06/23/00 -- Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream!

No, not that dream!  Any dream, but that one!

Well, I had my first Clarion wish-fulfillment dream last night.  Or maybe it was a nightmare, I'm not quite certain.  Anyway, in this dream, I'm still at Clarion and I've sent off two stories: one to Magazine of F&SF, one to Asimov's.  And I get an e-mail that seems to be an acceptance.  Only I can't remember which story I sent to which magazine so I don't know which one has been accepted.  In my head, while I'm dreaming, I'm going through all of the stories I've finished so far and trying to figure out which one I'd've sent to Asimov's before I ever gave it a chance at F&SF.  Oh, and the other weird thing... Asimov's got back to me before F&SF did.  Weird.

I don't know if it was before or after that, but I had another Clarion-induced dream last night, too.  People's stories are working their way into my dreams.  And comments that people have made... comments either about other people's stories during critique, or jokingly about any (sometimes every!) story, and other catch-phrases we've started using ...  I'd tell you all about this one, but, in truth, I think it would only make sense to my fellow Clarionettes from this year.  But there weren't any maracas.  Of that one thing, I'm truly grateful.

So I think I also got my first crank phone call this morning, too.  I'm not sure whether I should be disturbed or not.  Very soft voice on the other end.  Almost impossible to hear and understand.  I thought, at first, it was one of my fellow Clarionettes, but it wasn't ... at least, I'm pretty sure it wasn't.  In a way, it was like something out of a bad horror movie.  Clarion is weird enough without feeling like I'm in a bad horror flick.  I guess I'll worry about it if it happens again ... or if I come back to my room and everything in it is gone.  Ugh, not something I want to think about at all.

Okay, so it turns out I wasn't the only one to talk to Mr. Whispering.  But it did remind me, as a couple of us who did hear from him were talking, of a story I saw in the Blowfish catalogue years ago and that's up on their (not even remotely recently updated) fiction mag website.  It's called "Three Obscene Phone Calls" ... If you're offended by smut, you may not want to look, but I think it's funny as hell and not all that offensive.  Of course, it takes a lot to offend me.

Meanwhile, on to the critique session.  And then a group picture afterwards! :)

And then to lunch.  Karen, Jennifer, Linda and I made our way to the mall ... in search of something gift-like for instructor-types.  Lunch at Ruby Tuesday's in the Meridian Mall and then we were in search of said gift-like thing.  We made a decision and were swift to purchase.  Then we wandered for about an hour and a half while we waited for the finishing touches.

I was bad.  I found the Storm action figure for the X-men movie.  Jennifer is as bad as I am about being an evil influence when people are shopping.  Storm came home with me.  And three more tank-tops from Lane Bryant.  Jennifer and I killed the last ten minutes of our hour-and-a-half wait by free-writing over by the Gloria Jean's coffee place ... where the AC was working on overtime.  Yes, it was cold.  But I think I have an idea for a story after I write my first person slutkatkitty story.

Back on campus, I wound up wandering down to the cafeteria with a handful of folks and eating Salt&Vinegar potato chips for dinner while everyone else ate real food.  I was still full from lunch, but decided I still needed to unwind from two weeks of insanity.  There was talk of South Park, taste, the responsibility of artists, and censorship.  It was all very interesting and I'm not sure any conclusion was really reached and we stopped to talk about how nice it was to have weather before things got too out of hand with the rest of everything.

I was on a mission from, er, uhhh, well, I guess the Hallmark store or something, after I went back up to my room.  My mission: get the Thank You card for Sean signed.

Then down to Van Hoosen.  I caught the end of the South Park movie, then we all wandered into the other room to play Mafia.  We defiled the critique room with the game.  It was fun.  Not the Mafia I'm used to playing (with 'families' who try and kill off other families), but it was great.  I'm hoping we can get another group together later to play it again.  Basically, you have a huge group of folks (dunno what the minimum number of people is, but Gavin suggests no more than, like 19 ... or things get out of hand) and some of the are mafia and others are villagers.  And people keep dying.  Mafia kill villagers and then the whole group decides to kill people in an attempt to kill off the mafia.  It's just rad.

And I got drunk.  I mean, not ravingly drunk, but drunk enough.  I had two bottles of Guinness.  Lovely stuff.  More than I've had to drink at one time in a while.  But it tasted so good...

Sean eventually popped in, too, after he finished with all of his conferences.  He's pretty good at it!  Great at being mafia, even though he's only done it once (or so he says!).

I'm really bummed that he's leaving tomorrow.  He's been great.  We gave him his present and his thank you card (I drew a spider and a butterfly with diamonds on its wings -- shades of Resurrection Man  -- or at least as close as I could get on short notice with my doodles) then we randomly chatted for a little while longer.

Still tipsy, I decided to haul my tail up to the dorm when Karen took off... I'm going to go crawl into bed soon so I can get up for a 9am breakfast at IHOP tomorrow morning. :)  One last group hurrah (however many of us can get up, that is!) with Sean before he gets on a plane to go home.

We don't have any critique session tomorrow.  Or anything else planned.  It's going to be really weird to have a whole day to ourselves.  I'm not sure I'm going to know what to do.  Going to write the Nate story, though (I've been thinking how I can do it, all things considered, and think I have a pretty good idea.  I know which of my worlds I'm going to set it in to make things easy-er.).  Talked about it at dinner so I have to.  With any luck, I can get it done tomorrow and then work on critiques (and getting caught up on some of the stuff that we won't get to on Monday, or, potentially the rest of the week).  And maybe work on "The Shape of Things to Come", the story idea that bubbled up during the free-write.

Anyway.. bedtime for me.  It's a little early (like, before 2am!), but the alarm's still gonna go off at 7:30 so I can write a bit before going off to breakfast.