kate_schaefer | Clarion West 2012 Write-a-thon

Flex your writing fingers, sharpen your editing reflexes, dominate your submission process. Whatever your writing-related goals this summer, the Clarion West Write-a-thon can help you meet them.

What is the Write-a-thon? It's a way to state your writing goals publicly and work on them in community with other writers. It's a fundraiser to benefit Clarion West Writers Workshop, to raise general funds to pay for instructors, manuscript copies, facility rental, student scholarships, and everything else needed to run a workshop, right down to the paperclips.

The Write-a-thon is open to the whole Clarion West community: alumni, instructors, friends, passersby. The deadline for signing up for the Clarion West Write-a-thon is June 16, the day before the workshop starts. The sooner you sign up, the sooner your page will go live, and the happier the volunteers working on the Write-a-thon will be. The online sign-up form awaits you at:

http://clarionwest.org/writeathon

There are about 40 pages live already (thanks again, testers and early signups! I kiss your virtual feet), and we’d like to get as many more as we can set up in the next few days. Remember, the Write-a-thon is completely volunteer-run, and there will be some days when our volunteer hours have to be juggled in a particularly difficult way.*

Last year, we had 142 participants and 420 donors, and the goals for this year are even more ambitious: 200 participants and 500 donors. There's $2000 in challenge donations riding on the number of participants, so you can help Clarion West's bottom line just by making your writing goals public.

If you’ve done the Write-a-thon before, you know what it did for your productivity. C’mon back, and bring a friend with you. Got a challenge for your classmates? Bring it on!

Give yourself a tough but realistic writing goal and have a good time. If you’re not writing this year, cheer on those who are. Sign up sponsors in support of your goals, or just write alongside the others. Yes, the Write-a-thon is a fundraiser, and a very important fundraiser for Clarion West, but the writing is more important than the money. The writing comes first.

Thanks!**

* Okay, what I mean here is that I'm going to Alaska to visit my in-laws next week, which means that other volunteers will have to fill in for me. They're perfectly competent to do the stuff I usually do, but I usually do that stuff, you know? So I'm fussing about it and want to get it done ahead of time.

** My relentless boosterism is aimed at Clarion West in Seattle, but I'll also cheer on adherents of our sister workshop, Clarion in San Diego. Their workshop starts a week later than ours, so the deadline for signing up for their Write-a-thon is later than our deadline. Some people do both, for seven weeks worth of writing goals rather than six.