5 Tips for Catching a Pterodactyl

Jeopardy Question: What do Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dickens, and my friend Holly from grad school all have in common?

Answer: They've all -in their own natural, unthreatening ways- been convicting me about writerly procrastination.

When some writers procrastinate or go way out of their way to do other things instead of write, there's usually a reason for it. As a creative writing teacher, I hear these stories and say, "Well, it sounds like there's something scary in your writing that you're avoiding" or "Maybe your idea is just so big that you're blocking yourself." The latter might be true as there are just too many ideas floating in my head and I don't know which one to write first. But recently I've also discovered that it's a seasonal thing: as a teacher, I want to pack as much into summer as it can possibly hold, which so far has included Disneyland, Portland, and, unfortunately, tonsillitis. It's also included an increase in reading and I'm proud to look back and recognize that I've read:

-The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost
-Old Man in the Sea by Hemingway
-On Paris by Hemingway
-The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison
-The Thin Man by Dashiel Hammett
-Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
-The Road by Carmac McCarthy
-More F in Exams/F for Effort by Richard Benson
-Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
-Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald by Scott Donaldson
-Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
-The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

Um, that's 12 books, guys. That's three books short of a grad school semester's load. Now all I need to do is write an annotation for all of them and I've just completed 12 credit hours. I don't slight it by any means, but no wonder I've only managed to write a short bit when my focus has been so unfalteringly upon reading -okay, reading with interrupting for grading ENG101, writing freelance articles, and day-tripping.

Someone kindly told me that freelance writing is still writing -writing that I'm getting paid for- so I shouldn't be so harsh on myself. But I am hard on myself, because what creativity comes from writing about pterodactyl sightings or "How to Properly Sit in a Kayak"? Some of these might take creativity to make them interesting, but at the end of the day, my artistic hunger isn't sated for it.

Then the reading started speaking to me. Hemingway was frustrated with Fitzgerald because Fitzgerald didn't take the time to write, and when he did, he would block himself so much that all he was good for was sweet little stories for The Saturday Evening Post instead of real, important work. Charles Dickens wrote Oliver Twist as a serial over the course of two years. For two years he'd committed to one story line, printing chapters weekly. No breaks. No apologies. No "Well, I just don't feel like it." I read The Paris Wife in two days, a historical fiction novel from the perspective of Hadley, Hemingway's first wife. Even through fiction Hemingway doesn't alter his course. He pisses people off because he needs time to write. He has vision. He is unapologetic. He has focus.

So in the vein of wanting to write creatively but stuck in freelance writing mode, here are five tips for catching a pterodactyl -or rather, keeping a consistent writing practice:
1. Show up. Nothing gets written if you just dream about what you're going to write about.
2. Outline if your ideas are too big.
3. Give yourself permission to only write about one facet of your big idea.
4. Set a timer and commit to the time. It doesn't have to be all day, it can be 20 minutes.
5. Give yourself permission to write all crap. The longer you wait to come back to writing, the harder it'll be, so it's best to write something -anything- now. Even if it's crap. Especially if it's crap. It can only get better from there.

Ready. Set. Go.

What Writers Say in Tragedy

By now I'm sure that you've heard about the 19 firefighters that fell in the Yarnell Hill Fire. It's made national news, and it was heartbreaking to see Andew Ashcraft's widow on the Today show yesterday.

What do writers say in tragedy?

People think that because we're "good with words" that we know what to say and how to say it, but how artificial would it feel if we as writers had practiced phrases that we whip out in these times? A writer's job is to be true to emotions and true to ourselves, and when we ourselves have been struck by tragedy, writers are no more expected to materialize words than other grievers.

My brother was on this crew a few years ago. It seems like a cliche to say that this "struck close to home." What does that mean, anyway? That we had a close call? Because we did. That we're thankful my brother is still with us? Because we are. That we are devastated for those families as if they were our own? Because it's true. My brother being on the crew drew me close to a group of men that I wouldn't otherwise have known, men that I would have merely thanked for being public servants. And while I only knew one who perished (Clayton Whitted, you're with your Lord and Savior now), by association I knew all of them.

I'm an active mourner. When stuff happens, my first instinct is to do something. It's funny that writing is only my second instinct, but if you think about it, it is still an active something. I may not be called to serve to these families directly, but through writing, I can serve them, and best of all, I can serve the firefighter's memories.

To you 19 who perished, I honor and respect your sacrifice. You went into every fire knowing that you might not come out, and for that I thank you for going into this fire honorably. Thank you for loving your community, and thank you for serving us by the greatest sacrifice. I promise to serve your families whenever I can and to keep your memory strong.

(This was the last photo taken by Andrew Ashcraft, and the last text he sent to his wife.)

See, in times of tragedy, writers don't need to say something that hasn't been said before (because I'm sure everything I've written has already been written), but it is up to a writer to speak what is true. Hemingway said that if he couldn't write anything else, he would strive to write one true thing a day. This is the truth today, and writing it down makes it as real and as immortal as the memory of these great men.

It doesn't feel like enough, but it feels like something.

Hairy Houdini and Other Reflections from Housesitting

I should write a book about this.

What is story? It's easy to get too compartmentalized with regards to story, like saying that books and movies are different from journalism and different from what happens when you come home from work and tell your spouse about your day. These are all stories, my friends, and the best and most interesting stories are ones in which unexpected things happen.

I housesit a lot, which suits me because I don't mind getting paid to read and work at someone else's house. Yes, there's more to it than that like watering plants, walking dogs, and the like, but it's just a lifestyle change for a temporary amount of time. I used to say that it was easy money. 

Past tense.

Because things happen when I housesit, and I guess looking back, weird things have always happened to me while housesitting. There was the time that the fire alarm beeped due to low battery which freaked out the little dogs resulting in one pooping all over the bed and the other running through it. Yeah, that was fun. And then there was the time when I took the trash out on a summer night and the door locked behind me so I had to traverse barefoot around the woods to get through the back door which I knew I had left unlocked. And then there was the snowy night when at 9pm someone was repeatedly ringing the doorbell. In the past, however, these have been just funny stories that I share around a campfire. 

But why do we read books? And what's the difference in reading a book around the campfire as opposed to telling stories around the campfire? 

I'm currently housesitting for Hairy Houdini. Yes, this dog waits until I'm not home to find the one place in the fence where he can somehow sneak through. On day one of my stay, the neighbor called because he'd gotten out so I had done as much fence repair as I could. Aside from pooping in the house, the rest of the stay has gone on uneventfully. Yesterday I was home all day, had a bit of a book-hangover as I'd stayed up until about 1am finishing Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, and I started The Road by Cormac McCarthy after writing a few articles and grading for my online class. I thought the most unpleasant the day got was when I stepped in one of the yard's land mines, but then the next door neighbor got home and told me about Hairy Houdini getting out. After some conversation, I discerned that he's still been getting out, but she's been putting him back in the yard. We both mended the fence after some trouble-shooting, and then I went to dinner. In the hour and a half I was gone, Houdini got out of the yard 4 times. Yeah, um, I've since placed a long two-by-four in that gap so that he doesn't keep jumping that corner of the fence. We'll see if it works. 

But this isn't nearly as interesting of a story as two weeks ago when I was housesitting for a different family and the neighbors called the cops on me. Evidently dogs don't like when the fire alarm beeps due to low battery. I've already mentioned what ensued a few years ago when it happened, but this time I awoke to find the dogs sleeping outside without even entertaining the thought of going inside for breakfast. I only had a little bit of time before church started, so I ran outside, found a latter that was, of course, covered in spiderwebs and since it's early still, the spiders were moving along nicely on those webs killing and eating moths, etc. Gross. So I found a broom, brushed them off, carried the ladder inside the house aaaaaaaand it wasn't tall enough. Of course. So I took the ladder back outside (the spiderwebs were all re-built by mid afternoon), and tried to think of another option that didn't involve calling the homeowner's brother at 7:30 in the morning. Then I remembered that there was a sliding ladder alongside the other side of the house. I evicted the spiders again, and then realized that the ladder was too long to weed through the narrow hallways of the house to get to the master bedroom. Ta-da: I removed the window screen and led it through the window. This is when the neighbors called the police, because it's not natural for a stranger in a polka-dotted dress to be leading a ladder through a window at 7:45 on Sunday morning. After a dangerous climb and replacing a battery that was so far out of my reach that I couldn't even look at it as I did it, I accomplished the goal, replaced the screen and the ladder, and rushed off to be late for church, passing the police cars on my way out of the neighborhood. It wasn't until later that I realized that 1) I could have called the fire department to change it for me, or 2) that there was a curtained screen door around the corner in the master bedroom, so I could have gone through the screen door instead of removing the window screen. Oh, well. 

Maybe I've told these stories too many times by now, but isn't that indicative of a good story? The details, now, have been gone over so many times that I won't forget them. It's told in the traditions of The Iliad or The Odyssey, verbal and with memory, not altogether different from written versions of those same stories. And here these housesitting stories are now written down, too.

Kristen Kauffman, housesitter

Average duties: walking and feeding dogs, watering plants, running out garbage barrels, checking the mail, and doing the dishes and the laundry at end of stay.

Additional duties: Washing floors and furniture that have been pooped or barfed on, picking up pieces of lamps that have been chewed, mending fences, fixing fire alarms, fixing windows, transporting animals from neighbor's house down the block back to home, calling the Humane Society, receiving calls from Animal Control and the Police Department, and escorting uninvited crazy neighbors from inside the house.

Will charge extra for: items been chewed beyond repair such as phone cords and shoes. 

Jury Duty Meets The Thin Man

Other jurors hate me -or I guess to be more accurate they love me, because by saying that I want to be selected, they don't have to be. Today, I had jury duty and there I was, the cheerful prospective member with my journal and my vending machine coffee, bright-eyed and nerding-out about the possibility to exhibit my Sherlockian skills.

Yes, I did seriously think that.

I opened my journal to even write that thought down when the gentleman next to me commented on my being left-handed. He's left-handed, too, so we talked about hating pencils, 3-ring binders, and my penchant for fountain pens as I smear ink far less than with a gel-pen or a ball-point pen. Then I caught myself confessing: "And, as you can imagine, my left hand is stronger, so when I use the typewriter, you can always tell which letters are on the left side because I press the letters harder and the ink is darker because-" I was about to explain the technique of keys and typewriter ribbons, but seeing he was older (I would learn later that was 64), I said instead, "Well, you know."

"Say," he replied, "That would be a really interesting detective clue; you know, the detective reads the finished paper and then knows that the criminal was right or left handed depending on how strong the ink is for those letters."

"Ooh, I should write that down," I replied. "I could use that." And therein led to confessing my deep, dark secret: not only am I a writer, but I actually want to be selected for this jury. So when the Jury Commissioner led us through our rights and expectations, she reached one point that said, "You may not do any personal investigation, including visiting any of the places involved in this case, using Internet maps or Google Earth, talking to any possible witnesses, or creating your own demonstrations or reenactments of the events which are the subject of this case." He chuckled and raised an eyebrow at me. 

I hereby declare that I, Kristen Marie Kauffman, will not attempt to be Sherlock Holmes, that I do not have high-functioning Aspergers, I don't have a French accent like Hercule Poirot, and I do not arrive uninvited to people's homes like Miss Marple. 

I did, however, refrain from getting the mystery novel out of my purse, and I said nothing of having recently finished reading The Thin Man or having watched the movie last night. Suffice to say, I may be like Myrna Loy, though, and may coyly be more observant and smarter than I look. 

 
Did I get selected? Yes, I'm supposed to report back next Wednesday. What case am I on? I can't tell you that part, silly. 

Film Adaptations

I'm not gonna lie: I usually hate book to film adaptations. It's not merely the obvious I-can-imagine-it-so-much-better problem, but the omission and reshuffling of plot points. The amalgams of characters. The simplification of driving questions. *sigh Really, people?


Perhaps the films I've been the most disappointed with claim to be Wuthering Heights. I don't know what book they opened, but the book I read had passion and an undying love, albeit crazy and vengeful. Cathy, though careless, was graceful. Heathcliff, though crazy, loved Cathy so much that it controlled the rest of his life (and his children's lives). This is classic Romantic Era drama: the heroes make really stupid mistakes but still manage to be noble. Nobility, however, has evaded cinema; The 1939 Laurence Olivier version ended with Cathy dying, cutting out half of the plot. The 1970 Timothy Dalton version made my fall asleep, and the 1992 Ralph Fiennes version seemed to cut only my favorite lines from the book but portrayed Heathcliff as certifiably crazy and Cathy as a manipulative wench. Come on, people.

To be fair, I haven't seen the 2011 version or the 2009 Tom Hardy version, though admittedly I'm dragging my feet on seeing them because as long as I haven't seen them, they might actually be good. (I'm secretly hoping they are.)

But I have been surprised recently.My first surprise was Life of Pi.  At first I had zero intention on

seeing it, especially when I found out it was going to be in 3D -typically a craze reserved for capes, flying webs, explosions, and robots supposed to be intelligent but reassure us that they're not via juvenile humor. Since the book didn't contain any of these, why should I see it in 
3D and thus encourage studio makers to participate in stories with no plot? Beyond that, I loved the book so much that I didn't want my memory to be replaced by a bad adaptation. 
But when someone whose opinion I respect said not only that it was good but that it was loyal to the book, Okay, I'm in. I just watched it again the day before yesterday and I was reminded with its loyalty. While Ang Lee reshuffled a few minor details, the main points are there, and he actually (dare I say) enhanced the plot by making the Author's

Note into it's own storyline. Brilliant. And through that Author's Note, the powerful and story-changing end really sings. Reluctantly I went to see it in 3D and was reminded that this is why we see movies in this novelty: it's not enough to carry the film (as superhero, action, and children's movies often depend on), but it is enough to enhance the plot and to make the images breathtaking. It was worth it. And with Ang Lee's gorgeous design style, is it possible that I like the movie even more than the book? Nah. Because even the beautiful movie omitted graceful lines such as: "That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?"Another: "If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?" Yet another and possibly my favorite: "If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation."


But one movie was able to capture the narration that I felt was omitted in the previous likable 

adaptation: The Great Gatsby was a very pleasant surprise. Baz Luhrmann has given us movies like Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge, and Australia, movies that -though I love them- start with fast-paced high adrenaline and then chill out, movies with loud, pumping music, and climaxes that surprise me in spiteful contrast to their beginnings. I've also noticed that Luhrmann loves characters who run and characters who shout. I know that we as writers need the main character to want something desperately for the tension to be interesting, but there's only so much running and shouting you can observe before it's a clear pattern. That was what the trailer portrayed: running and shouting. Great. Then it came out and I brought to the theater a class of excited, fidgety high schoolers after a half

day. They dressed up in 20's dresses and feathers, I nerded out about wanting to marry the handsome Mr. DiCaprio (if you're one of my readers, sir, send me an email *wink), and though I swore I would reserve my expectations, I had high ones. The movie met them, pleasantly, and (again, dare I say) exceeded them. I think this could be the most loyal book to film adaptation that I've ever seen. (Gasp.) It was well-paced and genuine, the narration was graceful without being stilted, and while the music involves hip-hop, it's roots are Gershwin. I loved it. Does that come through? I'm being sarcastic, because I realize my review is a stellar one, but it was so much more involved than the 1974 Robert Redford version omitted almost all of Gatsby's backstory. Not only did Luhrmann include, well, everything except for a few infinitesimally minor scenes and one minor character, but he also did so much research that it couldn't help but to be inspired. In fact, Luhrmann and his wife said in the New York Times the week before the movie premiered that the research was almost more fun than shooting the movie. I think I would agree with that. One more thing: I was likewise reserved when I heard that Gatsby was going to be in 3D, and, well, again there are no tights or capes or idiotic robots in the book so I was reluctant to indulge. However, I was pleasantly surprised. While I forgot about halfway through that I was watching a 3D film, there were certain green light scenes that were awe-inspiring.

So go see these fabulous films. I've seen Gatsby in the theater thrice, now. These films are why they adapt books into film. Movies like Wuthering Heights, on the other hand...

The Big Sleep and Reasons Why William Faulkner Might Not Have Been the Best Screenwriter of All Time

Books I Bought Last Week:

None. Can you believe it? 

Books I’ve Finished This Year:

-East of Eden by John Steinbeck

-Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

-Silk by Alessandro Barico

-Weird Things Customers Say in Bookstores

-The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

-Animal Farm by George Orwell
-The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
-The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 
-Grimm's Fairytales by the Brothers Grimm
-Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Currently Reading:
-The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific by J. Maarten Troost


I bought another typewriter.

On Sundays, teachers, students, and military get a 25% off of their total purchase, so what on Thursday had been $12.99 for a typewriter I wasn't sure I wanted, today turned into a casually frantic search for a $9.75 typewriter. I found it tucked above scales and under food processors in a case that on second glace wasn't broken after all. It was only cosmetically dirty (nothing that rubbing alcohol can't fix) and the keys worked fine, though a younger and less experienced generation of buyers thought it didn't work due to needing a new ribbon. Okay, where does one find typwriter ribbon anymore? After two office supply stores and a total of five quizzical glances from men who didn't quite know how to handle the nerdy anomaly excited to find typewriter ribbon, I victoriously drove down the highway with my window down, listening to Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros play my favorite summer song, "Kisses Over Babylon." (http://youtu.be/CR8xbCPvr-o)

What stuck with me was much less contemporary than my song, or even my car (though it is nearly 20 years old. Yikes.) -I love old things. Old, old things. I use my recently acquired typewriter as a segue into what I had intended to blog about today: Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, Musso&Franks, and noir. (If I were a radio host, I would change the theme music from Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros to something more fitting, say Woody Herman, http://youtu.be/hK_9otl3sZ0)

I grew up watching old movies and The Big Sleep with Humphrey Bogart was one of my favorites.It captured everything I loved about noir films, and the plot was so intense that I used to use it as a litmus test for adulthood: if I could figure out the murderer, then and just then I'd be a

grown-up. What I didn't realize is that not even the director knew who the murderer was -but I'm getting ahead of myself. In the meantime, I was growing up, starting college, getting curious in literature, and The Big Sleep was one of the first few books I ever bought.

But I never read it.

That doesn't surprise you, does it, reader? The blogger who struggles with reading books as fast as she buys them? Nah. So it mustn't surprise you, then, that I didn't read it until this year, until over ten years after I bought it. I probably wouldn't have, to be honest, if I hadn't had a conversation with a colleague at the college about noir 

films. Reminded by how confusing the plot was and realizing I'd never read a Raymond Chandler book before, I decided that now would be the time. Coincidentally, only a week or so after I'd begun reading, a writer's conference I attended mentioned noir films and directly quoted from The Big Sleep. Omitted from the film (as most of the real plot is), Chandler describes Phillip Marlowe as a kind of cynical warrior, and as he steps into the Sternwood mansion, he sees a huge stained glass window of a knight rescuing the damsel in distress. What's interesting about noir, though, is that the damsel in distress is almost always a femme fatal, and she certainly is in this book. Marlowe is compelled to save her via the knight-in-shining-armor motif, though he knows in saving her, how exactly dangerous she is. But even more interestingly is the idea that noir is so purely American. While Swedish noir (like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) is becoming popular now, previously it was very American, very cowboy-ish in the sense that the renegade independent comes out of the wilderness to rescue someone and to restore justice, and then he recedes back to his solitary lifestyle. If noir is cowboy-ish, then it's no wonder that noir hit it's silver screen popularity in California, America's last frontier.

By Chandler's cynical voice through the first person Phillip Marlowe is the charm of the book. While he's bitter and makes comments about society, his eye for detail is both thoughtfully introspective and sometimes funny. I was pulled in almost immediately, especially with phrases like "Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead." Later when he references the dead man, he says, "His glass eye shone brightly up at me and was by far the most life-like thing about him." Later as he notices that someone has moved the body, he says, "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts." Who is this detective? He wants to come off as street-smart, savvy, too cool for school -and he is- but he's also a beautiful thinker, a philosopher. The end -no, I won't ruin it for you- is so beautifully worded that I couldn't help but to sigh with the last turned page. Read it. You have to.

By the way, the book is completely different from the movie. Raymond Chandler wrote it while sitting in the back booth of Musso&Franks on Hollywood Boulevard. It was established in 1919 and

among M&F's patronage includes not just Chandler who wrote his only four novels from the back corner booth, but also William Faulkner who rewrote The Big Sleep in script form, their contemporary Ernest Hemingway who drank at the bar (big surprise) with F. Scott Fitzgerald (big surprise). Tennessee Williams was there. Everyone was there: Charlie Chaplin had a favorite booth, Marilyn Monroe had a favorite booth, and all of the  directors and producers intermingled there. As someone who loves Old Hollywood, I would have loved to go there anyway, but I finished the book as we were already driving out to California. Dad mentioned that Chandler wrote the whole thing at Musso&Frank's, and that he (my dad) had driven there several

Brink's truck driver to pick up money. In fact, when Brink's was having a tough time, the manager even offered him a job, knowing that he loved the place and that he loved Old Hollywood. The job didn't work out, but he appreciated the thought and remembered her. "Dad, let's go. I'll pay. It's not like we're here every day." So we went. We valet parked in the back lot and came in through the back door, looking old and sketch. This place is that amazing? I thought. But then we came around the corner to see the glossy floor, the wood paneling, the shiny red booths... No one has restaurants like this anymore. The manager that had offered Dad a job was now the owner and she remembered him -almost 30 years later. Crazy. She knew exactly which booth was Chandler's so as a nod to Chandler, I sat in his booth, holding a copy of his book. So surreal. 

So here is the funny thing about The Big Sleep: Raymond Chandler wrote this beautiful, complex story that had a few things in it that the Censor Board wouldn't pass in 1946, so William Faulkner (then screenwriter, not major American novelist) changed them for the script. Then Howard Hawks wanted Faulkner to add a few scenes to beef up Lauren Bacall's role in the film (she was very popular at the time, and even more popular starring in a movie with her new husband). So the already diluted, confusing plot became even more fuzzy with new scenes and character motivations. When Hawks was halfway through shooting the film, he said to Chandler, "Say, who is the murderer, after all?" Chandler, nearly speechless, said, "Ask your screenwriter. You've changed so much of the story, I couldn't tell you." When Howard Hawks asked Faulkner, he shrugged. "Eddy Mars seems like a crook. Let's pin it all on him." And that, my friends, is why the end of the movie differs so much from the end of the book, which is really a shame because the end of the book is brilliant and contains in it the namesake for the story. Otherwise, you watch the movie and you wonder what this has to do with sleep.

The moral to this story is to always go to the restaurant where your favorite book is written, sit in your author's booth, and get a drink at the bar from where your other favorite author drank with his frenemy. Here's the other moral of the story: always buy cheap typewriters at Goodwill.

Eternal Summer

Yeah, um, I know it's been a long time.

I'm sure somewhere that's on the top ten list of things not to say to your blogging readership, but, meh, honesty is what it is and writing never is what it could be when you deliberately avoid saying the thing you want to say.

So here's how things are from where I sit: I'm eating strawberries and almonds from a teal Earthenware bowl, I'm drinking the last of the morning's coffee from a cup with the handle formed from an arched horse, Woody Herman's old big band orchestra is faintly playing on my computer, and I'm sitting under a large shade tree pretending not to hear the trash truck making its rounds in the neighborhood. This is summer, my friends. This is the time of the year when I can reside barefoot in gym shorts and a long-sleeved Jane Eyre t-shirt, planning what my summer is going to look like, while knowing it's not as infinitely long as it seems right now.

My pledge to myself this summer is to write. More. Really. I've just spent the last ten months frantically squeezing editing into every spare moment, and while there's something distinctly teacher-ish about it (something that I secretly love), I haven't yet negotiated that balance in scheduling that allows me to do that, plus reading, plus writing. If you've been reading my blog for any length of time you know this: I need to stop buying books faster than I read them (hah) and this summer involves more dedicated reading.

But additionally, I'll be working with more short stories (probably Steampunk stories), I'll probably play with some creative nonfiction (essay or novel, who knows), and I'll set to reworking the novel-ish idea that I had last touched in November. Yeah, I told you it's been a while.

To be fair to my craft, I haven't been completely non-productive; I've polished and submitted to quite a few contests. I know contests are a gamble and that sometimes they feel like throwing away money, but even then I like the idea that these contests go to literary publications. Even if I don't win (which would be nice), my money is going to a starving writer like myself who could use the cash, and the rest of the money is going to the overhead costs of supporting accessible literature for the masses. I can live with that. Here is where I've submitted said work:

Conium Review: sent April 1st, heard May 1st: Rejection (Boo)
Mixer Magazine: sent April 14th, should hear by June 26th
Bristol Short Story Prize: sent April 10th, should hear mid-July
Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition: sent April 10th, should hear end of July
Spoon River Poetry Review: sent April 14th, should hear in August
River Styx Poetry Magazine: sent April 10th, should hear in October

I suppose that's another rule I've just broken: thou shalt not ever reveal where thou've sent work on the chance that thou shalt be rejected by all of them and thus appear inferior. To this again I say, meh. I am who I am. If rejection means I need to write more and improve more, then I'm game. I'm game anyway, so I'll ride the tides of chance.

Hemingway said he would strive to write one true thing a day and here's my truth for today: my current plans for summer seem eternal because they're my plans for life. Uninhibited by scheduling, I aspire to soar above my circumstances, to write and read and enjoy, to dream that my writing right now could be accepted by every publication, that there is nothing stopping me. Maybe that's a little bit of Gatsby and contemporary relevance getting to me, but I don't care. Maybe success has eluded me so far, but that's no matter, because today I'm going to run faster, stretch my arms out farther, and then one fine morning-- (Thanks, F. Scott.)