Saturday, January 03, 2009

And your hair looks great today!

I'm procrastinating from looking at someone else's edits of my writing. Looking at them is making me nervous. I'm very much aware that I'm out of practice from writing. This is weird since of course I write all the time, but it's been a while since I have tried to construct large numbers of artful sentences. (Interestingly, to me, my poems, which have been described as elliptical, tend to have very simple, stripped-down sentences that don't really work translated into prose.) That writing is not like walking or breathing but is a skill that needs to be kept up is one of the true things that they say in MFA-land.

Anyway, I'm writing this from a coffee shop with "complimentary wifi," and I'm taking solace from the way I can't help but misread the sign. I'm expecting a little window to pop up any minute saying "Great job!" "That was a terrific sentence, that one there!" "Just write a few more like that one and you're golden!"

UPDATE: Well, it's okay. Also, yesterday I hatched this great plan to freely and essayistically write out my thoughts and impressions at the end of every study session, so as to get into better fighting form for writing, and also to keep a better record of what I read, and to try to develop ideas that might be useful later. There might be some blogging connection to this; I'll keep you posted.

Also, (a propos of my coffee shop neighbor, who wasn't able to get a word in around her friend's earplug-penetrating conversation) isn't "edgewise" a great word?

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