WEP '12, Day 44 - The Clarion Call

I'm going to try some self-social engineering.  The idea here is to try and force myself to do something through perceived peer pressure.  It has more or less worked with this blog.  Excepting last weekend's burp due to illness, I've gone forty four days in a row posting here.  The fact that I know that there are something on the order of six to ten people who read this everyday is what gets me to write here day in and day out.  Granted, not everything that's written on the blog is good per say, some of it is pretty pro forma, especially the posts that pop out at two in the morning when I'm dog tired.  Last night's Chicago Bulls post, I'm looking at you.  Nevertheless, forty four posts in forty four days ain't a bad start.

There's this thing called the Clarion West Writer's Workshop.  It's a six week writer's boot camp, with each week taught by a different established author in the science fiction and fantasy genres.  One of said instructors is George R.R. Martin of Game of Thrones fame.  So if I can manage to attend that, it'll be a pretty big deal.  The first step is applying, and said application requires 4,000 to 7,500 words of genre fiction by midnight of March 1st.  Well, technically, it's twenty to thirty pages of manuscript which boils down to around that number of words, but you get the idea.  I'm not satisfied by anything I've got on hand, though,   So I'm going to try writing a new short story over the next two weeks for my application.

What does that mean to you, loyal reader?  Well here's the plan.  I'm going to be writing my story in a Google Doc.  I'll grant access to the Doc to anyone who contacts me and provides the email address they want to use for access purposes.  Use whatever contact method you're comfortable with, be it email (jng2058 at yahoo.com), Twitter, Facebook, or Google+.   Hell, you could even leave a comment here, if that's your pleasure.  I'm not configured for carrier pigeons, though.

I'm not going to put the story up on the blog.  That counts as "publishing" it, and if the thing's any good, I may try to make some money off it.  Granting limited access to some readers/editors is just fine, though.

If you have comments on the story, feel free to leave them here, or in the comments of future Clarion Call posts that I may put up.  And I shouldn't have to say, but will for formality's sake, don't edit the Google Doc itself please!

So that's the idea.  If even only a couple of you read the story as it goes up, that should encourage me to keep writing the damn thing, painful as it may be to have my writing process out on display.  but I'd really like to have those six weeks in Seattle, and this is the first step towards that goal.

Let's see how it goes!