My Mouth Is Full

I bit off more than I can chew. Surprise. The third UCLA class started, and while the exercises in character are awesome and helpful for my novel, I can never seem to get them posted. I leave in two days for Washington DC to visit my cousins, then head south to Hilton Head for a writer's retreat that I was supposed to have a one-page synopsis, a cover letter and the first fifteen pages of my novel submitted to the instructor of, by like, last Monday. Luckily he's a friend, so he's letting me slide, but 'tis not an auspicious beginning... does not bode well for our hero... feels like dark foreshadowing to me. Gloom. Doom. Drudgery. Despair. All things Nanowrimo, and it's not even November yet.

Epiphany

I've been going to the local acupuncture clinic on a semi-regular basis to get help with my knees, my neck and my stress level, and almost every time I come back from a session I have an epiphany of some sort. Tonight was no exception save in the significance of what I've become present to.

As I left the clinic parking lot, I started to worry about whether I'd find a parking spot, then decided that it was pointless since I wouldn't know until I got home anyway, and if there were no street parking I could always pull into my garage. After finding the perfect parking spot around the corner from my apartment, I stood outside on the sidewalk for a few minutes, just enjoying the quietness and dark fogginess and feeling of solitude - nobody apparently around. My mind quieted itself in fits and starts, and finally let through the realization, as I started to walk up the path to my gate with ferrets trying to chew my brain about my story titles, that I'm doing my life's work. Right here, right now. Writing. This is it. And it's okay that I get this tightness in my stomach and my breath comes shorter - I'm famous for telling other people how easy it is to confuse fear and excitement - I need to listen to my own advice. Sure, I'm afraid of sucking, but even if I do now, I won't always, and it's exciting to look forward to reading my books and stories in print. I don't have to be afraid of it.

Somehow, as I rounded the corner to my front gate, I got that writing is enough. I don't have to save the world - the things that satisfy me such as doing volunteer work are enough to fulfill that need to go hands-on with helping. I'll always do that and that's okay. Writing is both plenty and enough to make a mark in the world. And maybe if someday somebody reads something I've written and it makes a difference, I will have, in some small, quiet sense, have saved that person in a way that I can be satisfied with. It sounds like hubris, but I believe that powerful writing touches and lights something in us when we allow it in, and that's what I want to do. It's all I've ever wanted to do.

Okay - back again with cute pic that reminds me of when I was a teeny littl'un tossing crumbled Moon Pies into the Mississippi River. It fits the mood of the novel I'm writing, so deal with the cuteness - you won't go blind if I don't.

I got my first short story/scene exercise thingy back from my Tuesday night class, and it was all tattered and bloody. Gotta love the power of the red pen. Served me right, though - I hated the exercise and what I was given to work with and so rebelled by doing a poor first draft. I got dinged for all the stupid amateur crap I deserved to get dinged for.

Am now conflicted - if I didn't like it and didn't care how it turned out, should I feel bad for not doing well, or should I feel bad for not doing my best no matter how I felt about the exercise, for not turning in professional work no matter how unengaging I felt the material to be? All it was was an injunction to write 2-4 pages where the ending paragraph had to include an action and a profession that had been supplied by other students. I ended up with a bogus list - all I could strike a spark off of was flying and monkey handler. You see where this one is going, right? At least I showed some restraint and didn't write about monkeys flying out of Kafka's ass. Maybe I should have.

Oh, and also, I'm no longer feeling purple, so I've changed my blogskin. It's too much of a subconscious invite to write purple prose, and since Hustler magazine won't return my phone calls, I shouldn't waste my time getting all sweaty that way.

'Sperimenting...wait one....

I've been racking my brain and raiding Google to figure out just what the hell literary fiction is - thanks to a fellow WriMo (whose name I promptly forgot) and some writer dude named David Lubar, I now have as good a definition as any.

Oh, and he also offers up this fascinating factoid: "When Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy met for the first time, they immediately got into a bragging match. First, they started comparing facial hair. Then, they got into a vodka-drinking contest. Finally, they began shouting, "Bet I can write a longer book than you," and "Bet you can't," at each other. Millions of innocent readers have suffered the consequences of this rivalry."

I feel so much better now, like I finally understand everything there is to know about litfic, even if there are crumbs in my butter and my eyebrows are furrowing uncontrollably.

I'm Baaaaack.

Not sure if that's a good thing, but that giant sucking sound you hear is me getting caught up in Nano-ey goodness again.

And I'm also taking two, no wait, three classes from UCLA's Writers Program, which is bitchin' neato and what my life's all about. One has me focusing on short stories (whee!!! playtime) and the other my novel(s) and I'm going to a writer's retreat on Hilton Head the first week of November, so that's gonna be interesting in the greater Nano scheme of things... how freaked out and over-compartmentalized can I possibly get?

I'm getting ready, though. I'm getting strong. Bought some steel-cut oatmeal to fortify my diet. And today, got myself a nifty coffee roaster doogiemaflinger which is all One Hand Clapping's fault.