One of the benefits of being more technologically aware than your mentor is that you can weasel into discussion you may not normally be accessible to. I put myself on Chip Delany's list-server for his fiction workshop and now I get to see most of the stories that get reviewed.

Of the five that I've seen so far, I was onlt jealous of one and that jealousy lasted 3/4 of the way through the story. It was written in an experimental fashion - through the eyes of a feral human, but the rhyming and sing-song text that carried the story in the beginning was abandonned later on. The ending of the feral human was predictable and told in a boring first person well-educated voice. The other four stories were not very memorable except to note that they all had very vague aspects of speculative fiction.
1) Story about a woman who anticipates her disappearance in her journals.
2) Urban fairy tale about a man whose graffitti disappears at the same time a beautiful woman enters his life.
3) Some odd story of drug abuse and physical abuse at the hands of a drug abusing boyfriend.
Clarion did it so much better. I'll take a "moon is an egg" story any day of the week.

I've also learned through my girlfriend that what SF writers call "info dump" is called "too much exposition" in film-making. When a film character's dialogue recounts the whole plot and summarizes the difficulties, it is a problem with exposition. Neat, huh?

I read poetry tonight at "The Painted Bride." It went over really well because I exclaimed the virutes of a woman's vagina after three or more women had read fairly typical "boyfriend abused me stories." Timing is everything!

I'm so hip.

TIME ENDS HERE