I'm Nisi Shawl, a multiple award-winning writer and editor.  My quasi-up-to-date website is nisishawl.com; you can find out there about previous publications and so on.  For this campaign I'm hoping to raise $1100 in donations to Clarion West in support of a story I've started writing titled "The Green and the Grey."  Here's an excerpt from the current draft:

    The last day of the first part of his life, Fennescue rose six minutes before the phone grumbled.  He had programmed his phone’s alarm to start by clearing its virtual throat, and that was enough to strip away the last vestiges of sleep.  Reaching carefully over his slumbering sexJoy, he tapped the phone’s touchpad to preemptively silence the alarm.  Then he sat, still careful to avoid the sexJoy’s proximity triggers.  A soft grunt, a slow stretch, another reach--too close this time.  The sexJoy stirred, burrowing half its sleek bulk beneath the bed’s knitted silk topsheet before he could switch it from standby to shutdown.
    He got up.  He thought about the unfortunates who couldn’t afford a daily shower as he padded down the hall to the wing’s tiled wetroom.  He had to pee, too.  The bidet’s seat was warm--warmer than it ought to be.  Bridge had used it ahead of him.  She liked to poach on his territory.  Power posturing.  That was fine; it was just another way of acknowledging that he had won.
    He pushed the bidet’s plunger and stood by the room’s drain to activate his shower.  Near-scalding streams of pure water struck him on all sides, at every angle.  Colorless, scentless--a brief foray into 20th century spy novels had infatuated him with Ian Fleming’s James Bond character and his spartan hygiene regimen, so Fennescue eschewed additives.  And now the shower’s temperature shifted to cold, its jets pumping faster, harder, emulating Bond’s trademark icy-needled finish.

    He dressed absentmindedly in charcoal-colored separates, silently rehearsing the morning’s first calls: to the ironically named Dodo Corp, to the pong magnate he was courting, to the house attorney responsible for vetting freelancers’ contract requests.  But all that was forgotten when he entered his office and saw the blinking message on his desk.
 

Thank you for your donations--I finished this story!  Now my critique group, STEW, is going to help me make it so much better.  In the week during which I'll wait for their comments, I'm ginning up my next project: something about working with non-human intelligence.

Clarion West 2023 Write-a-thon

Amal El-Mohtar during the 2019 Summer Reading Series

The Write-a-thon supports Clarion West programs year-round. All donations support Clarion West classes, workshops, panels, and other programs for emerging writers, including our Six-Week Workshop. We also hold events, offer scholarships, raise awareness, and promote diverse speculative fiction in Seattle and all over the world. 

Clarion West

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