I just signed up to participate in this year’s Clarion West Write-a-thon. Since this works as a fundraiser for Clarion West, you can sponsor me in my writing endeavors. Of course, this is also a tool for making myself write.
I’m planning to work on a sequel to For the Good of the Realm, which just came out from Aqueduct Press. I plan to do a little work on it each day. I notice in looking at the pages for this year’s Write-a-thon that there are many other things I may be doing, but that’s the starting point.
Signing up for this got me to thinking about Clarion West, past Write-a-thons, and the whole science fiction and fantasy world.
Going to Clarion West was one of the pivotal experiences in my life. The intensity of the process was crucial for me. It not only made me write, but it made me believe in my writing. But I think the key part was being a writer in community, doing the same kind of work along with others who shared my interests and desires.
I bonded with the people in my class. Twenty-four years later, I remain close friends with several of those people and can usually pick right up where we left off with most of them.
The Write-a-thon doesn’t bring that back, but it does make me remember Vonda N. McIntyre, who always participated and always sponsored other writers who were participating. Of course, Vonda was well-known for her generosity to other writers, so this was no surprise.
Signing up for the Write-a-thon reminds me of how much I miss her.
I got into science fiction as a reader, but as an adult, not as a teenager. A friend of mine pointed me to C.J. Cherryh’s Morgaine series after listening to me bitch that I couldn’t find any fiction worth reading. (This was in the late 1970s, when literary fiction was all about failed relationships among people who had more in common with my parents than they did with my generation.)
I started there and kept going. And, as I’ve said before, I ended up reading a lot of work by women, because there was great feminist fiction being writing in SF/F in the 1970s and 80s.
The thing that hooked me, and that still hooks me, is that science fiction (and a good bit of fantasy) is about something. There are ideas; there is substance. And as a rule, those ideas are wrapped in a good and often exciting story.
People who criticize SF/F as “escapist” obviously don’t read the good stuff.
And the real joy of it is that there are so many people writing really good stuff right now, new stuff, different kinds of stories than the ones that came before. There may be space ships and aliens or swords and witches, but the ideas are going in some new and different directions.
I didn’t get into SF/F to write it, but since I was doing some writing, it sucked me right in. One of the beauties of making up future worlds or worlds that never were is that the author gets to set the rules. You’re not stuck with reality as it currently exists in setting your story.
I’m glad I found this world. I’m glad I write in it. And I’m glad Clarion West exists. Please join me in supporting it.