Day One of Writers of the Future

Day one of my Writers of the Future adventure has come and gone, and I'm feeling pretty great. Well, technically day one is today I guess, so I should say that Day Zero of my Writers of the Future adventure has come and gone, and I'm feeling pretty great. When I call it day zero it makes me think that there's going to be something uber-exciting like a typhoid Mary or a zombie apocalypse.  But mostly, all the winners arrived and we had our orientation.

Brandon, Scott Parkin and I were the first to arrive. I'd been warned ahead of time by a previous year's winner to expect cameras. Holy cow, they weren't lying! They filmed us driving up in the car. They filmed my feet as I walked into the hotel. They snapped pictures as we checked in and said our first hello's to the other winners. It felt a little like I'd stepped onto the set of a reality show. Only without having to vote anybody off the island by the end of the week. Which is good. Because I really like everyone I've met. :)

We spent the entire day hanging out in the lobby of the hotel, so we could say hello to everyone as they arrived. At about 7 last night, we were taken upstairs for a run down of the week by Dave Wolverton and Tim Powers. They'll be the main two instructors through the first part of the week. It was really intimidating to be told that we'll be expected to write a completed short story in just 24 hours. Dave is an excellent teacher, I've taken a workshop from him before. Tim seems like he's also going to be a great teacher, and they actually managed to present the idea in a way that took the edge off the fear.

I hope I can hold onto that in the coming days.

We were also handed a beautiful hard cover book about L Ron Hubbard's writing career and his thoughts on how to be a professional writer (our text book for the week), and a magnetic name badge that has our name, the year we won, and the name of our winning story engraved on it.

I have to say, seeing the name of my story, engraved in gold, and absolutely real, actually made me want to cry a little bit. Even though I've been through this process, and I've seen the galleys and I've known for awhile that this was coming, seeing my name and the title of my story actually written down like that, made it all suddenly become very real. That surprised me.

It felt pretty awesome.