I did take a few pictures, but not very many, unfortunately. I've linked to what I did take though, of course.

The VPX Reunion East was a rousing success. Terri's got an awesome place up there. We sat outside for most of the early part of Saturday. A few of us went swimming too, which was great - I hardly ever do that anymore. The inside of the house is nice too - comfortable and spacious and with many artefacts adorning all the walls, including various farming implements. It also has a wonderful log cabin-y smell.

It was great seeing a bunch of you again, and the timing was quite perfect for me too. Shame the rest of you couldn't be there too, but We Will All Meet Again, I'm sure.

Here are the few photos I took (the clickable one is our "VPX Room 50 Lives" cake):

From VPX Reunion

I was just sleeping for a few hours. Sleeping during the day/early evening seems to be great for my dreams... they're at their most vivid during those hours.

We were all in a room... a small crowded room. Everyone from VP was there. I was wandering around, in and out, doing something with my cellphone, though at the time I did not seem to know what.

Construction was going on throughout the house (and the VP House had the same sort of balcony setup as did the Island Inn, but the rest of the building seemed quite different). Evidently, workers were adjusting the size of the rooms, because some rooms were leaking into others and taking up too much space. But whenever they came to fix it, the size difference was completely inconsequential. Less than an inch per room, in fact.

After working on one room, however, an interesting acrobatic climbing frame structure rose from the balcony boards and circled the VP House (except it managed to be both inside and out). It had swings, monkey bars, various climbing things, and plastic tunnels. I don't remember who said it, but someone proposed the theory that it was there for when we all finally learned to be real chipmunks.

While this was going on, I was going through the complex, taking photos of my VP mates. But there was a strange man in a ninja outfit too. I never tried taking his picture, but when I took a photo of anyone else, he'd make a leap and do a flying kick, timing it so that he was right in the centre of the picture when the photo took.

I was still doing that thing with the cellphone too, however. I was investigating something. I had discovered that typing the same digit into a cell phone nine times would allow me to discover the true form of anyone at VP. The fact that there were only ten digits did not seem to be an obstacle here. Some of the numbers could apparently be used in different ways (even whlie being the same numbers). The zero key ten times got the operator. Shame I never thought to ask her for any answers.

I did receive some answers (and I don't believe any of them were chipmunks). Unfortunately I've forgotten them all. Clearly it was not Information I Can Return With (or should that be News I Can Use?).

Though I did discover one person's true form. Scott Hawkins was the White Hart. I know this because rather than using the cellphone to make my discovery this time, I just asked. Mac (who was always with him as they continually circled the VP House together) gave me this information freely. It was very much a case of "the sort of thing that seems to happen in TV dreams, but never in real ones" happening in a real one. The significance of the name seems quite clear.

Then I woke up and discovered I had nothing to write any of this down in, so I rushed over to the computer and just typed madly. Some of that information (including most of our True Forms) will sadly be lost forever. But I suppose next time we find ourselves in a dream, we can wander over to the White Hart (I'm sure it has a big "50" on the door), grab one of those perfect drinks they just don't serve in the real world, and learn some more.

If anyone reading this has been thinking of going to Viable Paradise but isn't sure, you should definitely take a listen to the Viable Paradise Party Podcast from sailormur's I Should Be Writing.

You will hear most of this year's students (and a few instructors) take turns describing (very drunkenly) what we learned during the workshop. If that doesn't win you over, hopefully the sounds of the party itself will!

It's a lot of fun, and you even get to hear my voice at some point, so go ahead and listen even if you have no need for a writing workshop.

krylyr sums up the Viable Paradise learning experience in 20 simple points.

... is going really well in fact. I've so far managed to accomplish the "page a day" goal, with over 1000 words written every day since I got back. This has resulted in a new story (in need of much editing, but a complete story nonetheless), which I'm rather happy with. I'm pretty sure there are more to come in the next couple of weeks :)

(After that it's NaNoWriMo, so I'll need to up the word count a little bit)

I came home on Sunday to find that Olivia had roasted a chicken and baked me a cake :)

I felt really quite disoriented after the whole VP experience though, and I ended up staying at home on Monday - I needed that extra day just to acclimatise to real life again.

I got a decent amount of writing done. The laptop really helped open up new possibilities of writing, as I can now write while lying down on my bed - a position I've found quite conducive to writing (relaxing on the sofa being another one). Also a big help was the little Jim MacDonald over my shoulder saying "it's okay to write crap". I think I might be able to accomplish my new "write something every day" goal now.

Sadly, today I really do have to get back to work. I think I'm sort of ready to get back now... we'll see.

Here are all my Viable Paradise X and Martha's Vineyard photos:

Going to a reunion for an event you've only just been to is a strange experience. Particularly in this case.

After the huge sense of closure we got from the party on Friday night, it was strange to find half of us still here, sitting around listlessly half the day not knowing what to do. Part of it was because half of us had already gone home, and part of it was that the workshop itself was really over by that point. Some people from previous VPs turned up, but there was still definitely more of us than them, and I get the feeling that participation in the reunion events was a little less than hoped for.

Things improved dramatically in the evening, when we all wandered down to the beach to watch the jellyfish again. This time they were clearly visible, their lights flashing and sparkling in the dark water below. Better even than that was the sky - it was so clear and vast, with more stars than I've ever seen (except for once in Nepal). Just sat there for ages looking up.

When we returned, games of Mafia began, followed by one of Werewolf Mafia (which is basically a combined Mafia & Thing). I was so tired by this point I just watched, but before the night was over Teresa and Terri managed to talk me into a game of Thing. It turned out to be the longest game of Thing ever, but also one of the most fun. The game ended with two Things and two Scientists (myself being one of the remaining scientists) - but I made the wrong choice and the Things won. It was already about 1am when the game finished. All in all a good way to finish the VP experience.

athenais has posted the Viable Paradise X group picture to her flickr account. It can be found here. No names or anything, but I'm the guy in the yellow t-shirt in the back row, second yellow t-shirt from the bottom. I'll have my own photos uploaded at later date.

Yeah, I'm being a bit lazier here, but my mind has been elsewhere, so daily accounts were removed from the plan pretty quickly.

Anyway, VP - as athenais put it at one point "Viable Paradise is like summer camp with booze". I think that's a pretty apt description.

The past few days have sort of blended into one. I've had loads of advice, and now actually see storywriting in a very different way. Jim Kelly in particular was great at fixing my stories. When I had my one-on-one with him, he sat down, asked "what is this character's motivation?", then asked "what are you trying to say with this story?", then, upon receiving both of those answers, said "okay, I propose to you this...", which fixed the story better than I could ever imagine, and actually helped me to see everything in better terms.

My group critique also helped. Where Jim helped with the overall concept, my fellow students (and instructers Steven Gould and Patrick Nielsen-Hayden) helped with some more specific things in the story, while also reaffirming where the general weaknesses lay. In Critters, I've often found that my stories will receive contradictory suggestions, but here, everyone was more or less consistent in what they thought needed to be fixed in the stories. Now I am completely certain about what I have to do with both stories, and about how I have to approach all future stories.

Yesterday, we had "Beer with Billy", where we all read parts from Hamlet while we guzzled down a whole lot of beer. It went on a bit too long, but there were some great moments, such as athenais reading Rosencrantz as Ted Logan, and Dru Miller doing Ophelia's singing parts as heavy metal.

Today there was more drunkenness (it was a distinct and important part of the workshop - much bonding was done here). The "Viable Paradise Reunion" actually started today, where people from previous years turned up. Some of us played a little game called "wandering paragraphs", where we took turns reading peoples' opening paragraphs (from works not previously submitted to the workshop) and tried to guess whose was whose. No-one guessed my sci-fi story as my own, probably because no-one knew I'd written any scifi (it was my only scifi story, after all)

Because of the reunion, we had new name tags, where most of us wrote our name followed by the roman numeral. Consequently, my name tag read "Chris X". This lead Cory Doctorow to suggest that I was an activist for Scottish rights. This lead to a discussion (largely involving myself and hirez, who is English) about Scottish Independence (or lack of actual desire for such), the absence of an English parliament, and the virtual Hadrian's Wall at the border to prevent grey squirrels moving up to Scotland.

This was followed by an all-out party in Scott's room. It seemed that almost everyone turned up at some point. It was great to just hang out with everyone after the workshop - and it was a truly amazing atmosphere. We did a Viable Paradise "What I Learned..." testimonial for one of sailormur's podcasts, which I think also helped to give it quite a sense of closure. A few people, who live in either Philadelphia or Connecticut, I will almost certainly be meeting up with again from time to time (hopefully in the form of a critique group), but I'll be keeping in contact with a lot of them wherever they may be. There were a lot of fine people here, and unlike most places I've been, there was no annoying person in the group whatsoever. Everyone was great, and I'd be happy to hang out with them all again.

Some of our group will have left by tomorrow morning. The rest of us will be staying one more day, to attend the main reunion events. I didn't do the story assignment for this, but neither did most people, it seems, so I should be fine. Then on Sunday morning we'll all be departing, back to our dreary old lives. Except this time, we have an even stronger impulse to write, and to write well.

The first real day of the workshop. We all trundled downstairs at 8am to do the critique session we'd been up all night preparing for (about 7 students per group). We actually held up pretty well. After this was James McDonald's lecture on chess and prestidigitation as metaphors for good writing - very interesting. Then James Patrick Kelly gave a lecture called "Ten Cheap Plot Tricks", which should come in very handy.

After lunch was a freeform group discussion. Quite interesting, but it involved the full group, which meant a huge circle to talk in.

After lunch, I had a one-on-one session with Cory Doctorow. He gave me some great advice on my stories, mostly to do with character and thematic elements of my work that could do with improvement - including a very interesting take on the ending Earthly Desires. His other suggestions all seem like definite improvements that will strengthen both character and theme. After discussing my submitted stories, we talked about my other works in progress, including King of the Nine Dragons, which helped to sort out the direction I'm going with that. Even better were his suggestions on my proposed NaNoWriMo novel: one suggestion in particular, regarding its ending, was so perfect that I'm already very confident about the novel even though I haven't written a word yet.

After dinner most of us headed down to the beach to see the glowing jellyfish. We saw a few, which were cool, but they weren't out in force, and the moon was still pretty bright. So we just hung out on the beach for a while, looking at the stars. Apparently some of the group saw a huge fireball fall from the sky, but I (and a few others) missed it. After the beach, a few of us hung out on our balcony with a few beers. Then we read and critiqued tomorrow's stories (but I'd done half already, so it wasn't nearly as bad).

And now I'm off to bed. Goodnight!

Okay, well this is my second night here, and I actually have a little time (sacrificing about 30 precious minutes of sleep) to give a little writeup.

I almost didn't make it to Martha's Vineyard on Sunday at all. Got on the plane in New York just fine, then we taxied to the runway. After about 10 minutes of waiting, the captain came on the intercom to say "There's a message on my screen I haven't seen before. We'll have to take the plane back to the terminal for maintenance". Very promising. They buggered about with the plane for two hours before finally leaving. Fortunately, I'd included a 2 hour buffer zone between flight and bus so made it okay.

On the bus, met a couple of people also heading to VP (Evelyn Brown & Barbara Gordon), then on the ferry met both my roommates (Evan Goer and Bart Patton), and John Chu, who'd critiqued Dragonfly Heights when it was on critters. Met everyone else later, at the Island Inn, of course.

The Island Inn is awesome, sort of like a semi-rustic timeshare - maybe a combo between a timeshare and a log cabin, if you can imagine that.

Our first evening involved a BBQ, followed by introductions, where we each got a "gift". Mine was a grey plastic rat with red eyes. We now have to do a writing assignment involving that toy, among other things. Then we were introduced to "Mafia" and "Thing". I didn't really like Mafia too much, but Thing is a fantastic game (based on the movie "The Thing").

Then we had to read and critique about 20,000 words before the next morning. Lots of fun!