One of my New Year’s resolutions was to apply to the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, at UC San Diego. As I’ve mentioned here before, I’ve always thought of myself as a writer – but I haven’t always been willing actually to write, and one of the things that’s often stopped me is fear. Fear of sucking. Fear of not sucking. (Because if you don’t suck, then you really have no excuse, do you?) But, having made the resolution, I actually carried through, and this morning I got an email telling me that, although I wasn’t one of the 18 writers selected for the workshop, I have been put on the waitlist.
I can live with that.
In fact, I can more than live with that. I’m so excited I can barely type.
I’m a bit nervous, though. Because another of my resolutions was to submit at least one piece of writing for publication. I know which piece it is. It’s one of the short stories I submitted to Clarion. I’ve got one or two small edits left to make to it, and then away it goes. And I know which market’s getting it. It’s Weird Tales. My goal is to get it to them by the end of the week.
Wish me luck…
[...] As promised, I’ve submitted one of the stories I used for my Clarion application to Weird Tales. I was so wound up about it, I forgot to attach it to the first email (though I did remember to paste the first four paragraphs into the body of that email, per the instructions at Ralan.com’s listing for the magazine), and had to send a second one, with an apology and an attachment. I can only hope Ann VanderMeer’s done something similar in her time… posted by ChiaLynn at 10:54 pm [...]
[...] and while I could tell myself she was just being polite – I’m not going to. Like being waitlisted for Clarion, this feels like a huge step to me, and lets me know that I’m headed in the right [...]
[...] asked me, early this year, if I was going to apply to Clarion again. I said yes, and I did intend to, but then for a variety of reasons, I decided it wouldn’t be [...]