Last night (well, at 4:30 this morning), I finally finished my story "Star-Gazing" and sent it off for first critiques. As usual, ten or twelve hours after I send something off, I think of about a million little things I could have changed, that *this* detail could have been like *that* instead...but I think I'm going to be good and patiently wait to hear back from the first critiquers.

It's a first-person, present-tense recollected story about teenagers seeing a UFO, and strange things that follow that event. I'd been unusually stalled in the middle until I was out at Fox's Sherron Inn in South Miami, which for context is the the most dimly lit bar in the free world, sort of like a sensory deprivation tank that serves really good martinis...and it hit me that the problem is that I'd been holding to the delusion that the story was going to be, at least in some extremely soft and loose sense, "science fiction," just because it happened to have a set-up usually associated with science fiction. It's not. It's surrealist fantasy, and with that in mind, everything fell into place.

Oh, and it came in at right around exactly 4K, so unless I have to expand it greatly in revisions, I finally have something that I can submit to Clarkesworld.

This is the third story I've finished in the four and half months since Clarion, which sucks compared to my pre-Clarion productivity rate...but I shouldn't complain, after how freaked out I was when I was warned that some people can't write anything for about six months afterwards.

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Speaking of Clarion, remember a while back I mentioned that my Week 6 Clarion West story "David and His Zebra" won 1st Place in Revolution SF's Clarion Shmarion contest (a contest for the best stories that, for whatever reason, probably wouldn't go over well at a Clarion-style workshop), thus entitling me to publication on the web-site and a fabulous bag of books? They just put it up, along with the second and third place winners.

Here it is.

As an introduction, what follows is the end of the required paragraph I submitted explaining why this slightly psychotic, sleep-deprivation-induced in-joke wouldn't go over well in a Clarion-style workshop. (I actually have a good case from experience, whereas I'm honestly not sure about the reasons the second and third place winners wouldn't have gone over well...as I argue here, in my response to the original contest description, "if there's a Clarion aesthetic, it's emphatically an aesthetic of stretching and experimentation." Which is one of many, many reasons why, to be serious for a second, as much fun as it is to poke gentle fun at certain aspects of the experience, it was an absolutely fantastic summer. I frickin' miss Seattle every day.) Anyway, like I said:

.....Suffice to say that every
> character in this story shares a name with one or more participants
> in the workshop. Oh, and it's probably worth mentioning that Tina,
> Caroline and Nicole were among those who were amused by the story
> and that, while the real David does indeed have a stuffed Zebra
> that tells him what to do, he assures me that neither he nor Zebra
> will be offended if the story is published.