Anotha day anotha dolla … week two has just wrapped up at Inkhaven, and I can’t say my enthusiasm has diminished in the least.
I read aloud some Wallace Stevens for our wine, cheese, and poetry night (it attracted many more Eliot fans than I expected); experimented with “miracle berries,” which temporarily make sour food taste sweet; and attended workshops on listposting, memoir writing, and developing your voice. There were Q&A sessions with a fairly successful journalist, Jasmine Sun, and a literary agent representing the vague and sinister forces of traditional publishing. Also this week was the event Let’s Discuss a Stone-Cold Classic Magazine Article, which centered around David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster.” It always turns me vegan for a week after reading.
Oh, also, I got a cameo in Alexander Wales’s Foreverhaven!
Writing roundup for the week:
- 19th century poet UTTERLY DESTROYS his critics (NO MERCY!): I fear the clickbait workshop has made me too powerful.
- Paean to the machine-translator: People seemed to like this one! I actually meant to write about something else but it just sorta came out that way. The ending, of course, is a shameless ape of the Sam Kriss style … if you want to take it up with me Sam come to Berkeley.
- Genome: My attempt at a Remy story, and the one I was wrestling with last week. In the end I just wanted to get it out of my head, but I’m not unhappy with it.
- Art is not subjective: I felt sorta guilty for just writing fiction and about fiction, and wanted to branch into more argumentative stuff; unfortunately, I picked a topic that really needs 20k words to do justice. Some of the sentences in here were pretty aesthetic though I gotta say. Also when I was looking at Wikipedia images of Van Gogh paintings I started weeping out of nowhere?
- The one-word poem worth $8,000; or, 652 words about 1: One of my most popular posts so far. Not much to say about it. There’s a guy who feeds every Inkhaven post into Claude and gets him to rank them tournament-style, and turns out the shoggoth likes this one, too.
- Proof of the multiverse: Written with apologies to all of physics, probability, and philosophy. The official position of conq.blog is to NOT endorse quantum suicide.
- conqhaven 2 electric boogaloo [YOU ARE HERE] – Shaping up to be a real firecracker…
A rough tally puts me at 5 fiction, 3 reviews, 3 metaposts, 2 poemposts, 1 argumentative, and 2 miscellaneous (loop, paean). Not bad! I want to write a few more argumentative pieces and get outside my comfort zone with fiction (which probably means romance or action). We’ll see how it goes. I have enough ideas to last for three Inkhavens.
Apparently in a few days we’re being swept away to a mysterious cliffside mansion. People have been clamoring for the Inkhaven beach episode, but my murder mystery senses are tingling. This can only end one way…