Borderlands Press Done Kicked It Off
Fri 2006-08-04 20:15:27 (in context)
- 5,000 words (if poetry, lines) long
Well, I'm here. I'm sitting at a desk in an apartment in a family dormatory building on Towson University campus in the state of Maryland. If that isn't enough prepositional phrases for you, you can add "after the big Borderlands Press Writers' Boot Camp kick-off." And now I am about to drop.
I mean, it's not that they've begun to work our asses off yet. It's that I got very little sleep last night, which has been a theme all through my second week in New Orleans, when all of a sudden I had the time, energy, and unmitigated panic with which to address my fast approaching deadlines...
and I'm flying American Airlines, who have to make every freakin' flight go through the huge pain in my ass that is the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, regardless of actual geography...
and the Baltimore airport is strewn with detours so that I gotta walk half a mile in one direction to get my luggage and half a mile in the other direction to get on the Super Shuttle...
and every Sheraton desk clerk within phoning distance has to put me on hold for five minutes before they can take the fifteen seconds to give me the next phone number...
and I have with me a collection of very high quality full-leaf, muslin-bagged tea and no implement suitable for boiling water in. Not ideal!
Tomorrow, presumably after I get a good night's sleep, my ass will be entirely worked off. Instructors/authors Doug Clegg, F. Paul Wilson, Tom Tessier, and Tom Monteleone spent much of tonight's kick-off meeting telling us, in the general, why all our stories pretty much sucked. I expect tomorrow in our small-group 1-instructor 2-hour sessions they will tell each of us about the suckage in the excrutiating specific. Fellow workshop members have been telling me that they liked my story very much, which makes me glow and gives me warm fuzzies, but in no way tempts me to think that I'll be exempt from having my story get ripped to utter shreds by the professionals.
It's a good thing. Whatever's left after the shredding will be the kernel of what "Putting Down Roots" really wants to be. And that's why I'm here.