Kate Schaefer

09:58 am: Clarion West 2012 Write-a-thon

Flex your writing fingers, sharpen your editing reflexes, dominate your submission process. Whatever your writing-related goals this summer, the Clarion West Write-a-thon can help you meet them.

What is the Write-a-thon? It's a way to state your writing goals publicly and work on them in community with other writers. It's a fundraiser to benefit Clarion West Writers Workshop, to raise general funds to pay for instructors, manuscript copies, facility rental, student scholarships, and everything else needed to run a workshop, right down to the paperclips.

The Write-a-thon is open to the whole Clarion West community: alumni, instructors, friends, passersby. The deadline for signing up for the Clarion West Write-a-thon is June 16, the day before the workshop starts. The sooner you sign up, the sooner your page will go live, and the happier the volunteers working on the Write-a-thon will be. The online sign-up form awaits you at:

http://clarionwest.org/writeathon

There are about 40 pages live already (thanks again, testers and early signups! I kiss your virtual feet), and we’d like to get as many more as we can set up in the next few days. Remember, the Write-a-thon is completely volunteer-run, and there will be some days when our volunteer hours have to be juggled in a particularly difficult way.*

Last year, we had 142 participants and 420 donors, and the goals for this year are even more ambitious: 200 participants and 500 donors. There's $2000 in challenge donations riding on the number of participants, so you can help Clarion West's bottom line just by making your writing goals public.

If you’ve done the Write-a-thon before, you know what it did for your productivity. C’mon back, and bring a friend with you. Got a challenge for your classmates? Bring it on!

Give yourself a tough but realistic writing goal and have a good time. If you’re not writing this year, cheer on those who are. Sign up sponsors in support of your goals, or just write alongside the others. Yes, the Write-a-thon is a fundraiser, and a very important fundraiser for Clarion West, but the writing is more important than the money. The writing comes first.

Thanks!**

* Okay, what I mean here is that I'm going to Alaska to visit my in-laws next week, which means that other volunteers will have to fill in for me. They're perfectly competent to do the stuff I usually do, but I usually do that stuff, you know? So I'm fussing about it and want to get it done ahead of time.

** My relentless boosterism is aimed at Clarion West in Seattle, but I'll also cheer on adherents of our sister workshop, Clarion in San Diego. Their workshop starts a week later than ours, so the deadline for signing up for their Write-a-thon is later than our deadline. Some people do both, for seven weeks worth of writing goals rather than six.

05:55 pm: Life Is Good
I'm having a terrific time at Wiscon this weekend. The highlight of the weekend, so far, was singing with a bunch of women last night. We mostly sang old British folk songs and silly camp songs, the kinds of songs you learned when you were twelve, if you were lucky, and continue to sing in the shower many many years later. The highlights of that highlight, for me, were singing "Rolling of the Stones" with Ellen Kushner, and hearing Rachel Holmen sing "The Five Constipated Men of the Bible." When I go home, I must get out some of those old folkie LPs and figure out whether and how to replace them.

Another highlight was piling into a car that was almost large enough for five people and going to Ichiban with Kate Yule, David Levine, and Vicki Rosenzweig. Despite its name, Ichiban is a Szechuan restaurant. Kate found the restaurant through application of her awesome superpower and Yelp fu. Our party's combination of foods to avoid meant that we ended up eating intensely flavorful but mild foods, the most interesting Szechuan eating experience I can remember ever having.

As usual, Wiscon is far too full of people I want to see, most of whom are also trying to see far too many people, and many o f whom are hanging out in places other than where I'm hanging out. As complaints go, this one does not rate high on the pain scale.

03:06 pm: Cephalopods and ornithology
If you are at Wiscon this weekend, and if you are in the bar on the first floor, and if your bartender is named Zach, ask him about either cephalopods or ornithology. He will be informative and witty on either subject.

09:10 am: I almost forgot!
Any day is a good day to make a donation to the Carl Brandon Society, but some days are more appropriate than others. I'm not linking directly to the particular controversy that inspired today's post, because I think the number of people who have helped explain the problem has already reached the useful maximum.

I will link to a terrific explanation of why the phrase in question was problematic.

I generally direct my CBS donations to the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship, which sends a writer of color to Clarion West in Seattle and to Clarion in San Diego each year. Other terrific CBS programs include Con or Bust, which helps people of color attend science fiction conventions, and the Parallax and Kindred Awards, which recognize speculative fiction by a writer of color and spec fiction dealing with issues of race and ethnicity, respectively. I like the way these three programs address multiple aspects of representation in various parts of readers' and writers' lives. 

08:35 am: My friend Mark
My friend Mark was, at various points and to varying degrees, a professional astronomer, a museum exhibit designer, a writer, an actor with a particular talent for improv, a Shakespeare scholar, a Sherlock Holmes devotee, a photographer, a fan of the Karamozov Brothers and The Brothers Karamozov, a film afficionado, a friend to dogs, my Clarion West classmate in 1992, a man with a loving metaphorical heart and a defective physical heart. He was, most of all, the devoted and beloved spouse and true life partner of e_bourne. He died yesterday.

Across twenty years, we were never very close, but always happy to see each other. In twenty years of that kind of friendship, we were present in each other's lives in some hard times and some good times, because that happens, across time. I'm happy to have known him and glad to have seen the care he and Elizabeth took of each other.

Goodbye, Mark. You could always make me laugh. Too.

11:05 am: On the nature of work
I have managed the budget-writing process for a bank division with over $2 billion in assets, $45 million in income, and $37 million in expenses. I have been the counter waitress in a failing luncheonette. I have run a bookkeeping machine that was obsolete before I learned to use it, written database reports on delayed airplanes and bus route changes, counted cars in an intersection, answered phones and alternately lied to callers or told them the truth, wiped the dirty butts of small children, analyzed data, made predictions about what would happen next month and next year, driven people places and driven them home, mortared concrete blocks together to build the wall of a church.

I've been paid for some of that work and not paid for some of that work. All of it required that I paid attention to what I was doing and did it carefully. The amount of money and respect I got for that work was rarely commensurate with the amount of effort and experience it took to do that work. The rewards for doing minor clerical work well are pretty limited; the punishment for doing it badly is pretty limited, too. The amount of time and care it takes to do it properly is always more than those who've never done it believe.

09:23 pm: Sibling dibling
My sister Gini is visiting me right now. At this minute, she's sleeping in my guest room, since she got up at oh-dark-hundred two time zones away and traveled via delayed airplane to our land of unexpected ice and snow. That is, we expected this particular ice and snow, but in general, we don't expect ice and snow in Seattle, so we're never really prepared to deal with them.

The special joy of having my sister visit, aside from just enjoying hanging out with her, is memory. She says, do you remember our neighbors in Brunswick? And I say, the Kowalskis, on the right. There were a bunch of boys, and Linda. We went to Linda's wedding, years later. No, the other side, she says, and she names them, the family on the left, and the family past them, and the family past them, and the children in each of those houses: Nina, Polly, Christina, big girls, all of them, Gini's age or older. Past that last family, there was a swamp, a real swamp, and we weren't allowed to go there, but we did any way. In the other direction -- two or three families past the Kowalskis -- was Gini's piano teacher, Mrs. Gardner (all grownups were named Mrs. and Mr. in the fifties). We could get to the Gardners' house by going through backyards, which was important, because we weren't allowed to walk on the street by ourselves and there wasn't a sidewalk. We especially weren't allowed to cross the street without grownups, so it was good that there was so much to explore in our block. Not being allowed to cross the street wasn't a hardship; in my memory, there were no houses across the street then. I'll have to ask Gini if there were houses across the street in her memory.

Tomorrow, I have to pass my sister on to her son and his family, who live north of here. She has grandsons to visit and admire, and fine grandsons they are, too. Tonight, we touched back to our youth; we went to a country her son cannot imagine and certainly cannot visit. I don't want to live in that country, but it's good to be able to visit it from time to time.

08:50 am: Handmade memery
Following the example of akirlu, who was in turn inspired by scarlettina:

I will do my best to make something handmade for the first five people who comment to this post. They are encouraged in turn to post this same message and make something by hand for the first five people who comment on their respective posts. The rules are it has to be handmade by you and they must receive it before 2012 ends...who's in with me?

I note that my hands work in fabric, paper, beads, wire, glue, words, food, plants, and procrastination. We can come up with a suitable medium for the project together, but whatever it is has to be limited enough in scope that I'll actually do it.

08:12 am: Mens sana in corpore sano
If personhood begins at conception, does a corporation become a person when the first idea is scrawled on the cocktail napkin?

06:47 pm: Alas, alack, also damn
If one has a computerized sewing machine, even a very old computerized sewing machine, and something goes wrong with it, one cannot diagnose the problem oneself. One will have to wait until Monday at 9:30 am.

One had a number of things all pinned together and ready to sew.

Dagnabit.