{"id":1187,"date":"2008-07-01T18:24:00","date_gmt":"2008-07-02T01:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2008\/07\/01\/im-going-to-paradise\/"},"modified":"2008-07-01T18:24:00","modified_gmt":"2008-07-02T01:24:00","slug":"im-going-to-paradise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2008\/07\/01\/im-going-to-paradise\/","title":{"rendered":"I’m Going to Paradise!"},"content":{"rendered":"

After a day at the International Spy Museum<\/a>, D and I returned to our hotel room, where this email was waiting for me:<\/p>\n

Dear Mr. Chen,<\/p>\n

On behalf of the staff and the instructors, I’d like to welcome you as
a student to Viable Paradise, and say congratulations!<\/p>\n

This letter is a written confirmation of your acceptance to the 2008
Viable Paradise Writers Workshop, aka VP 12\/XII…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s more to the message, but that’s the important bit. I was too surprised to be excited at first, since I had just applied yesterday<\/a> and wasn’t expecting to hear back for at least a week. But I got over that quickly.<\/p>\n

I’m going to Viable Paradise!<\/span> With John Scalzi! And Elizabeth Bear! And Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden! And fellow Half-Life 2<\/span> enthusiast Steven Gould<\/a>, who also wrote Jumper<\/span>! I probably shouldn’t ask him what he thought of the movie, but maybe I’ll ask his wife<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’m not well acquainted with the works of the remaining two instructors, Debra Doyle and James D. McDonald, but I plan to do some reading<\/a> before September…<\/p>\n

Finally, in case you’re wondering, the manuscript I submitted with my application was the current version of “Working Graves,” which started with a dream I had in 1999<\/a>. The opening scene is still mostly intact, though I’ve expanded upon it since that first draft. And I made a few important changes from the draft I submitted with my Clarion application<\/a>.<\/p>\n

~CKL<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After a day at the International Spy Museum, D and I returned to our hotel room, where this email was waiting for me: Dear Mr. Chen, On behalf of the staff and the instructors, I’d like to welcome you asa…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[79,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-vp12","category-writing"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}