I woke up Saturday morning in the bed I had slept in most of my childhood. It was far too early. I was two time zones away from home and Friday had been a long day with a four hour drive through the desert to Albuquerque and then a flight to Hartford with the inevitable layover. My mom had picked me up there, which is why I woke in the bed I did. I was wide awake, one would think from dread or excitement, yet neither possessed me at the time. I went for a walk with my mom on the hill I was raised on, the early, early morning sunlight filtering through the changing autumn trees. Leaves covered the sides of the road, yellow and brown and a few red. Acorns sat on the pavement, some crushed by passing cars. After a brief visit with my cows, my mom and I left to drive to Woods Hole to catch the ferry. We got there early and explored the local beach and visited the light house.
The ferry ride was unexpectedly pleasant. The breeze blew everything out of my mind. It was like being in quiet limbo. I had left the doubters behind and the fear was still before me. I sat there reveling in the experience, the wind blowing my hair, the sky slipping into those colors that only exist as the sun approaches the horizon at the end of the day. It was a good moment to be alive, though a little chilly (I was glad I'd brought a sweater.) I didn't let what awaited me on the other side of the channel pollute the purity of the ferry ride.
I arrived in Oak Bluffs and after waiting in line forever to get off the ferry found Mac and Kate waiting with two of my classmates, Rose and Chris K. We got to the Island Inn, got our keys and went to our rooms. Bethany, one of my roommates, was there and we spent the rest of the evening talking. I was too shy to find dinner companions (Bethany had already eaten) and ate Craisins Trail Mix instead. Jean, our other roommate, came back much later that night.
Our pantry had a severe lacking of food (since we hadn't really stocked it yet,) so Bethany, Jean, Amy, and I walked to Oak Bluffs. I have no idea of the distance, but it was mostly flat and nice. Oak Bluffs has the cutest houses I've ever seen and they certainly aren't frightened of color. When we got back Bethany and I explored around the Island Inn and met a few other VPers. I desperately wanted to socialize with other people, but my shyness was in full gear.
That evening the whole group came together for dinner. My first view of Jim Macdonald had him trying to open a bag of "margarita in a bucket." He was doing this two chairs away from me and I had visions of that ectoplasm yellow substance flying through the air and landing all over me. Luckily the margarita behaved and I was spared.
The other instructors trickled in and while I wasn't having tongue tied hero worship they didn't seem very approachable. Would I ever be able to hold an intelligible conversation with these people? We ate and introductions were done. We got our schedules for the week. Ack! My group critique was tomorrow! And I had to critique another student's work. We had to critique the work of two other students almost every night we were there.
After the logistics were done we played Mafia and Thing. I was the Thing in my very first game and survived a surprisingly long time. I was even congratulated on my most excellent Thing playing, which made me laugh. There are definitely pluses to having no idea what you're doing sometimes. I did the critiques for the night and Bethany and I went for a walk/jog to the tennis courts and the main road at 11:30. Then I went to sleep.
My group critique or "breakout group" was the first thing on the schedule. I didn't freak out nearly as much as I could have. I got great feedback and the criticism wasn't too painful to take. My classmates said good constructive things as did Jim Macdonald and Debra Doyle, who were the instructors present. They had some crazy ideas as to how to make my novel better, like make it have a Slut Goddess and a Dread Spider God and there was some talk of vampire pegasi, or maybe it was fanged. I came out of the experience feeling as good as one could after having had something you'd worked hard on picked apart. It's often compared to having been gone over with a brillo pad and I agree with that comparison. But, now that I knew some of the problems maybe I could maybe actually fix them. It's hard to fix things you can't see.
After that we had a lecture with Jim followed by a lecture with Teresa Nielsen Hayden. I won't go into the lectures as other people took much better notes than I did, though a couple of things really resonated with me. Jim said that human beings have short attention spans and to plan for this. Having a short attention span myself it's something I wish more people would pay attention to. Teresa said that readers don't want surprises, they want the perfect birthday present. After lunch we got a ton of writing assignments. I'll just mention the ones relevant to the rest of my tale:
Write a 5000-9000 word story. We had been broken into three groups and mine got: must be SF, no aliens or faster than light travel, in near future, off earth. We'd gotten a toy the night before and it had to be included in the story.
Write a scene from the viewpoint/in sympathy of something you find repugnant.
After Collegium there were one-on-one sessions, but I didn't have one scheduled till Tuesday. I walked in the opposite direction of Oak Bluffs and spent some time exploring the beach. I needed to get back and do my critiques, so I didn't spend as much time on the beach as I wanted to. Plus I really needed to get started on the assignments.
That night Jeff and his roommate (I can't remember who it was, which is horrible of me) had a Heroes watching party, which was a lot of fun. I would have spent a lot more time socializing with those present, but I still had critiques to finish.
The day started with another breakout group, then lectures with Debra Doyle and Elizabeth Bear.
The afternoon's one-on-one with Teresa was one of the best, and worst, parts of my VP experience. She said a lot of things that my other critiquers hadn't and they were all good things to hear, if a bit hard to take. Near the end she told me I needed to cut the wings off the pegasi in my novel and turn them into normal horses. I looked at her and said, "I'm not sure I can do that." She said that with the wings it could be, at best, marketed as a late YA. She added that I didn't need to cut them off with a butcher's knife.
I spent the rest of the afternoon in a state of shock and spent a good bit of time talking to staffies Suzanne and Mac, who were extremely helpful. I knew there were things wrong with my novel, I've known that for awhile. I just never in a million years thought the winged horses were going to be one of them. I mourned the impending death of one of my favorite ideas.
I had a very vivid picture in my head of pegasi getting their wings hacked off with a bloody knife. It made me queasy. It occurred to me that I had an assignment I could use this for. So, I wrote a scene where a pegasus gets its wings very gruesomely removed. I wrote it from the perspective of the cutter and he got a lot of pleasure from it. I wanted to vomit. I wrote it with tears streaming down my cheeks in a state of complete agony. I couldn't go back and edit, I couldn't read any of it as I wrote it, or after I decided it was as done as it was going to be. This was right before dinner and I tried to be social and just couldn't be. I went back up to my room and cried. They had told us the first night that there would come a point in the week where you would probably want to cry. Well, I was there.
I pulled myself together and joined the group for jellyfish watching. It was really, really cool. The tide was going out from an inlet under a bridge and when the current caught the jellies they glowed. You'd see a faint glow, the current would grab it and it would glow brighter, then when released it would fade. Some of us went under the bridge where it was easier to see the other sparkly ones. I spent a lot of time under the bridge, enjoying the darkness and the colors in the water, hearing the cars drive over my head. Then there were conversations on the beach under the stars. The sky was nice, but not as nice as it is out where I live.
Writing was a struggle that night. I felt worn out from what I had done earlier. I finally managed to squeeze out about 900 words. I wouldn't have written anything, except that we had "permission to write badly." And oh, did I write badly.
Another Breakout Group and a lecture with Laura Mixon. My one-on-one with Elizabeth Bear was good and our conversation really helped solidify some of my problems in a mostly non-threatening way. She suggested I read Toughguide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynn Jones which is a great book full of fantasy clichés. She also suggested, due to the remoteness of my home, that I find a good online writing group, which I've done.
This was our half day. The whole group went to the Bite in Menemsha for lunch. I love scallops and they had them fried. Yummy! Julia ate a gallon of clam chowder. There was good conversation the whole time: driving there, waiting in line, eating, and driving back. Heather, Bethany and I did a bit of shopping in Oak Bluffs (darn you Galadriel's Mirror and your pretty jewelry!) and returned to the Island Inn.
That evening I worked on my big story, adding about 500 words. While I could appreciate the point of the assignments, I resented the fact that I was stuck in my room writing when there were all those people out there I could be socializing with. I had a feeling that I had already learned my biggest lesson from the pegasus piece and everything else was inconsequential at that point. I decided to stop writing. I went to the staff room and printed out my assignments and sat talking to various people, mostly staffies, and Bear. At some point Bear decided she was going to read us The Unstrung Harp (the only Real book about writing.) It was like being back in Kindergarten, especially when she showed us the pictures.
Jim makes the most delicious pancakes ever and it was a great way to start the day. We did our last Breakout Group, then lectures with Cory Doctorow and Steven Gould. Cory's lecture was awesome, if only because he held my attention for a full two hours. I had been trying to get up the nerve to ask him for a one-on-one all week and after his lecture I finally did. He talked too much sense in his lecture for me to not take advantage of the opportunity. I realized that I write "heroically," which is basically writing a lot of words all at the same time instead of a smaller number over many days. It's dangerous because it's hard to be heroic every day and you run the risk of creating rituals to psych yourself up. If you write a little bit every day it's just part of the day, not something to get worked up about. Steven Gould continued along the same lines about writing habits.
After lunch we broke into groups of four, each group with an instructor, to share our writing assignments. Cory was with my group. I had been fearing this moment. I couldn't even read my repugnant viewpoint piece in my head, how was I going to read it out loud to the group? Two of the other people in the group read theirs and then it was my turn. I had told the group at the start that I just couldn't read it and restated that. I just... I just couldn't. Cory asked if he could read it and I let him, tears leaking as he did. Cory and my groupmates were very supportive, which is very important. I had no problem reading my long story (which wasn't very long) to them which was completely different, being comical in nature.
Before dinner I walked to the beach with Bethany and Dorothy, enjoying the fall sunshine. I'm proud to say that I walked every day I was at VP, but that's not as much of an accomplishment as you might think. Walking at sea level is easy when your house sits at 7000', but knowing it would be easy was great motivation.
Beer With Billy is a VP tradition and to my dismay we were reading Richard III. I have unpleasant high school memories of that play, but I will never look at it the same way again after my VP experience. About 3/4 of the way through I gave up my part to Rose, who had gotten a part without a lot of lines and I'd somehow gotten one with tons. I believe this is the night I was introduced to that yummy drink from Brazil thanks to Chris K. Mmmm...
Friday morning we had more pancakes and I had a short one-on-one with Patrick. After that Cory and I went to Oak Bluffs for coffee and walked around. Before that conversation I had learned a lot about my writing from the instructors and other students. From Cory I learned about myself. Little things, thoughts, that hadn't quite come together yet bloomed. What insights did I have? Sorry, those are mine to know, but I'm still feeling the impacts of them.
I was a different person when we returned to the Island Inn. I felt like something really big had happened to me but I didn't know what it was yet. I had a hard time paying attention to the group discussion, but was able to get some focus back for Patrick's lecture. I asked Teresa for a "Permission to Write Badly" certificate, which is now framed and hung on the wall. That permission has set me free.
We ate lunch and had our group photo and took the VP oath. Things were starting to get sad. Some of us took our dinners outside to the parking lot to watch the sunset. We were social for the rest of the night, first playing Thing, then breaking up into smaller groups enjoying the last night the best we could. The end of the night (and the beginning of the morning) was spent sharing our "Origin" stories with each other. I finally got to bed sometime between 3:30 and 4:00 am.
Despite the really late night I was up and cheery much earlier than I would have thought. I had breakfast with a bunch of people, including several instructors, thanks to the draw of Julia's French Toast. My sadness grew as the goodbyes added up. I rode the ferry to Woods Hole with Kathleen and Rose, Martha's Vineyard being more and more obscured by fog the further we got from it. Symbolic? Of course. So nice of Mother Nature to oblige. I didn't want to say goodbye to the people and the experiences. I didn't want to return to the mainland. My mom picked me up at the ferry and I didn't want to share anything with her. It was my experience, my very own that I didn't have to share with anyone if I didn't want to. I was possessive of the experience and the ways I changed. Sharing it at that point would have ruined it.
I went out to dinner with my parents and both of my brothers and their wives. I felt like an imposter, but not due to the usual imposter syndrome. I felt like an imposter in my own life. I wanted to scream out, "I'm not the person you think I am!" But instead I just sat through the night, knowing I had a secret. I knew I had changed. No one else needed to know.
I started to get my thoughts down on the plane ride to Albuquerque and discovered more insights in the process. I still felt like I wasn't quite in the same world as other people, but it was much easier surrounded by strangers. When I finally got home to my own house the next day I didn't feel like I quite fit in my life anymore. I had changed and I didn't want to lose that. I would be wasting so much of what I learned if I let that happen. I quickly made contact with a number of my classmates and I'm holding onto the friendships the best I can. They're my kind, my people, my tribe and they understand. The VP experience was worth it just to have them afterwards.
Was Teresa right about cutting the wings off my pegasi? I still don't know, but I'm pretty happy with the short story that came out of their de-winging.