Right now I am working on an experimental nonfiction piece so weird even I can’t keep track of what I am trying to do. At the moment, however, it’s making me manually type in the complete text of someone else’s book. Why not just rely on OCR? Because this way. I will know every comma and semicolon intimately. I will understand the shapes of the phrases and the gait of the original work in a way no number of readings will ever accord.
I decided to go to the World Fantasy Convention, after all. I have a story on the ballot, a great honor as always. Even though it’s the last minute, maybe they’ll give me a reading? It does mean a lot of scrambling: registration, planes, hotels, plans. The big stopper right now is hotels. I don’t even know what the backup hotels are, since the main hotel is full, I guess.
First class of the graduate workshop is today. We don’t even have a reading assignment for the two and a half hours of the class. I am going to try something new, and hope that it works out. I am hoping for a different sort of conversation. This is especially relevant this year as the other CW fiction professor is on sabbatical, so all the writers may get pretty sick of me by the end of the year.
