Sorry I'm late.
I do like to try to be consistent, but I overslept this
morning and it was a crazy day where we all of us had to be out of the house
early so something had to give and it was the blog. If you missed my 6:30 or so appearance, my apologies; these
things happen. If you didn't notice...ignore this paragraph.
I had one of those days at my writers' circle yesterday. I
wrote furiously for the better part of 45 minutes or so, filling about five
sides of notebook paper in my hard to read writing. That's a lot for me; lately, I've been much more like a side and a half. Along the way, I scrawled 'WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP!'
across the bottom of page 4, partly because I had lost control of the piece—I kind
of knew how I wanted it to end, but couldn't seem to figure out a way to bring
it about, and partly because it just felt…wrong. It was good writing, I was pretty confident of that, but the
piece just felt wrong on a content level. Still, it was nice to write with that…fury (yeah, second
use of that sort of word, but it's appropriate); I haven't done it for a while.
Carrie has the latest version of POWERLESS to look over and I've got two WiPs
that just aren't grabbing me the way I need to be grabbed, so I've spent the
last couple of nights sort of moving things around and doing a little bit of
writing around trying to find my way back in.
So this piece was fun in that it was forty-five minutes or
so of head down, nose to the paper writing, but when it came time to read…I
really didn't want to. It just felt like something that was sort of …I don't
know, stupid, but I read it anyway.
They liked it.
It wasn't in the, "Yeah, that was good, okay, who's
reading next?" sort of way. They did like it, I even got a "You
should submit that somewhere". Typing it up later, I could actually see
the possibility—and I could see some ways to make it better.
Go figure.
DO you find that happens to you? Pieces that you think are drivel that everyone else likes? I'd almost think it's a form of self-defense, like "I really, really want people to like this, but I'm afraid they won't so I'll assume it's horrible, that way I can only be pleasantly surprised." The thing is, I don't usually think that way. When I have something in writers' circle that I really like, that I think is good, I get very nervous about reading, with a severe case of the 'jimmy leg.' This was a totally different feeling.
Anyway, my brain isn't working at 100% for this today, so I'd better go. Have a great day, see you on Friday, I think.
