I attended a writing workshop at the Hugo House yesterday with Charles de Lint. He is one of my favorite authors – he writes clean, upbeat, intersting fiction where his characters deal with current problems – all of it set in cities and towns and touched by magic. He calls it Mythic Fiction (and says he doesn’t like the term urban fantasy).

The workshop was good – it’s nice to have most of a day to just talk about stories. The most interesting part for me was Charles’ statement that he writes for himself – he sits down to write essentially so he can read the next few pages of his novel. My work feels like that, too, since I don’t write from detailed outlines. But I’d never thought of it that way.

Another nice bit was that I’m used to being surrounded by sci fi and fantasy buffs that are well and truly steeped in our tropes at conventions. This was a wider audience, and it was fun to hear different perspectives.