I am leaving this Saturday for the Clarion Writers’ Workshop! I can’t wait to meet (in person!) my co-Clarionites — Stacie Brown, John Chu, William Farrar, Erin Gonzales, Jessica Hilt, Jennifer Hsyu, Adam Israel, Dustin Monk, Tamsyn Muir, Laura Praytor, L.M. Redding, Dallas Taylor, Leah Thomas, Karin Tidbeck, Tom Underberg, Kali Wallace, Kai Ashante Wilson — and the instructors: Delia Sherman, George RR Martin, Dale Bailey, Samuel R. Delany, Jeff Vandermeer, and Ann Vandermeer!

My novelette Slow Boat is in the August 2010 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, in stores now!  Read an excerpt on their site here. And more about the story here.

Now here’s one of those crazy far-out unlikely tales of Science Fiction: l am proud and excited and somewhat baffled to announce that I will be attending the Clarion 2010 Writer’s Workshop!

A friend in the film business was alarmed by my about the future… page.  “Aren’t you worried someone will steal your ideas?”

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It is commonplace advice for writers to “write what you know”.  I disagree.

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All fiction is speculative fiction.

And all writing is fiction.

Check out my cousin Bonnie Norman’s blog “A Working Title”.  It’s filled with insightful interviews of Science Fiction and Fantasy authors, reviews, and other good stuff.  Be prepared to spend some time reading!

My short story Freia in the Sunlight has sold to Asimov’s Science Fiction!  Many many thanks to Sheila Williams, the Editor at Asimov’s, who asks tricky questions and expects good answers.

See below for more on the story.  I’ll post about issue dates and such as soon as I know myself!

If there’s one thing I hope and strive for in my writing, it’s clarity.  Writing clear, concise, precise prose is always challenging, and all the more so in Science Fiction and Fantasy.

That’s because the goal (well, one goal) of fantastic fiction is to describe the new, surprising, extraordinary, the wondrous.  And it’s easy, even tempting, to be oblique, obscure, vague in these descriptions, to use the literary equivalents of murky, billowing smoke and ominous shadows.  It’s a superlative, a compliment, to say “Wow, that’s too fantastic for words.”

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This is my sixth story.  At 4200 words, it’s my shortest yet, and my third official “short story”.   (The SFWA definition is under 7500 words…)  I’d been batting the idea for this one around for a week or two, but I needed a second short story for my Clarion application, so I headed to the café and wrote it down in two long sessions.

The story starts:

Freia is beautiful, and she knows it.  Richard Wooten says so, at 0:47.

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