I attended Clarion, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, in 2001. I kept an on-line journal that year (that page has links to all the entries).  The journal begins about the time I sent in my application. The first day at Clarion was June 3, 2001.

See my Clarion at home page for my thoughts on how you can learn the core fiction-writing skills you’d learn at Clarion, even if you can’t go.

In additional to my stories, my experiences at Clarion also led me to write a few bits of related non-fiction:

• “Story Structure in Short Stories” is an article I wrote for Speculations.  It talks about various models for story structure and how those models apply to short stories in particular.  It appeared in the February, 2002 issue.
• “How I learned at Clarion” is a small piece that talks not about what I learned but about how I learned it—and compares what I expected would be the most useful parts of the experience to what actually turned out to teach me the most.
• “Where you won’t get critiques and how not to use them” is a short rant that I dashed off when I should have been writing fiction but was annoyed over some particularly foolish complaints about rejection letters that I happened to read that day.
• “Clarion Expenses” is a brief description of what Clarion cost me, offered in the hopes that the information would help other people trying to figure out whether they can afford to go.
• “T-shirt quotes (runners-up)” is a list of the candidate quotes for the back of our class t-shirt that didn’t win.  (Find one of us at a con or something to see the winning quotes.)

Over the few years before I attended, it had become common to put Clarion journals on-line and those Clarion journals had been important to me; it seemed only right that I should keep one myself.  Writing the journal turned out to be so much fun, I continued Philip Brewer’s writing progress through mid-2005.