Those following me on twitter know that I had an unhappy brush-off the other day regarding writing. So I decided to make a list about being a real writer to cheer myself up.

You’re not a real writer if:

• you haven’t been published;
• you’ve been published but not paid;
• you’ve been published and paid but published online;
• you’ve been published and paid in print but not in a prestigious journal
• you’ve been published and paid in print in a prestigious journal but it’s only short fiction or individual essays

So yes, I have no novel and only short fiction and maybe not in the most prestigious journals and mainly online, so what? I hate the hierarchy that I’m not real at what I do and it rankles because this isn’t the first time this happened – as an undergraduate female in a STEM field at a university that has huge problems with male privilege (which doesn’t need to be the case as where I went for graduate school in the same field was awesome and had none of the problems my undergraduate school had), I had to constantly justify why I deserved to be there when others around me with dicks didn’t. Now I have to justify that my little steps to success aren’t valid until I write the big, important novel.

Maybe I will write a novel. Maybe I won’t. But you’d think in a field that is all about narrative, that we’d be able to allow more than one narrative to define literary success.

I understand that not everyone likes everything. Myself, I like about zero percent of the world. Still, I wish that the intersection of

• people who like me, and
• people who like my writing

had cardinality greater than one, i.e. Geoff. I do appreciate some of the random positive-styled comments I get. I’ve gotten this seems more mature than other stories you have written. I’ve been complimented on font (which I should have passed along to the LaTeX people). I had someone point out a typo. I feel that if I were a poet, I would do a found-poem of all the positive-style comments I have ever received.

Clearly a few strangers don’t mind me, otherwise no one would have ever published anything I’ve submitted, but somehow stranger love means nothing without overwhelming friends and family love too.

Another piece rejected, but this time with a nice, personalized rejection letter stating that my story made it through to the final round of editorial deliberations, but didn’t win the prize. This is better than two weeks ago’s generic rejection, but rejection still.

So, for April two yeses, and so far for May, two nos. In fiction land, batting 0% is actually a very positive score, but you know what would be far more awesome than 0%, that’s right, 100%. A girl’s got to dream.

And now I return to proof-reading.

In high school, I took a Writer’s Craft course in Grade Eleven. For each assignment, we had to submit massive amounts of pre-work, like detailed planning of plot points, character charts, at least three prior drafts, etc. The teacher maintained that one could not write a good story without doing all these things. Dutifully, because if there is one thing I am good at, it is following mindless rules, I did all her pre-work. A friend in the course did none. Said friend did better on every single assignment than me, even though that should have been impossible under the teacher’s rules.

So yes, high school is dumb.

But also, I jumped through all these hoops about How To Write A Story that felt unnatural to me and didn’t do well. I vowed not to do it again.

I mean, character sheets? That is not how I work. I usually only know as much about a character as is necessary and do not know things like what their favourite song was in high school, how many movies they watch a month, what colour socks they wear, unless it is somehow relevant. Planning out plot points? Here is how I write a story. I get an idea. Sometimes it is a large thought-out idea (the novella was the initial thought of comparing the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War to the Muhajideen of the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, plus pregnancy, yeah, don’t ask, and trust me, it isn’t working out so well), sometimes it is a few words (I really love the words Happy Valley-Goose Bay, and later found some things that fit into a story that I could call that). Then I write some scenes, usually dialogue, in my head when I can’t sleep. Then maybe a week or two later, I sit down and write start to finish in a notebook over a few days/weeks/months depending on the length. How I write from start to finish having not planned much out, I do not know. It just happens.

Last week, I found out I didn’t place in a writing contest. So, I never place in writing contests, so I should at least be used to it. But for this writing contest, there were all these helpful How To Write A Story hoops to jump through and I jumped through them and now I’m annoyed because I clearly did not learn my lesson the high school time and did it all again for no reward. So, yes, Einstein (literally), Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, this is me.

It would be nice to win a contest though.

So I have a lot of anger lately at a lot of people. Basically, that Killer’s song when they say don’t you put me on the backburner, that’s the anger I have. People not replying to emails, probably for valid reasons, but when I get an email from someone in which she complains about how much she hates it when no one replies to her emails, yet hasn’t replied in two weeks to the email I sent her, these are aspects of life that make me angry.

In my head, unable to sleep last night/this morning, I started writing about this. Of course, I’ll consolidate a bunch of people and make a lot of things up, but the story is worthless. What a passive-aggressive way to deal with being sad – I’ll write a nasty story about people I know to make myself feel better. I can’t do anything with a story like that. I’ll probably still write it though.

I wonder a lot about my memory. Two weeks ago I was invited to a wedding of someone I’ve known for a long time. When I mean a long time, I mean since we were eight years old. The friendship has waxed and waned over the years and I guess it’s waxing right now, hence the invitation. So, obviously, I have to think of a present, and I’m sitting around thinking about some of the stuff we did in high school, like stupid poems we wrote to each other and thinking maybe I could recreate some of those, at least for the card, because that would be nice, wouldn’t it?

Then I realise that no, it wouldn’t be nice, because nobody remembers all the random bits and pieces I do.

I met someone recently. Technically, I re-met someone. We went to high school together and were in a few classes and in a few clubs together and she has no memory of me at all. Not one, while I remember her. I remember entire conversations we had together. But none of this clearly made its way into her long-term memory.

I’ve always been at the periphery of people’s lives. I get that. My personality is less of a personality than a flat-line of quiet and suspicion. Observation. I observe, which helps me as a writer. The memory helps too, remembering scenes and places and how people stood or looked or smiled in certain instances. So I can take my exact memory and put it to good use. Still, it sometimes hurts to be forgotten, even if I can use the forgotten bits in my writing.

And because I teased you all with the possibility of high school poetry, here is some of a poem that I wrote in high school for my wedding-friend. It is a nonsense poem, like most of the poems we wrote at the time. I can’t remember a lot of it (so much for my exact memory), only bits and pieces. I think the poem was about forty lines long, and I only have twelve lines that have stuck with me. The ending stanza, which I do remember, also has to do with remembering things for a long time, so I guess it’s apt for this post about memory. So I leave what I can recall here for you to peruse: