Transit across the continent achieved!

The obligatory picture of the view from my hotel room.

Guess what? I'm in San Diego! Yes, the palm trees were a bit of a tip off, I'm sure.

I flew in two days early for Clarion to let me start to get over jet lag, which bit of planning I am profoundly grateful for. I got in at noon local time, which my body thought was 4:30, on two hours sleep having woken up at 2 am. I stayed up for another nine hours out of pure bloody-mindedness, but it's not as though anything useful happened in those nine hours. When you find yourself too zonked to do a facebook quiz, you know you're out of it.

This morning I got an email from the first week's instructor, who was imparting quite a bit of information. The part I have worked past hyperventilating (but not past the stomach ache) about is that one of my stories is going to be workshopped on the very first day. The instructor (the lovely Nina Kiriki Hoffman) is highly encouraging us to write stories while we're in San Diego, and to give us two days to panic something out she has arranged the first two days to be spent critiquing submission stories, and I'm on the block for day one, week one.

I've never workshopped or anything of the sort before, so I really don't know what this will be like. (Other than painful.) I'm especially worried about my ego, to be honest, because I submitted those stories because they were the best I had and I couldn't see how to make them better. Seeing these stories in particular torn to shreds is going to be special. But I'm also very excited about this, because I don't have to worry for long about what they're going to think of what I write. I can just dive in the deep end and hope I don't belly flop.

And I won't be telling you how the experience went for another two months. I actually won't be blogging during the whole of Clarion for a variety of reasons. I will now lay them out in a list, because I like lists.

• Blogging is a prime way to distract myself, particularly if I have to start searching for pictures to illustrate my posts. I am already very good at distracting myself and not exactly the most EXPERIENCED person going into this thing, so I want to roadblock this avenue to failure and despair early.
• The likelihood of feedback on what I write from people outside of Clarion would just make me post some incredibly winy rants. They didn't like my story! I don't know how to use punctuation! Someone laughed at me! I spilled my coffee on my shoe! Oh, cry me a river, self. I haven't even WRITTEN those posts yet, and I'm boring myself. 
• And, y'know, whining all over the internet doesn't do a whole lot towards making me seem more mature. 
• As a going away present, the people at work gave me this really pretty diary and pen set. The pen clicks and the diary has a magnetic clasp. It's just begging to be used!
• Yay bullet points!

Right! So as I alluded to in that wonderful list, I won't be blogging but I will be diarising. (I mean, duh. This must be preserved!) I also bought a fancy camera, so I'll be using that. :D It makes lovely shutter noises! Ca-chunk Ca-chunk. #easilyamused

See you around!

Down below those clouds is St. John's.