This is a four-minute post. I was really not feeling the whole work thing, and so didn't get there early as I have for the past couple of months, and I left at 5:15 to have dinner with Terry. I was still productive while I was there, and I also answered some emails when I got home, but writing so much last night definitely made me want to sleep more to recover.
Dinner with Terry was good; we went to CPK in Palo Alto, which I love, and I ate an obscene amount of roasted garlic chicken pizza. We discussed Madeleine and Ferguson a bit, and when I got home, all I really wanted to do was keep writing -- but I need to do the assignment for my Stanford class. So, I got through the required reading for the assignment tonight, although I stayed up a bit longer than I intended to do so. This week's assignment is to read four short stories by Flannery O'Connor ("A Good Man is Hard to Find", "Good Country People", "Everything That Rises Must Converge", and "Revelation"), and then write a two-page story (either a complete short-short, or a fragment of a longer story) that is a creative response to O'Connor using at least three of the stylistic choices that O'Connor used in her work.
The interesting thing is that when I'm writing something patently unlike my real life (romance, for example), I have no trouble coming up with characters who have little in common with me and who do things that I would never dream of doing myself. But when I'm writing 'literary' fiction, I am still in amateur mode, basing my work heavily in personal experience. So my challenge to myself is to make this a story in the truest sense of the word, rather than semi-autobiographical. The challenge of responding to O'Connor's style while simultaneously coming up with characters and plot out of thin air is daunting, but I have tomorrow and Friday to accomplish it, so hopefully I'll be fine.
This is slightly more than four minutes, so it's officially time for bed!
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