Home again
The critiquing portion of the workshop ended this morning, with critiques of my story.
It's interesting the patterns that come up in critiques over the years; the general feeling today seemed to be that, as has often been the case for my workshopped stories, this story had a weak beginning but a strong ending. Way back at Swarthmore I took the fiction writing workshop class, and when I handed in my final paper (the short story I'd been working on all semester, which it just occurred to me was in some ways a precursor to the story that was critiqued this morning), the teacher (writer Elizabeth Benedict) commented something like "I would never have dreamed that the ending of this story would be so moving." (I'm paraphrasing heavily from imperfect memory here.) Which on the one hand was high praise, but on the other hand was a reminder that the opening was a bit on the unprepossessing side.
At least nobody today told me "Your story begins on page 3," which is what workshops have been telling me for about fifteen years now. Maybe I'm learning.
Anyway, the overall feedback today was a fair bit more positive than I was expecting—this is a story I've been struggling with since WisCon about three years ago, and I've been very uncertain about a lot of aspects of it, so it was nice to hear that I seem to be on the right track, even if there was a fair bit of disagreement over what exactly I should do in the next draft. (Thanks to M and J for previous comments that helped me get this draft into workshoppable shape, btw.)
Okay, that was way more than I intended to say about the story. What I started out to say was that the writing and socializing and eating and hot-tubbing and napping portions of the workshop are continuing through tomorrow, but I was exhausted and over-socialized and really needing some alone-time, so I came home tonight after dinner. I realized on the way home that I was the only person there who doesn't share living space with someone; I think I'm more used to (and more in need of) solitude than a lot of people are.
Also, I realized that I don't do so well with taking the alone-time I need when I'm in a social context. I could sequester myself in my room (though it seems to be a rule that walls of workshop spaces have to be thin), but if I know that everyone else is in the other room chatting and laughing, it makes me want to be out there with them even if they're talking about stuff I'm not interested in and even if I have a lot to do. Over a convention weekend that's not such a big deal, but I'm going to have to be careful of it during my vacation periods later in the year; in particular, the SWIL vacation to Nags Head is going to offer lots and lots of opportunities for socializing, probably at any time of day or night, and I'm going to have to force myself to go off to my room and spend time by myself to avoid burnout.
In other news: so nice to be back on broadband! Email did actually start working for me over the cabin's satellite modem, or at least more or less working, sometime in the last 48 hours, but it was still quite slow. (I was able to receive email by telling Eudora not to download any messages over about 30K; I was able to send email only when the gods smiled upon me, or at least I couldn't see any other pattern as to when it worked and when it didn't.) Got home, and now I can check and send mail quick like a bunny. Yay! (Actually, one of the things that saved my sanity midweek was about two minutes of using Stewart & Jessica's wireless broadband; that also allowed me to send SH autoresponses that had been piling up.)
Also nice to find various pieces of papermail waiting for me, mostly cards and a gift or two. Thank you; you know who you are.
I feel like I have a lot more to say, but nothing is coming to the surface amid general jumbled thoughts, so I'll leave it at this for now. More soon, no doubt.
