Clarion Flash Fic Workshop: Week Four

Yeah, I… look, time is confusing, okay? I’m finding it difficult to keep track of my place with the lectures, assignments, and critiques staggered as they are. It’s fine. But I keep writing my assignments ahead of time, which means I get nervous about having messed up the schedule.

So far, I’ve written four stories! Having a little bit of structure, and critique partners is doing wonderful things. My week three story was written for the prompt of world building. I took a scene from The Daughter of the Rose and the Jasmine, a Palestinian variant of Cinderella. It really fought me, that one.

And the prompt for week four, due this coming Thursday, is ‘horror.’ I’ve got a very strange relationship to horror. In grad school, I was assigned a mess of an archive on the gothic. I had to clean it up and make it useable. I wrote my MA thesis on Jane Eyre. But I “don’t read horror” but I do listen to The Magnus Archives.

I feel like I don’t know the shape of a horror story. Yet, my first attempt at horror ended up a finalist for the Best New Weird Award, and is my best story so far. Will this one be the same? Hard to say.



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