Clarion West Write-a-thon 2020

The Clarion West Write-a-thon runs in conjunction with the six-week long writer’s workshop in Seattle each summer, and although this year the workshop itself has been postponed, like everything else, the Write-a-thon is still on for the same dates, June 21 to July 31.  Kudos to the Clarion West folks for doing their best to help writers feel connected, and inspired to keep working, by offering a number of online events and courses in lieu of the regular summer activities.

Here’s the link to my page for the Write-a-thon: Lara Campbell McGehee – Clarion West.  For now I haven’t changed it from last year’s, but I may add some updates as I go along.  As always, any donations are much appreciated.

Clarion West Write-a-thon 2019

This year’s Write-a-thon runs from June 23rd to August 3rd.  My page is here. For now I’m leaving my ‘goals’ section the same as last year, though I think it might help if I picked a specific project or two to complete by the end of the six weeks.  I was a bit surprised at how much I accomplished in a short period when I was scrambling to revise a short story in time to meet a submission deadline last month — being under that kind of pressure can certainly be motivating!

Clarion West Write-a-thon 2018

Once again I’m looking forward to participating in the Clarion West Write-a-thon. As always, any support or encouragement is much appreciated. 🙂 My page on the Write-a-thon site can be found here.

My info on the site is the same as last year’s, as the only brand new writing project I’ve tackled since then is a novelette (a very long short story) that’s currently sitting in the cool-down phase before I go back to do another draft. So for the six weeks of the Write-a-thon, I’ll be plugging away at the same things that are still in the pipeline, and again focusing on trying to keep up a regular schedule with a minimum of two hours of writing time each day.

Of Elves and Giants

The first time I saw Ursula K. Le Guin give a reading, I was surprised that she was a more petite woman than I’d imagined, and touched to discover that her small frame and way of moving reminded me quite a bit of my mother. It always seemed to me that my mother’s fine-boned structure, combined with a special poise and elegance, contributed to giving her a fey quality. Before seeing Le Guin in person that day, I’d only seen a few black and white photos of her face. It wasn’t that I expected her to be a particularly tall or robust woman, but I certainly hadn’t anticipated that she would share that elven quality my mother had. Upon reflection, it seemed highly appropriate for someone capable of such powerful magic with words.

One descriptor that’s appeared often in the many articles written about Le Guin this week is ‘giant’, with her being referred to as ‘a literary giant’ or a ‘giant of science fiction’. Thinking about this led to a realization I wrote about in an email to a dear writer friend and fellow Le Guin fan, and I wanted to share part of it here:

Some people with brilliant minds and a powerful presence — full of a great, sparkling mental energy — just seem like they should be immortal, and a world without her in it feels like a world left with a huge empty space. It dawned on me yesterday that when someone who appears — on the outside — in the form of a small elderly woman can leave behind such a gigantic hole, it’s exactly what Jem thinks about his foster mother, Enkara, near the beginning of White Sky: ” . . . Enkara, who was one of the oldest of the midwives, was also one of the smallest women in that house, and she didn’t look strong. But Jem knew that in truth she was larger than the others. On the inside, where it really counted, she was bigger than all the rest of them put together.”

A Thousand Words

It’s the task of the writer — and the special gift of the writer — to find words for the things that are hardest to put into words.  While the old adage is ‘a picture paints a thousand words’, the challenge we relish is attempting to do the opposite: using words to paint pictures in vivid, real-life detail, and, even more challenging, to capture the subtlest nuances of emotion.  But that doesn’t mean it isn’t very difficult at times.  Perhaps in some ways it’s hardest of all for a writer, who knows the immense importance of finding exactly the right words at the right moment.

So today I share a picture to convey those thousand words, through some little friends of mine — collectively known as ‘the writer doggies’ — who sit on my desk and keep me company while I write (a good thing to have for such a solitary activity).  They’re always good at being quiet, but today there seems a deep sadness in the quiet camaraderie they share.

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Clarion West Write-a-thon 2017

facebook_cover_CW2017WaTWriter

Write-a-thon time has come around once again, and as usual I’m itching to work on something new but also have oodles of edits that need to get done. So this summer’s goal will be to reestablish a writing routine where I spend at least two hours a day doing some kind of writing, whether it’s editing or drafting, rather than tying myself to one particular project. I’m hoping that will result in making progress on final edits for one novel, doing both some drafting and editing of old material for another, and polishing up one short story to start sending out on submission. Continue reading

It’s Write-a-thon Time

This is my fourth year of participating in the Clarion West Write-a-thon. (It also marks the fourth anniversary of this website, since being able to post weekly updates, as well as having a complete professional profile for the Write-a-thon, was an added incentive for setting up my own author site.) As mentioned in the goals section of my Write-a-thon page, I would have preferred to be drafting something new during the next six weeks, since it’s easier to get a real sense of accomplishment when you can count words or chapters written, but finishing the final edits for She-Wolf has to be my priority this summer.

I’ve often talked about finding the editing phase very enjoyable (and even downright addictive!), especially the fine tweaking and polishing that goes into getting the language just right. But one difficulty with this stage of the writing process (for me, in any case) is that it can be very hard to accurately estimate how long those kinds of edits will take. When you carefully work through a chapter and think you’re happy with it, only to spot a number of additional things you want to change when you come back to it a week later, it makes it hard to set deadlines.

No doubt part of that is due to being afflicted with chronic perfectionism, but I can’t discount the fact that being in a slightly different frame of mind when you pick something up can help you to see it in a different light. For instance, I’ve found that looking at a manuscript not only in print, but in actual book form, helps even more with shifting fully into ‘reader mode’. Continue reading

Spreading the Word about the ‘Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin’ Documentary and Kickstarter Campaign

I recently learned about this feature documentary about Ursula K. Le Guin and the fundraiser that the filmmaker, Arwen Curry, is currently running through Kickstarter. It looks like a wonderful project, and Arwen Curry has been filming and working closely with Le Guin for a number of years; the film is scheduled to come out in 2017.  The project has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, but to get the funds from the grant released, the producers have to raise the balance of their budget, which is $200,000.  While they set their initial Kickstarter goal for $80,000, they’ve already doubled that, and with two more weeks to go, it looks like there’s a good chance they’ll get the full amount and then be able to focus entirely on finishing the film — I’ve got my fingers crossed that they’ll make it!

As anyone who knows me (or who’s read much on this site) is well aware, Le Guin is both my favorite author and my greatest inspiration as a writer. It may seem that I go on about her a bit much, but it’s hard to put into words the significance of the epiphany I had when I first discovered her work.  As I mention in my bio here, it was because of her that I learned that there was such a thing as social science fiction, and realized that all these story ideas I had running around in my head fit perfectly into that subgenre.  (And one could argue that much of my fantasy is essentially social SF with a fantasy-type setting and a few other elements that give it that fantasy feel instead.)

Because Le Guin writes both SF and fantasy and a wide variety of other things — including poems, essays, plays, contemporary fiction, and children’s picture books — she also provided an example of the kind of writer I want to be, since I’m interested in writing many things and wouldn’t want to be pigeon-holed into any category.  And as soon as I was old enough to fully appreciate the brilliance of her style, it also contributed to inspiring me to strive toward that level of mastery as a writer. Continue reading

Copy Editing Humor

When it comes to television, I’m pretty much a PBS addict, but I do occasionally watch other channels. One of my guilty pleasures is watching TLC, since I like some of the programs having to do with fashion, like the makeover shows and shows about wedding dresses.  (I’ve become a fan of the designer, Pnina Tornai — some of her dresses are amazing! — and I named Crea’s cousin in How to Steal a Demigod ‘Penina’ as an homage to her.)  On one episode of Say Yes to the Dress, the sales consultant’s reaction to a comment made by a member of the bride-to-be’s entourage is hilarious.  People can certainly say odd things when criticizing a dress and saying what it reminds them of (or describing what they think the dress should look like), and in this case the odd objection caused the poor consultant to look both confused and exasperated and exclaim, “What does that even mean?!”  The way she drew out the word ‘mean’ for maximum effect made it particularly funny, and also made the phrase and her intonation stick in my mind.

So I’ve been buried in copy edits for the first two volumes of In the Shadow of the She-Wolf, and it never ceases to amaze me how little things can sneak through in a manuscript that’s been picked over and edited many times. Some of those sneaky proofreading errors are fairly understandable, such as a replacement of one word with a similar one that’s still a real word with a correct spelling.  My writing buddy whom I sent an ARC to caught one of those — ‘pouring’ in place of ‘poring’, when it means going over something in detail.  (Like copy edits!)  Since I normally pride myself on my copy editing skills (and the first agent who read a full manuscript of mine commented on how clean that manuscript was), it’s still embarrassing, but it’s not as if that’s a word most of us think about very often.  Much worse — and I have no idea why it wasn’t corrected earlier — was the replacement of the word ‘series’ with ‘serious.’  Three other people (in addition to myself) read that, and not a single one of us caught it?  Seriously? 😉

I’ve come to the conclusion that even the most picky readers (who can be very scathing in their criticism!) sometimes get caught up in the story or are focusing on one aspect of the writing more than another, and miss things that should be obvious. As I mentioned before, some of the little bugs that make me cringe are repetitive things, like the same word appearing three or four times in a paragraph or two when it could be reworded to avoid that repetition, or using the same speech tag or a very similar description of someone’s expression only a few paragraphs apart, even if those things might not really bother a reader who is caught up in the story.  Even more embarrassing is when you come across a sentence or phrase — which might have been intended as a poetic metaphor or a creative way of capturing a feeling, or might just have been something which should have been simple yet didn’t come out that way — and realize you’ve been skimming over it because it seems to capture the gist of what you intended.  But when you take a good hard look at what the words on the page actually say, you find yourself thinking, “What does that even mean???!!!”

Cover Reveal for White Sky

White Sky Front Cover

Here’s the cover for White Sky, the first volume of In the Shadow of the She-Wolf. The cover was ready some time ago, and it’s the final copy edits that have ended up taking more time than I’d anticipated. I’m rather surprised at how many little things I’ve found that I want to tweak in a manuscript that has already been pored over countless times, over a span of many years. (Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, considering how much of a perfectionist I am!) 😮

One thing that’s made it tricky is trying to approach the edits as if the book were written by someone else, and putting on that last polish — clearing up spots that could be even smoother or clarifying small details — without trying to change the author’s style. Repeatedly trying to update the manuscript to match the growth and evolution of my style is what put me in danger of spending my entire life writing and rewriting the same book in the first place(!), so there had to be a place to draw a line. To find that balance, I’m certainly trying to make the book the best it can be, but I’m also endeavoring to respect the younger version of myself who wrote it. As I once mentioned here, I believe you have to look at it like an artist who can show off their paintings and remark that some were done in their blue phase or their abstract phase — which they’ve moved on from — and still be proud of those paintings and the way they reflect that stage of their journey as an artist. Continue reading