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News: Offering an Online Workshop

Photo of a black cat named Raven
Bonus: The virtual classroom may include sundry visits from Raven, who likes to know what's going on at all times.
Several people have been asking if I’d offer an online workshop and I’ve been thinking about how best to do that. So here goes. Please spread the word of this however you can. If I don’t get at least 3 students for a workshop, I’ll cancel it.

Dates:
Workshop 1 — Wednesday evenings, 8 pm-10 pm PST, December 14, 2011-January 18, 2012
Workshop 2 — Saturday mornings 9:30 AM-11:30 AM PST, December 17-January 28, 2012 (I have to miss the 21st due to a convention).

Format: I’m going to offer two sessions, one on a weekday evening and the other on Saturday mornings, because I know schedules vary. The class will run six weeks, with a two hour session each time. I would like to schedule workshop time into that, where you’ll get a chance to read and critique each other’s stories, as well as a chance to hear me critique them, so starting with the second session, part of the class will be devoted to that (no more than 50%, tops). I’ll be doing the class as a Google Hangout, so we’ll all be chatting face to face, which means there is a limit of 9 students per class. There will be an optional make-up session for both workshops for people who had to miss a class or two along the line the week after the class ends.

Focus: The focus is the short story – how to come up with an idea, how to write it, how to revise, and how to submit it. There will be weekly writing exercises and optional reading. The final class will include career stuff, market advice, and a few funny anecdotes.

Why take a class with me? As both a writer and editor, I bring a focus that lets me advise you from both sides of the desk. My experience as the fiction editor of award-winning Fantasy Magazine as well as short story collections and anthologies combined with the fact that I’m a working, selling writer helps me provide you with solid, up-to-date market advice for both online and print publishing. My teaching experience includes the Johns Hopkins University, Towson State University, and Bellevue College and I’ve studied with John Barth, Stephen Dixon, Octavia Butler, and Connie Willis, to name just a couple of people I’ve had the pleasure of learning from. Former students can testify that I’m an active, engaged, and entertaining instructor who gives careful and considered feedback on their work.

Value adds: As part of the class, I will be happy to critique an extra story (up to 10k words) afterwards and offer market advice. The offer expires after a year.

Cost: Well, it’s an experiment, so I’m basing this off comparable workshops I teach. I am charging $199 per person, but will make it $149 if you sign up before midnight PST November 30. I do take Paypal; contact me at spezzatura AT gmail.com and we can work out details. If you can’t afford it and have some interesting barter to propose, let me know at the same address.

What if those times don’t work for you? Drop me a line. We can try to work something out.

Other questions? Drop me a line in the comments.

31 Responses

  1. I’d love to take a workshop with you, but there are so many conflicts and travel and demands over the holidays that it’s a challenge just to get my daily word count done. Any chance you might be offering something like this again in the spring?

    Reply

    1. If this ends up being successful (by which I mean it runs smoothly and allows me to pay bills and fund the next couple of cons), absolutely! So pass it along to all and sundry. 😉

      Reply

  2. I think you can count me as signed up for the Saturday session. I’ll drop you a message. I am excited!

    Which 21st are you missing – the December one or the January one?

    Reply

  3. I am interested in the Wed evening workshop, even though it skirts my bedtime. Now if you’d offered it from, say, 5 in the morning . . . Ah, well, never mind. Let me know how to pay you through PayPal.

    Reply

    1. At 5 in the morning, I fear all I could do is stare blankly at the screen in a most uninformative manner. Paypal to spezzatura AT gmail.com is swell. Thanks!

      Reply

  4. I was able to sit in on a reading of yours at the WFC this year. I would love to take the Wednesday class, but the time zone shift makes that a 10-12 midnight course for me, and I’ve got to be able to drive to work every Thursday morning. Please give me a nudge if the class times shift to an earlier period 🙂

    Reply

    1. Absolutely, Rosalind! I’m going to tinker with the times next time I offer the class. Living on the West Coast makes evenings a little goofy time-wise.

      Reply

  5. Do you still have room for the Wednesday night 8 – 10 class? If so, let me know I’m in. You already have taught me a lot just from reading your blog posts and I think this would be awesome.

    Reply

  7. Another East Coaster struggling with the time change. I’ll keep watching to see if it gets any earlier. Very exciting idea!

    Reply

    1. Doing an earlier one wouldn’t be tough. If next time I went for 4 pm PST, which is 7 PM EST, is that a time that would be good for East Coasters?

      Reply

  8. Excited for this! I have spread the word around. (If you need to change the time to get more people in, I don’t mind – either is good for me.)

    Reply

  11. Wow, this is really tempting. I’m not sure I can raise the funds in time for the first one but I will definitely be watching this site.

    Is the focus short stories only? Do you need new or old material? Will we be writing new stories for the workshop?

    Reply
  12. Pingback: Delicious linky goodness. « Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive

  13. Hi, I’d be very interested on your workshop but unfortunately Paypal is not avaiable on my country, would it be possible for me to pay via credit card?

    Reply

  14. Hi! I emailed you about the workshop but haven’t heard back.

    I was wondering if the workshop was still going ahead, I wanted to join the Wed. evening one.

    Reply

  15. Hey Cat,
    Sounds great, unfortunately Dec. is crazy busy and besides my computer is playing Peek-a-boo with me; after x-mas is should all be mended 😉 I hope you’ll do a class later.
    Have a great Holliday!
    🙂 Judith

    Reply
  16. Pingback: Class Status | The World Remains Mysterious

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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."

~K. Richardson

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99 Statues, Part Two

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(Another excerpt from the story I’m currently working on.)

Nicholas woke slowly. It was chilly in the room, and when he shifted his body between the clinging flannel sheets, he could encounter zones of warmth and cool. Two down comforters were draped over them as well; Nicholas could not sleep without their weight on him, while Feniker, who seemed to burn with a furnace’s metabolism, would inevitably throw most of them off during the night, onto Nicholas.

He could hear Feniker’s soft breathing, a burry almost snore, a sound so uniquely Fen that it tugged a smile onto Nicholas’s lips, knowing what his lover’s face looked like when sleep-slackened, how it must look right now. He had drawn the drapes across the windows; the hotel’s front looked out onto the plaza, but Nicholas had opted for one of the less ostentatious back chambers which he secretly thought more pleasant, overlooking the back gardens, which were the more handsome vista, even when leaf-deprived and blackened by the cold, due to the green cedars that ringed it round.


The hotel was stirring. Soon enough his breakfast, with plenty left over for Feniker, would arrive and be deposited outside the door with a discreet knock. The hotel’s own brand of fish tea, with an odd peppery brackishness. He still wasn’t sure whether or not he liked its aftertaste, even after living in the hotel for almost two months now. He had lived with his father before then, but fire had taken their mansion, and both had taken themselves to alternate lodgings. He had chosen this hotel, which he could afford on his lavish allowance, for the way it managed to combine proximity to the student quarter with luxury.

He rolled on his side and found Feniker watching him, no longer snoring, blue eyes bright in the morning light, almost luminous.

“Good morning, sunshine,” Nicholas said. He leaned over to give Fen a kiss. Fen’s fingers tangled in his hair, drew him down to meet lips.

“What’s on your agenda for today?” Fen said.

“I am meeting with my father to go over the plans for the new factory in Cloudmarch,” Nicholas said.

“Will you be visiting it? The expedition is going through Cloudmarch. You could come out with us, say goodbye there, do whatever you needed to do with the new factory.”

“I would serve my father ill as a factory manager,” Nicholas said. “I’m not good with such things.”

“You have a mind keen enough to keep up with anyone in their classes,” Feniker said. “If you chose to exert yourself. Instead you pretend yourself slower than you are, and use it as excuse to while away your days drinking fish tea and playing cards.” He pushed himself off the bed and strode across the chamber, naked, to reclaim his clothing from the bench below the window.

Nicholas gathered the covers around himself, reluctant to lose their warmth, even in pursuit of what the kiss had promised. “What of you, what does the Duke’s secretary do today?”

Fen shrugged and drew on his trousers, sat down to pull on his boots. Behind him the window panes were laced with frost, a pattern like the ghost effluvium a professor had demonstrated at the last University lecture Nicholas had attended.

Thinking of that, he protested, “I do go to some lectures after all, and meet with Professor Wirewit to work on my paper.”

“Meetings that are few and far between,” Fen said. He caught himself. “Look, I don’t mean to nag you.”

“Will you come tonight and see a play with me?” Nicholas asked.

“I will have papers to transcribe,” Fen said. “I have been burning the candle at both ends, and I must decide where I should be spending my time. I do not mean to imply that it should not be with you, only that I would rather spend time enjoying your company, than sitting together staring down at a stage while the audience gossips so loud that we cannot hear half the lines.”

The reasonable tone, the exaggerated patience in his voice made Nicholas want to smack him.

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Snippet from Hearts of Tabat

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What did it mean? Because surely it must, happening three days in a row. It couldn't just be that she'd had the same dream randomly dropped into her head three times. She'd mulled it over, standing in her office staring out over the street steaming in the warm spring rain that pattered on the patterned paper umbrellas, printed with political slogans, that everyone carried.
I’m working on the sequel to recently-finished Beasts of Tabat, whose working title is Hearts of Tabat. Here’s a snippet I wrote this morning.

Adelina did something she’d mocked other people for doing. She consulted a Dream Reader.
Everyone sensible knew that Dream Readers were frauds, making up stories to suit the needs they could read in their clients. Everyone’s dreams were as individual as their minds, everyone had their own internal cartography leading to entirely different parts of their brains.

But the dream had come three mornings in a row. Three mornings when she woke up with a start, fear clamping its fingers, slender as reeds, strong as iron, around her throat, her hands clenched so hard that her nails bit into the heels of her hands.

She was walking along a bridge, which narrowed further and further, so much only a single person could walk across it, then crumbled away in the middle, leaving a two foot gap. She knew a wide enough step would take her across it, but when she looked down, she saw the water, seething with toothy eels, their lanterned eyes staring up at her, waiting for her to fall.

She saw Bella far, far away, down the long road on the other side, back turned as she walked away, too far to hear Adelina calling after her. Snowflakes were falling around her, as though a cloud echoed her progress overhead, and moonlight glinted on the snow, tinting it purple and red.


Finally she gathered her wits and went back a few steps. She crouched, then pushed herself forward and ran to jump and land on the other side. Far below, the eels ground their teeth, a sound that crawled up her spine and along her shoulders.

A headshake, like a dog cleaning itself of rain, chased the sensation away.

Bella had vanished over the horizon. Parks lay to either side, and she knew they were Tabatian parks, but ones she’d never discovered before. The notion delighted her: she’d investigate their histories, incorporate that into her long-time project, a complete history of the city.
But which one to enter first? She hesitated.

The left-hand one held a fabulous menagerie surrounded by a high, green-painted fence. She could hear the creatures roaring and whinnying, baying and moaning and a calliope’s wheedle. Fireworks arced and popped above it.

On the right was a more sedate water-park. But it held nooks and crannies as enticing as any brightly-colored booth: serene statues had placards waiting to be deciphered, and a massive fountain in the center roiled with carp colored white and purple and red.

It came to her that the righthand side would cost her no coins, but that the menagerie would require the price of admission, so she fumbled at her belt, thinking she’d let the lack or not determine which way she went. But the coins in her pouch were unfamiliar and she was uncertain whether or not the ticket seller would accept them.

She hesitated, torn between choices.

Something was coming padding down the road towards her. A Sphinx and a Manticore, unchained, unrestrained. They walked without hurry, placid and implacable and deadly. Their mouths moved as though they were talking to each other, but they were too far to hear.

Where had Bella gone?

She looked from side to side, but something in the way they walked told her they would follow, no matter where she went.

They came so close she could smell the stink of the Manticore, hear the sound of their steps on the road. They were silent now as they came towards her”¦

Then she’d wake.

What did it mean? Because surely it must, happening three days in a row. It couldn’t just be that she’d had the same dream randomly dropped into her head three times. She’d mulled it over, standing in her office staring out over the street steaming in the warm spring rain that pattered on the patterned paper umbrellas, printed with political slogans, that everyone carried.

***
Love the world of Tabat and want to spend longer in it? Check out Hearts of Tabat, the latest Tabat novel! Or get sneak peeks, behind the scenes looks, snippets of work in progres, and more via Cat’s Patreon.

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