This is for my compatriots from Marvin's Blue Heaven breakfast table:

I finally made it back home yesterday to my lovely wife and fuzzy dog after eight days away at the Blue Heaven workshop. I'm delighted to be home but nostalgic for the workshop. It was an extraordinarily helpful, intense, and fun week, maybe even moreso than last year. I don't want to be a namedropper, so I'm not going list all the terrific skiffy writers who attended. Suffice it to say that the week was professionally and personally rewarding, filled with learning, insight, humor, collegiality, friendship, food, beer, free Stormclouds, animal heads, turkey vultures, TNT explosions, Totally Outrageous Behavior, quips that can never be repeated without someone choking almost to death, and Old Gregg. My novel Silvertide was critiqued by two sharp readers who restored my confidence in it, and I hope I served as useful a function to the three embarrassingly talented scribes whose novels I critiqued in full (or nearly so).

Too many good times to recount them all, or even to pick a handful. I leave you with my entry in the Blue Heaven 2007 Raunchy Limerick Challenge, posed by a fellow workshopper who shall remain nameless, for reasons that will remain unstated. The challenge was to compose a limerick employing the words pump, rump, and Cockney.

( Down at the Village Pump )

Greetings from Kelleys Island, Ohio. I've been here since Sunday with the Blue Heaven writing workshop, and though I've had plenty of opportunities to report, I have somehow found other things to do instead.

But now that we have something of a lull, and no alcoholic beverages at hand to distract ourselves with, I will mention some excitement from this morning's critique session. (And no, I'm not talking about the deer that wandered past.) So we're sitting on the patio behind a bed and breakfast in the woods not far from a giant limestone quarry. At about 11:45 two long siren blasts came from the direction of the quarry. There was idle speculation that this was a warning preceding an explosion.

Sure enough, a few minutes later the ground rumbled beneath us with a deep whump! That was exciting enough, with our ribs vibrating, but a second or two later followed the sound of an immense explosion that was loud enough to make everyone jump in their seats a little. It was so loud I expected to see a debris cloud lift over the trees, or rock fragments to come sailing toward us, but nothing of the sort happened.

Gee, that was kind of a boring explosion.

Is it possible to be nostalgic for something that only happened a week ago? Laura and I were sitting out back in the dusk last night, me with a beer, she with a cigarette, the dog with a chew toy, and I was telling her about how if I felt this way after only a week at Blue Heaven, I must have been a complete mess at 17 coming home from six weeks at Clarion.

( Fetch that rock! Fling that snake! )

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Some other Blue Heaven 2006 roundups:

• Chance's report from the field
  
• What Charlie did last week
  
• Blued with Greg
  
• Paul on snake wrangling
  
• When Tim is blue

Though I've been involved with local writers' group on and off in the time since, I hadn't attended a formal away-from-home writing workshop for nearly 21 years—well over half a lifetime, and all of my professional writing career. So it was with excitement and some trepidation early this year that I accepted Charles Coleman Finlay's invitation to attend Blue Heaven 2006 on Kelleys Island, off the Ohio shore of Lake Erie.

Excitement because this would be a peer workshop focusing on SF and fantasy novels, and I was having definite trouble transitioning from short fiction to longer work. And also because I'd be hanging out with some first-rate writers and rising stars.

Trepidation because, for all that I sometimes get worked up online and probably don't come across as bashful, I'm fairly reserved in person and don't usually say much in a new group until I'm comfortable, if then. And also because I'd be hanging out with some first-rate writers and rising stars.

( Into Himmelblau House )

Of course, there was more to Blue Heaven than just work. I doubt the group's yin would have functioned as well as it did without the yang of the camaraderie we found outside the workshop sessions. But I've gone on long enough for now, and for that I'll have to make another post later.

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Brenda Cooper posts a group picture here. Left to right:
Back row: William Shunn, Paul Melko, Tobias S. Buckell, Greg van Eekhout, Tim Pratt
Second row: Sandra McDonald, Mary Turzillo, Brenda Cooper, Catherine M. Morrison, Sarah Prineas
Front: Charles Coleman Finlay
Far Right Background: Sela the Amazing Rock-Fetching Canine

Came home last night to a happy dog and an even happier wife. And I couldn't have been happier to see them.

But quite a comedown to return to work—and be plunged into a manufactured crisis—after a week-plus at the Blue Heaven workshop. No time to post about the week's experiences yet, except to say that it was an amazing week filled with great people, and that the help I received on my novel was and will be absolutely invaluable. You may or may not glean more tantalizing details from ccfinlay, secritcrush, sallytuppence, Paul, Greg, Tim, Brenda, and Toby.

And you may or may not be tantalized by Secritcrush's Blue Heaven photo album!

Oh, and here and here, if you read down the yellow columns on the left, you can see what happens when writers with too much beer and wi-fi edit one another's Wikipedia entries.

Thanks, everyone, for a great week!

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P.S.  Does anyone speak Swedish?

It's WING NIGHT at the Village Pump, sort of a happy hour for chicken wings, 4 to 6. I could get used to this kind of living. Beer, wings, and internet.

Oh, yeah. And the critiquing of novels is very good, helpful, and educational.

But boy. Beer, wings, and internet. Yeah.

I'm enjoying the week greatly here at Blue Heaven, on beautiful Kelleys Island off the Ohio shore of Lake Erie. It's raining like a mother, and will for the rest of the week, but I'm still having a wonderful time and learning a lot.

There are two places and two places only to get free wi-fi on the island: the public library, and a local bar called The Village Pump. Guess which one I'm sitting in right now with Paul Melko, Greg van Eekhout, and Tim Pratt?

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Hint: we're drinking beer.

So tomorrow afternoon I fly out to Ohio for eight days of novel-critiquin' good times. This space will likely be pretty silent in the meantime. Looking forward to it, ccfinlay! (And all you other Blue Heaveners out there.)

The cursor is on page 201.

So, as a requirement of the workshop I'm attending in May, I must turn in 200 pages of a novel on March 15th. That's Wednesday. I have 45 pages still to go. I did 35 total last weekend, but that was a four-day weekend where I took Monday and Tuesday off from work. I did 13 yesterday. I have to maintain close to that pace every day through Wednesday to make it. Will I make that same total today? Certainly not if I don't stop fucking around on LiveJournal!

I am, by the way, writing a novel. I have 82 pages plus an outline but that needs to swell to at least 200 by March 15, when that much is due to the invitational novel workshop I'll be attending in May. Which of course is why I'm putzing around on LJ.

Anyway, I'm growing a beard and not shaving it off until the first draft is complete. Don't worry! That doesn't mean I won't keep it trimmed! ZZ Top look cool, but I won't be ready for a beard like that until I'm in my sixties.