Eugene Fischer

Category: Writing

Medicating, Sleeping, and Writing

Crohn’s patients, I have come to learn, frequently experience what are known as “flare ups”:  sudden spikes in the severity of their symptoms, often requiring agressive medicinal intervention to combat.  I had a flare up yesterday, and it had me–during my more lucid moments–reflecting again that “flare up” is a far less evocative phrase for the experience than I think it deserves.  I would prefer something like “perpetual stomach stomp,” or, perhaps, “gutsplosion.”  (How great a world would this be if students across the nation had to do PubMed database searches for gutsplosion references to write their papers?)

Anyway.  I spent nearly all of yesterday in a drug induced stupor, sleeping when I could and downing pain meds and reading when I couldn’t.  After about 20 hours of this things began to improve slightly, and I decided to get out my computer and see if it would be possible to get any work done.  Despite the end of the month deadline, working on the story I’m writing for the Genomics Forum competition, for which I am still figuring out the characters, seemed too hard.  So I opened up the file for another story I’ve been arduously revising for the past month.

Words started falling out of me like grains from a split sack of rice.

I have no explanation for this.  Up until yesterday, revising this story had been like pulling teeth.  But last night I could suddenly see through the haze of the story as I had written it once clearly through to the end of the story as it should be written.  I think I will be able to finish the revision today.

No deep thoughts here.  Other than perhaps that it is surprising how far ending on a bright note can go toward changing one’s perceptions of a miserable experience.

No Time for Blogging

My full rant about how terrible the last episode of Battlestar Galactica was (including the stupid implications of Hera being mitochondrial Eve) will have to wait, as I am out working on my short story for the Genomics Forum competition (and again posting from my phone). In the meantime, I agree with pretty much all of the points raised by the Battlestar Round Table at tor.com.

Clarion Teachers Everywhere

Last night Neil Gaiman was on The Colbert Report discussing The Graveyard Book:


The Colbert ReportMon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Neil Gaiman

And tonight on the BBC World Service, Geoff Ryman was brought on to discuss the propriety of the United Nations holding a panel discussion about Battlestar Galactica.  I haven’t been able to find a link to that segment, but my favorite part was the host asking, essentially, “might it not be considered irresponsible for the UN to look to a work of fiction for insight into real world events?” and Geoff answering, “Well, that depends on if you think of fiction as a lie or you think of fiction as a way of telling the truth.”

Paul M. Berger in INTERZONE

I urge you to find a way to get your hands on the current issue of Interzone, which contains the story “Home Again,” by Paul M. Berger.  Paul was my Clarion classmate and roomie, and I got to read the first draft of this story at the workshop.  I don’t actually know of anyplace in San Antonio that sells Interzone, but I’m going to have to track down a copy, because this story was a creepy little gem even at its earliest, and I must have it in a form that I can thrust in the faces of others.

On Target

I’m currently revising one of the stories I workshopped at Clarion.  Kelly Link told me that she thought it was largely successful, but that I used too much summary, and that the way to revise it was to expand it by about 2000 words.  Well, as of yesterday I’m about 3/4 done with the revision, and I just passed the total wordcount of the previous draft.  Even better, I feel excited about the new material, and the streamlining of the various emotional entanglements.  Basically, after not doing any of this stuff since last summer, I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of it again.  Good times.

Zelazny’s Toothache

In Roger Zelazny’s Hugo award winning story “Home is the Hangman” there is a line that, in one sentence, captures what has been the primary theme of my life for the last seven months as I have been scrabbling my way out of the pit of Crohn’s disease.  “Even the most heartening of philosophical vistas is no match for, say, a toothache, if it happens to be your own.”

I don’t know if everyone’s brain works this way; I can imagine raging against discomforting and unavoidable distractions of the senses in a way that drives productivity rather than retarding it.  But that isn’t what happens for me.  I am subject to Zelazny’s Toothache.  Today the weather in San Antonio could not be more pleasant, and I awoke with an energy and eagerness for my various writing projects that usually prefigures a satisfyingly productive day, one of the days where, instead of fighting for every word, the top of my head will unfold like the fronds of an anemone and easily pluck images from the currents of my fictional world.  But then, with no warning (and there is never any warning, or any observable pattern), I feel the fist begin to tighten deep in my abdomen and the tendrils of productivity slam back inside my skull.  My entire focus shifts to my physical being, and I head home and crawl into bed and take pills and seek out escapism and do anything else to further the one truly important goal:  finding a vector of comfort to cling to.

But if I can’t force my focus onto the areas in which I want to be productive, I can at least experiment with being productive about the things on which I’m focused.  Which is the point of this particular post.  Just keeping my fingers moving on the keyboard as I wait for the storm to pass.

I suspect I will be writing more about Crohn’s in the future–hopefully with a far more retrospective slant.  For now, here’s a link to a comic about Crohn’s disease that Tom Humberstone did for 24-hour Comic Day in 2007.  His experience is different in some ways to mine, but page 19 is dead-on.

A Message to the Applicants for Clarion 2009

And you should be finished with your Clarion and/or Clarion West workshop application right about…now.

Well, actually you probably should have finished and uploaded your application a while ago, giving yourself a comfortable cushion of time to correct any problems that might arise with the process.  But that isn’t what I did.  Around this time a year ago I was furiously pounding out the first science fiction story I had written in years, and it was taking twice as long as I had expected it to, and I couldn’t stop for anything, not even my dog dying, and I finally finished the damn thing and filled out the online forms and uploaded the documents in the middle of the night at my girlfriend’s apartment, eyes barely able to focus on my laptop screen, girlfriend trying to sleep through my typing ten feet behind me.  I got my application in with minutes to spare.

Then, for better or worse, it was done.  And I was proud of myself.  Whether I got accepted or not, I had identified going to Clarion as something that I would value, and I got over any fears I harbored of critique and rejection.  I had never seriously submitted for publication before, so it was my first time sending my fiction out to strangers to be judged.  That wasn’t a small thing for me, and I suspect it isn’t a small thing for many of you.  For a hundred different reasons, just applying can be hard.  So, now that the deadline for this year has passed, allow me to say to all the new applicants: well done!  I’m proud of you.

Now what?

Well, again, if you do as I did, you should be reading this blog post right about…now.  Because after I submitted my application I spent the next several weeks scouring the internet for other applicants.  I searched blogs and fora for any recent mention of Clarion.  (For the equally obsessive, I recommend Google Blog Search, Icerocket, and any forum dedicated to genre fiction in general or fans of a specific instructor or their work.)  I filled a folder with bookmarks to the blogs of everyone I could find who was in the same boat as me, starting the same waiting game.  And it seems possible that others may be doing the same thing now and stumbling upon this place.  So:  If you are reading this and you just applied to one of the workshops (1) congrats on getting it done and (2) leave a comment, let me know who you are.

And good luck!

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