Last week I did a guest author stint at the great Odyssey Writing Workshop, held at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, NH. Odyssey is kind of a bootcamp for people honing their skills in all areas of fantastic fiction. For six weeks, 16 writers write, read, think about, discuss, eat, and sleep fantastic fiction, under the stern yet kind direction of Jeanne Cavelos, who created the enterprise.

I envy them. I never did anything like this earlier in my career, which might really have helped.

Jeanne likes to have a writer or editor come in every week, to talk about the writer's life, and help critique varius students' work. Since writing is very much a part-time enterprise for me, which I anticipate for most of the students, I focused on how to manage that, and what to expect.

I'm not a writing teacher. It's just not a topic where I think I have an enormous amount to add. And it takes me forever to come up with something useful or interesting to say. This year my topic was literary SF, which is just crazy as a topic. Usually I do plot, which I can kind of fake. But it was kind of fun researching, thinking about how literary fiction differs from commercial fiction, what writers should pay attention to, and how to have fun with it.

After a couple of weeks drafting my lecture, writing critiques of a bunch of manuscripts, giving my lecture, having individual conferences with students, and in general talking about writing for a day and a half, I was exhausted. I came home and slept much of the weekend.

Jeanne does this all day every day for the entire session. It's really her baby, she knows everyone is depending on her, and she is enormously present for everyone at all times. I just can't fathom it.

This is about as much instructing as I can manage with my limited energy and even more limited neurons, but I do enjoy it, and end up meeting a lot of interesting people. I worked with some fine writers, and hope to see them in print soon.