Sort of a WOTF follow-up
I'll be posting about WOTF in bits and snatches, it seems, and not always chronologically.

Anyway, I came away from the workshop with two imperatives. "Write write write!" is maybe obvious, and I'm saving the writing discussion for later. Maybe less obvious is "Read read read!" Head co-instructor Tim Powers said this explicitly several times, and off the top of his head listed bunches of authors we should be reading: Homer, Chaucer, Hemingway, Faulkner, Chandler, Milton, Trollope, Kipling. He had a similarly spontaneous list of poets that I can't seem to find in my notes right now, although I know it included Eliot, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Auden.

Then there's the list of reference books he and the other co-instructor K.D. Wentworth agreed every writer should have:
-Bartlett's Quotations
-Asimov's Guide to pretty much anything, particularly Shakespeare and the sciences
-a good visual dictionary
-Durant's History of Civilization
-Edith Hamilton's Mythology (for classical mythology, obviously; its coverage of Norse mythology is, shall we say, slightly inadequate, and it doesn't touch on other mythologies at all)
-an old Encyclopedia Britannica - they recommended the 9th edition, published around 1911 and apparently now available free online. As they said, the size of the Encyclopedia has remained the same, so whenever new articles are put in, old articles are taken out. Now, consider with awe just what might have been considered obsolete or irrelevent information in 1911...
-The Joy of Cooking
-Conceptual Physics, by Paul G. Hewitt (edited for spelling) - an older edition is fine
-National Geographic on CD ROM.
-books on: architecture, guns, sailing, horseback riding
-"Daily Life in..." types of books

Plus there are the books they mentioned in passing, like The Secret History of the Senses that K.D. mentioned and that I absolutely must read, or Chesterton's The Everlasting Man, which Tim read an excerpt from when he was talking about "fairy tale logic." (Not that I haven't been meaning to read more Chesterton, anyway.)

Then there are all these books that now want to read because I've met the authors. I have Powers' The Anubis Gates sitting on my shelf but just haven't gotten around to reading it yet. Now that I've met Sean Williams, who may be one of the nicest guys on planet Earth, I really want to read something of his. There's all the Pohl stuff that's been on my list for years, like Man Plus (also on my shelf) and Gateway.

Oh, yes, and since I was hanging out with a bunch of SFF geeks the whole week, of course we talked about books. I think Pat Lundrigan (dandyfunk) may have convinced me to give Alistair Reynolds another try, and after geeking out over Gene Wolfe with Erin's (therinth) boyfriend Paul, I think it's time to reread The Book of the New Sun. Talking with ericjamesstone reminded me that I have that free ebook copy from Tor of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn. And I know there are more that I'm not remembering at the moment.

So: Write lots. Read lots. Off I go, now.