So I decided to write a flash fiction every day for September. Maybe one of those flash fictions will resist ending and spiral outwards into something meaningful. I’ll try to post the “best” one each Saturday, but the quotes are there for good reason. Don’t except literature. Expect meghan bickering with herself.
Here I am, back from teaching a full, rather than accelerated like I usually do, summer course. Ready to read. Ready to write. Ready to be published!
Also, ready to be filled with dread, writer’s block, imposter syndrome, and sweat. Actually, I guess I’m not filled with sweat as much as sweat is leaking out of me. Instead of sweat, I would like ideas to leak out of me. Usually, after teaching, I am overflowed with story ideas. But now, not even a drip or a drizzle or drop. I am storied out lately.
And so, do I force it? Just write whatever in the hopes that something sparks? Or do I wait for an idea? Or do I take some of my half formed ideas and squish them together?
I read a bunch of crime novels. Then I read pedagogy books. Then I read silly mystery novels. Then literature.
But now I don’t know what to write. Or how. Or even if.
When I was younger, I thought the covers of these books, with the cutout, was so classy and totally not gaudy at all. Not even a teensy bit gaudy. Oh, the follies of youth.
Still using the first pencil. Wrote some emo haikus yesterday with it (note: not about nature so not actual haikus I suppose). So rest assured: the pencil works for writing bad poetry.
Link for above. Bad poetry on request only.
That’s right — a whole month of V.C. Andrews novels (not that they were all written by V.C. Andrews but …)
I do not think my reading choices this month have made me a better writer. Or a better person. Or even a functioning human being.
Anyone want to start a podcast with me about reading trashy novels? I still have my big pile of Christopher Pike books to get through as well.
A three part series.
Other than this irregular blog, I write stuff longhand first, in notebooks that I fill up and then throw out. It’s a good thing I’ll never be famous because there are no “papers” that any sort of archive is ever going to be able to collect because I don’t keep any. Right now, I have a notebook from Chapters (like this one, but with cats on the front and it says The Time is Meow, and I actually have two because I knew when I bought the first one that Tesfa would want one too, but now she’s lost interest, so I have two of these notebooks.)
I also write in pencil because I’m left-handed and I hold the pen weird and it does not matter what type of pen you recommend for me, it will smear everywhere. So does the pencil lead, but that bothers me less than ink.
Also I had a mechanical pencil, and then I broke it so that the very end where the lead comes out is bent, so it breaks the lead as the lead gets pushed through, so I can write about two words before having to click it and then write two more words, etc. So that’s why I’ve been so slow with writing new things since December … sure … that’s it.
So, pencil number one. I would take a picture but I don’t have anything to take a picture with down here in my basement. It’s a pencil from Japan, which I know since the only English words on the entire package are Made in Japan, and also OHTO which may be the brand. I forget. I ordered three pencils off a foreign website and it took forever to get here due to mail, so I don’t really know. Oh! I found more English: Silver, which is the colour and I could tell already. Everything else is in Japanese. Even, maybe OHTO could be Russian, since H is a Russian letter (sounds like N), and the rest are the same in Cyrillic vs Latin. Unlike one of my other purchases from Japan (an iced coffee maker), there is no spot the difference game, wherein there were two identical pictures except one had a big X through it and neither Geoff nor I could ever figure out what we weren’t supposed to be doing with the iced coffee maker, or what was the difference between the picture with the X and the picture without.
But new pencil number one to try! I will write down the weird thoughts I had while trying to go to sleep last night and let you know how it went later.
I don’t know why this string of rejections is getting to me, but it really is.
is what I hope some publisher out there I sent my short story collection is thinking right now.
In other news, I have a short story collection that is searching for a home.
