I got a very nice letter in return from one of the bigwigs at the Institute, saying that unfortunately their age cutoff was 16 or they would have accepted me, but that I had talent and to keep working on it.

It actually was a good thing I wasn't accepted, I had no money and neither did my folks. But the letter was pretty special to me anyway.

The instructor seemed to know what he was talking about, though I should go back and look again. I did most of the course in 1995-6 before I started my masters degree.

I've often wondered where the draw the line ontheir evaluations. The critiques were never harsh, though the suggestions were solid. Harsh critique is bad for business, I suppose. I recall being asked to do one assignment over, so I think they really do want to teach. I suppose it depends on the instructor you end up with. Mary Rusenblum is their online moderator,and she is certainly a legitimate speculative fiction writer (see this month's Locus).

But it's nothing a good critiquer couldn't do. I hate the assignments (the shorter the story I try to write, the worse it is, and they want 2k words or less, usually 1k.) And their "good examples" really suck. There's one memorable one I really despised, on writing hooks, which is a paragraph about a Christmas present of a red truck, better and redder than anything else.

I not only would have skipped reading the article this hook went to, I'd have shuddered over any pictures illustrating this sickenly-sweet warping of Christmas.

Maybe it's that I'm sick of seeing stores sell Christmas decorations in early October. Maybe it's that I just don't get into the whole "Christmas spirit" until the week in which Christmas actually occurs, because the whole lengthening of the Christmas season just waters it down.

Maybe it's that I really hate the accompanying assignment: Write an entry paragraph for an article or story, research magazines from their book of Markets (most of the ones that looked interesting, I couldn't find) and outline the rest of the story to submit as a query to one of those magazines.

Hooks are usually the LAST thing I write, my outlines are written in stream-of-consciousness on a separate page below the story document, and I know who I want to sell to. Too bad they aren't in the book.

Okay, enough of my assuredly-biased ranting. I'm just fixed in my ways... I write the way I write, period. I've found that writing any other way leads to writer's block. Outlines in outline form stifle my creativity. The pressure to write a good hook makes me want to avoid it altogether. All my "short stories" have turned out to be great longer stories in disguise. In short, I'm frustrated, and "overdue" no longer applies to that hook assignment. I am purposefully putting it off until the end of time, and time ends today.

So yeah. It may be good for most beginning writers, isn't enough of a challenge in the right ways for me, (I'd do better with an instructor like Survivor.. the harder to please, the harder I'd work ^_^) and everything they can teach me, I pretty much learned already from lurking around here.

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Now this hardly seems like the most appropriate way to celebrate the day Jesus was born.

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