So, in a weird twist of fate that I’ll totally embrace, I was invited to attend this year’s Norwescon, which runs from March 28-31, 2013, at the Doubletree Hotel located at the Seattle Airport.

Here’s my schedule. Hope to see some wonderful people there! I’ll be helping out with the Baen Party on Saturday night, so be sure to come visit!
You can visit the website here.

Norwescon 36 Pro Schedule for Lauren Dixon

A reading! From “Throwaways” Thursday 6:30pm-7:00pm Cascade 1

An abused runaway meets the Immortal, who travels through doors no one else can see. Is he hiding something more sinister? When Susie winds up with some of his powers, she finds out.

Writing Poetry Friday 10:00am-11:00am Cascade 6
Writing poetry and sending it to markets for publication. An overview of markets. Form vs. free verse. How can writing poetry impact your writing of short and long fiction?
Panelists: Mae Empson, Camille Alexa, Lauren Dixon

Residential Writing Workshops: Clarion and More Sunday 2:00pm-3:00pm Cascade 3&4
Learn about the major genre workshops like Clarion, Clarion West, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, and more. Are you ready to attend a residential workshop? What will you learn? Each workshop has advantages and disadvantages, so which workshop will work best for you?
Panelists: Leslie Howle, J.M. Sidorova, Lauren Dixon, Tod McCoy

When external forces conspire against you, let them go.

So, I’m participating in the Clarion West Write-a-thon. This organization is a huge part of my life, and I’d like to give as much as I possibly can back to it. One of the ways I can do that comes through the annual Write-a-thon, which occurs during the workshop itself. While those brave souls are out weathering the writing storm, I’m cowering within my office, trying to concoct the best works I know to write. Since today was the first official day of the Write-a-thon (and yesterday the first unofficial day), I’m posting the words I wrote here. This is an unedited excerpt from my work-in-progress, “Throwaways,” a young adult novel that has been eating away at me for the better part of a year. If you’d like to sponsor me, you can do so by visiting my Write-a-thon page here.

And there is a power that holds, that sways her to do as it suggests, that makes her sit when it says to sit, to beg when it says to beg. She always follows, even when it burns, the words that say “yes, please” a catch on her throat, acid that eats through everything she might have been, might have seen. But she doesn’t know how to do those things anymore, to follow the man when he says he’s to be obeyed, to be honored and trusted and acknowledged as the one who truly knows.

Who is it that she follows? She tries to see the world through his eyes, tries to look beyond the quivering acquiescence that rattles through her, even when she tries to shake it off. All the edges blur into a prism of the not-right, of the mistaken. She sees fire, a haze of black that clouds and suffocates, a billowing breeze that swells into her throat and shakes her lungs into spasms of yes and no, before it spits her out into a mess of blood, a red river that drips thick drops into broken ditches bursting with dead things like crawfish, drowned grasshoppers, spiders and, somehow, even snakes.

“They’re not ours,” he says, quiet, in her ear.

She whirls, but he’s not there. Of course not. A shadow in her mind, he waits for her to break. How he bridges the walls, she doesn’t fathom. “They made a choice.”

“Like I get one,” she says, ready to crush the bugs showing her up, exposing her weaknesses. She just followed, as usual, and look where that got her? She glances at her wrist, veins blue against paper skin.

“You know your answer was already written.” Though she can’t see it, she can hear the voice sneer, a reminder. No control, remember? You were destined to take my place, it says. To give me back the power you found through the ever-lasting loophole.

A lump pushes back at her when she tries to swallow, to ignore the stupid reminder. Every day, the annoying pest that says, “you were built for this.”

“There’s nothing I was built for,” she tries to say, but the words just sicken her, a swirl of rotted thoughts she can’t control.

Background: Today I received a text message from UTD telling me severe storms were battling their way through south Dallas Country. For one second, I thanked my lucky stars that I’d left Texas and avoided this mess, but in the next, fear began sucking at me, wheedling at me, worrying through me as I thought about my friends, my loved ones, all the beautiful people I cherish and trust and miss back home. Granted, I didn’t have to worry about my own, Lucas’s, or our cats’ safety, but there are so many others I love and hate to worry about in a swirl of devastation like that.

And then I also remembered: two days ago, I wrote a piece about a coming tornado, touching down and wreaking havoc on the Great Plains. I’ve pasted it below. I had placed it on my FB page, but hidden it the same day because it seemed over-dramatic, and now, it seems real, too real. So here it is:

Fragment, a storm

There’s a wall of black moving in, a storm. The clouds roll down until they touch the rippling fields, the bowed trees, the sagging ply-wood houses. Nothing can escape this.

Nothing can stop the inevitable wreckage to follow, the flapping curtains that breathed lilac and honey, now soggy and buried in a swirl of burnt, creosote-soaked two-by-fours. Shreds of pink insulation float like cotton candy in the air, buoyed on by the wafting stench of sewage, unburied and unmoored and seeking its own shelter, always.

The last offering soaked into the earth, the rain and the lightning and thunder skitter down, precursors to the party, the whirl of world in the clouds, the breaking sweat that finally pours into a funnel, finally pours into our reckoning.

The plains and the petrichor and the last ones left to witness how the wind does move, how it takes everything up for itself, sweeping and sweeping and sweeping until all we have left–all we ever have left–is gone. Is clean.

(1 April 2012)

My story, “A Lesson in Metempsychosis,” is up at Extract(s) today! This was the very first piece I wrote at Clarion West, so if you want to know what I was thinking about that first morning we had a story due (back in good ol’ 2010), please take a journey through my mental landscape. Usually, after every story I write I carry around a feeling of shame. I always violate some boundary or hurt something in a story that makes me feel people should keep a wide berth. So maybe that explains the story. Who knows. Was the me in the past talking to the me in the future? Maybe it’s just a story. Let’s go with that. I mean, come on. A story with giant, soul-swapping crows? What more could you want? Also, it’s like 800 words, so it’s like twice as long as this meandering blog post about it.