Good for you, being a panelist. Doing things we’re afraid of is a great way to grow. I’ve gotten to the strange point where I’m more outgoing, in a way, around strangers than I am around people I know.

I like the Book of Honor idea. Next time Potlatch comes to Oregon, if it doesn’t drift into March like it did last year, I’ll go.

I look forward to the next educational offering you provide. If there’s anything else I convey, it’s that I really got a lot from your class and I very grateful all of the time you’ve taken to share your knowledge with less experienced writers.

I’m pleased to see you wrestling with the practical application of what we did in the workshop. It’s difficult to generate enough of a “plan” in six hours to really give you something that will hold up after any sort of banging at it, and it’s good to see that you didn’t let yourself be hampered by the outline once you started getting words down.

You raise good questions and issues with the post-jump start state. What do you do once you start leaving the outline? How do you deal with the skeletal nature of everything you’ve sketched out? You recognize that the whole structure is intended to be an outlet for organic growth, but even that sort of growth needs some care and feeding along the way.

Anyway, thanks for posting this assessment. It’s good feedback for me too. And there’s no failure here. It sounds like you got a lot out of the workshop, and retained enough to put in your toolbox for later use. That sounds like a win to me. :)

I agree that “that specificity in place made the story more universal than less”. “Generic” and “universal” are significantly different words, after all. And the more specific the place is, the more meaningful a character’s choices in that place, like the difference between going to bars named “Kell’s Irish Pub” and “The Lovecraft”.

How interesting that a non-spec fic writer would go to Clarion West; that would never have occurred to me. I wonder what it was like for them.

In-class writing exercises are the thing I most dread about writing workshops. My mind usually goes blank when required to produce on demand.