June 18, 2016 by Pamela

I found this photo from the Squirrel circus of 2016. Action shot of squirrel number one fleeing the premises. (I typo’d that as “feeling the premises” and almost left it.)

I started writing at 7am this morning and I did take a number of breaks but I’ve been working almost all day.

The Chicago trip was fantastic but I got home Monday night and then Tuesday I had a soccer game (Yes, I know, poor me) so I didn’t get home until 10pm. I woke up Wednesday morning with the crud.

I’m not feeling terrible today but I still have major coughing fits and I had just put a cough drop in my mouth when my husband came in here and set a frosty glass filled with strawberry colored frozen beverage in front of me.

He just finished school yesterday and he is in “OMG, I have the whole summer to play” mode. I am still working and I have a first draft to finish by the end of the month. I’m not quite in the same head space.

So, back to the drink, I looked at and said: I just put a cough drop in my mouth.

But it was pretty and smelled good.

How much booze is in this? I asked.

He said: Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, about a shot and a half.

I gave it back to him. If I spend the entire day writing that means I did not do anything else and I have chores to do before I can get fuzzy on a fruity drink.

I last did the Clarion West Write-A-Thon in 2011. I wrote an excellent introductory post about it then.

My stated goal is to write 1000 words a day although it’s not going to work exactly like that. I need to try to have a draft ready for beta readers at the beginning of August so I need to write about 17,500 a week for the next two weeks (That’s about 10 pages a day). Then I’ll have a first draft and for the last 4 weeks of the Write-A-Thon I will need to spin my first draft of poop into a readable draft of gold.

This would be much easier if I didn’t have a husband, a job, a soccer team, a vacation, cooking, cleaning and a never-ending pile of administrivia to contend with. But I’m going to try to make it happen anyway.

If you are rooting me on during this insanity – please consider throwing a few bucks to Clarion West. Small donations are very happily welcome. My donation page is here and there are tons of other writers to support if you don’t like me. There are other ways to donate here.

I hate making blanket dramatic statements like this, but the workshop really and truly changed my life and I am so grateful that I was able to attend.

Here is the progress on the project of August:

Posted in Clarion West | Tagged | Comments Off on It’s Beg-A-Thon Time!

The Birthday Problem: Or, We’re Terrible at Estimating Probability

Posted on July 27, 2014 by Pamela

While I’m away from the computer, here’s a guest post from one of my favorite people, Caren Gussoff (www.spitkitten.com) writing about her new book. Caren was in my Clarion West class and is a terrific writer. I haven’t got my hands on the book yet but I do know: BOB is a character in the book.

Humans are naturally terrible at estimating the probability of something happening. There are many theories as to why: it’s a side effect of subjective consciousness, that we seek a “confirmation bias” to inject meaning into the random data that we move through on a daily basis; a trait somehow favored in our evolution that’s kept us safe and viable (fearful or emotional events leave a bigger imprint on us); or simply that few folks receive an adequate education in maths when we are young enough for it to carve into our thinking. It fascinates me that our intuition about how frequently (or infrequently) events can and do happen — for instance, thinking of a song right before hearing it on the radio — is wrong (we think it’s an “eerie coincidence,” while, in fact, the actual probability of such a thing happening is higher than we think). In fact, this skew is the theme of my latest novel, The Birthday Problem (Pink Narcissus Press, 2014).

We personalize everything … which makes sense, because, given our consciousness, everything happens to us (the individual) or in relationship to us (someone we know, don’t know, and not-me). I wanted to write a book that relied on coincidence; in The Birthday Problem, every character has a relationship to every other character in some way or another. They are a web of people all affected by the same tragedy — malfunctioning nanobots that cause symptoms of mental illness. But their interconnectivity was how I played with the phenomena of poor probability judgment and whether it felt possible that all of these very different characters could be so closely related.

The title refers to a classical paradox that, IMHO, nicely sums up our failings in understanding probability. The birthday problem asks how many people need to be in a room together for there to be a 50% (or greater) probability that two of them share the same birthday (month and date).

Unless you already know the answer, whatever you are thinking right now is wrong. Now, it feels like there need to be a LOT of people in a room for there to be a 50/50 probability two of them share the same birthday. You may even think, quite logically, that it would require at least 365 or more. But really, it just takes 23 people in one room to get a 50% probability that two of them will share the same birthday.

There’s great explanation of the math here: Understanding the Birthday Problem.

For less number-oriented thinkers, this explanation is quite tidy: The Birthday Paradox.

Interesting, right? Even when you see the math, it still feels wrong. And that unsettling feeling is what I tried to recreate in The Birthday Problem.

The Birthday Problem is available at Pink Narcissus Press, Amazon, B&N, and in stores everywhere.

Posted in Clarion West | Comments Off on The Birthday Problem: Or, We’re Terrible at Estimating Probability

I Can’t Do Technology Part 748

Posted on October 14, 2013 by Pamela

This post has been updated because Tina showed up in the comments! If you’ve already read it, I’m not sure how you will know this but read it again.

I have been meaning to write this post since my trip to California way back in March.

I think I’ve explained that while I like the idea of podcasts, I very rarely have time where I just want to sit and listen to things. I only drive about 50 miles a week which isn’t enough time in the car and when I’m on the bus, I usually read. For years I subscribed to EscapePod because I thought I’d eventually get into the habit of listening more.

Instead, I would log in a couple of times a year and pick a couple stories that I wanted to hear and delete the rest. I recently gave it up all together because even when I do get around to listening I rarely enjoy the stories enough that I wanted to keep up with this exercise.

Meanwhile, when I got my iPhone I started subscribing to Toasted Cake which is narrated by Tina Connolly. When I went to California in March, I listened to about 10 of them on the drive. These work for me because they are short, maybe 10-15 minutes, and I almost always like the stories.

I also love Tina’s narration. She recommends books or talks about what’s going on with her. I swear I wrote myself a note so I could link to the exact podcast but I couldn’t find it and I didn’t want to bug Tina because she’s having a baby any minute, not to mention she has a book that came out TODAY, and I didn’t want to be all, “Oh hey, can you remember some random podcast you did where you talked about precious cookware?”

It is Toasted Cake #74 Taking Care of Ma by Lee Hallison and it’s from June which means I’m mistaken about when I listened to it, but who cares? Tina talks about having a hand thrown mini-pie plate perfect for making a fruit crisp. The entire podcast is less than 10 minutes. The story is good and the fruit crisp recipe is a keeper, too.

Upon hearing Tina talk about her special pie plate I thought: I have got to tell the world about my dual pie plate that Kira gave me. You can use it to make two kinds of pie at the same time.

And while I’m here, let me pimp Tina’s new book, Copperhead that came out today. The timing of this post is a coincidence. Yesterday I realized I had that photo of my pie plate sitting on my desktop forever and it was time to do something about it. Here’s an interview where Tina talks about the book.

Meanwhile, in addition to Toasted Cake I did a bunch of searching and loaded a whole variety of podcasts onto my phone to listen to on the trip I took this month. I had an interview with Joss Whedon and an interview with George Saunders. I had a WGA panel on the best written tv shows. I had all kinds of stuff.

It worked great on the trip down except I didn’t know I had to do something to get them to play one after the other so I kept having to fiddle with my phone to get to the next podcast while I was driving. I know, safe.

I still have about 500 pages of tutorials relating to technology that I’m very sincerely trying to get to but then, I’ve got a lot of things I’m trying to get to. The minute I finish this I’m running to the backyard to do about 4 days worth of gardening in 2 hours.

When I got to Orleans, I plugged my phone into my laptop, thinking I’d delete what I already listened to and then set up a playlist with the podcasts I had left.

And my laptop was kind enough to sync up my phone with the podcasts on the laptop which were the 30 Escapepod stories that I decided I didn’t want to listen to and a bunch of Toasted Cakes I already listened to. All my cool interviews went away. I don’t have my laptop and desktop systems synced right now because I haven’t gotten to that tutorial yet. However, one of the stories was Flowing Shapes by my Clarion West classmate Rajan Khanna who just sold his first novel.

So it all worked out.

Posted in Clarion West, doing it wrong | Tagged | 2 Comments