The Inside Story

Rubio's helps turn salsa into award-winning fiction!
Right now I'm sitting in a departure lounge at Atlanta International Airport. In about an hour I'll be getting my connecting flight back to the UK. Halfway home: this seems a pretty good time to try and get down some thoughts about WOTF XXIII.

My mood is intensely bittersweet, probably erring on the bitter side right now . . . I always hate endings and this one was particularly sad. Partly because it was four in the morning when I had to leave the Sheraton Hotel -- I was knackered from not sleeping, nobody was around except Grand Prize Winner Stephen Kotowych, and I found it hard to party the night before we all went our seperate ways. On the drive to LAX with Randall, one of the Illustrator winners, I think I fell asleep mid-conversation with our driver . . .

Anyway, WOTF was amazing. Even if Charles Brown, editor of Locus, had told us repeatedly that only one or two of us were going to make it (whatever that means), that couldn't shake the world domination vibe that coursed through the class all week. If Charles' words are true then the odds for most the group are already worse because human whirlwind, Jeff Carlson, has got a book on the stands right now. Check out Plague Year, a near-future SF apocalypse tale.

Hanging with, da da da, "The Illustrators of the Future"
The workshop was held at the place where we were staying: the Sheraton Hotel, Pasadena. It's a long four-storey building with a nice pool, bar, and restaurant. Virgin Atlantic use it to house their crews, but as well as stewards and stewardesses (who I note are among the less photographically-challenged of the workforce who serve the skies), the building next door was hosting Miss Teen USA throughout the week. The combination of these forces made for a very attractive cast of guest -- and helped us geeks stand-out even more. In a weird aside, when one of the Virgin stewardesses (who happened to be a fiction writer) heard about the workshop she was dead keen to meet us. Andrea, being a canny matchmaker type, immediately suggested myself as a point-of-contact, and a little later I met Sonal in the hotel bar. She might join my writing circle, Montpelier Writers, later in the year.

Nerds meet geeks at JPL
On Sunday we got introduced to the core instructors, Tim Powers and K.D. Wentworth. Tim is a man with charisma in spades. A custom-tailored jacket allows him to carry up to a dozen cans of coke at any one time, and so long as the caffeine in his system doesn't fall below a critical point he is a wonderful speaker. He'll strut around like a Shakesperian actor -- without the ego -- offering gorgeous morsels of wisdom, before self-deprecatingly telling you that he actually did the opposite. "Good is bad" was one of the many gems that parted from his lips and made me really think about writing. Kathy is less performance driven when she speaks, but no less a teacher for it. Her list of first line bloopers was particularly memorable, and included the line: X. Through Monday they covered the fundamentals of writing, including their thoughts on setting, character, plot, and dialogue. This was probably more reinforcing existing knowledge for most the class, but I did pick-up some new advice, such as ways of making speech more naturalistic with interruptions and tangential streams.

KD and Tim. Like Mastermind with no wrong answers.
Speaking of the class, I'll just give a brief run-through of their names, and my personal assessment of their chances of success . . . only kidding. I'll keep the latter bit in my head (it's all part of the act-like-a-professional drive). So, in the order the class was twin-seated in the octagonal workshop room, we have: Tony Pi and Steve Kotowych (keep the Canadians together so Americans don't get any ideas about nationalised health services etc, I guess). Tony is a linguist from Toronto, and Steve is a man you might want around when you need a large piece of Lucite (see later). At the desk behind them sat John Burridge and Doug Texter. John is a writer from THAT group, you know, the group that can't help placing in the anthology every year, and has a penchant for singing. Doug works for a Eng. Lit. Dept. He's a classic writer guy -- unbuttoned shirts over vests, sandals, a voice thick as molasses-- except for the fact he writes spec-fic -- which he deservedly gets crucified for. Thanks for taking some of the flak, Doug. Behind them sat Ed Sevic and Damon Kaswell. Ed is a bit like Frankenstein without the bolts, green skin, and anger-management issues. His voice carries some major authority, which probably helps him get-by in Israel where he currently resides. Damon is a recent father, so he handled the sleep-deprivation issues of the workshop well.

Tim Powers tells Damon Kaswell that coca-cola is the secret handshake.
That's the left-hand side of the room done. Then, across from Damon and Ed, you get to Aliette and I, the Euro contingent. I'm great, obviously, and Aliette is a little bit greater than that on account of her Vietnamese ancestry (which trumps my Sri Lankan blood). Ahead of us were placed Joe Jordan and Andrea Kail. Joe is an amazingly gentle man for someone who works in war zones, and contrary to some rumours, doesn't snore in his sleep. Andrea works for the Conan O'Brien Show and is hard-as nails NY lady. Watching a fight almost break out in front of the JPL reception building over which coast was best convinced me never ever to cross her. Kim Zimring and some chump named Jeff Carlson had the final two places. Kim, being an MD was very useful in reviving near-dead early drafts, and I'm sure Jeff will one day rule the world. When the day comes, just remember who helped you get there, Jeff!

Charles Brown tells Aliette and I to give it up.
The week was too packed full of events to do justice to here, but -- and this is really for the benefit of the other participants -- I'll now pass around some reverie gum. Chew on these: Bob the Thai waiter who was a living lesson in overexplanation; Steve K doing good work for Steve-Kind until on the last night when he asked Andrea for the time and got much more than that back; the curious aroma of sewage that wafted through Pasadena; living on tacos; the unveiling of the artist's illustrations; the dos and don'ts of approaching editors with material e.g. don't slide your manuscript under a toilet cubicle door; searching for water after coming out of the Mars Explorer Environment Simulation at JPL; seeing mint condition pulps -- practically all written by Hubbard either in his own name or under a pen name.

A pair of althletes, or the hands of a giant mechanical beast?!
One thing I do have to write about here is the twenty-four hour writing excercise. It is common knowledge (as common as knowledge can be in the oxygen-deprived heights of spec-fic) that during the workshop the writers must produce a complete story in 24 hours. What's not so well known is how powerful this excercise can be for a slow-writer. In terms of my career, I have the feeling those twenty-four hours will be the most important in my life -- unless I do something really dumb like this.

Even writers look cool in the infra-red
The seeds of the story come from a random object that KD gives the writer, and a chat with a complete stranger. I got colorful star-shaped salt-shaker, and winded up shooting the breeze with a guy who had the word "Security" emblazoned on the back of his T-Shirt (making my opening gambit the fairly easy: what are you securing?"). Anyway, I don't want to dwell on his life-story, suffice to say he'd been through a lot as a penetentiary guard and then police officer. The biggest inspiration came from a line he gave me when talking about the US government: "You gotta feed the monster," he said. It took a while for the different elements to gel, but when they did they story just came like that - BAM! I wrote for approx. twelve hours non-stop, only breaking for the bathroom and lunch, and I feel I got something good down. That's a new approach for me. I'm workshopping the piece with my writing group in a couple of weeks, so I'll see what they say.

Right, I'm going to write a seperate post for the Awards event later. That's all.

Then we all just disappeared . . . hopefully not career-wise!