Tuesday, March 09, 2010

she's writing, she's weaving, conceiving a plot

This is a four minute post. I had a fairly awful day; I spent the drive down to work in a continuation of the same weird panic-attack moment that I had last night, which didn't exactly get me off on the right foot. I interrupted my brooding to get my allergy shots, then continued brooding/slogging for the next several hours. I unfortunately had to cancel lunch with Vidya because I had too much random crap (none of it particularly interesting/fun) to do today, and I had meetings this afternoon (shocking, considering that I never have meetings anymore) before leaving early to go to Stanford for my creative writing class.

So I won't go into detail on the brooding, but it's no doubt tied to the fact that I'm getting older and should theoretically be making some commitments, but the urge to run away (or chop off my hair, which is usually inextricably linked to running away) is growing more intense by the day. I'll leave it at that, and hope that I check myself before I wreck myself.

Anyway, I went to class tonight, and it was better than I expected; the discussion of "The Last Summer of the World" was quite good, and then we workshopped my story and a story from another member of the class. I'm sure that was partially why I was in a bad mood today, because I had savaged the story in my head after I handed it in (it was really the first draft and I knew it had issues and so I was a bit embarrassed by it). But, the class was of course very nice, and they didn't savage it; and the instructor said that the tone was a very nice mix of sophisticated prose and light romanticism, and that the almost-flippant tone disguised but didn't ruin the sophistication of the underlying writing. This pleased me, of course; while in my head this piece wasn't exactly a romance, the class knows about my romance writing and so read it through that lens, and through that lens it still worked. The feedback was all extremely helpful, and I could see myself continuing this piece (it's set during the Crusades, so if I ever want to write medievals...) -- but I need to work on Madeleine and Ferguson's story first.

And now, this is patently not a four-minute post, and I really need to go to bed. Goodnight!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You may be getting "older", but I am getting less young. Slater

Anonymous said...

Some of the "word verifications" are interesting. Recently the word was "marin". That is about as close to a regular word as I have seen. But they do now appear to come in would be words with possible syllables. Today's word is "recularp". Any good definitions? Perhaps a repeating culling device that sorts things. For instance, a device that sorts copper from aluminum coins. Slater

Anonymous said...

The new word is too rich, "deverize". If it was daverize it would be the act of sorting coins on a recularp.

Anonymous said...

WTF? No new post = 1,000 years bad luck.