So earlier this week I got shit together to enter a contest, in both fiction and poetry. I spent a lot more time tweaking and freaking out about the fiction one, which is maybe stupid as that's not my "primary" (i.e. theoretically stronger) genre, but on the other hand maybe it therefore needs more tweaking. My last-minute nitpicks were less and less relevant, like "Oh my god what ORDER do I put the poems in" or "Oh my god do I italicize the titles or put them in small caps??" or "Oh my god what FONT do I use?" Which maybe is good as at least I'm not last-minute freaking about the content of the work itself, as that felt reasonably finished?
Not that I wasn't like, "This poem sucks, should I even include it?"
I feel like I have a lot of stale or inert poems that need to be workshopped but I don't want to because they're old and I'm sick of them.
Ended up writing a thing the other night at the reading/at dinner which is... okay. It was about those 2 skeletons that were found embracing, which I guess like everyone else had planned to write about too. But I did it first. Bwahaha.
What I found fucked up about the article about that I read was that they were all, "Maybe the guy died and the woman was sacrificially killed to accompany him to the afterlife." What the fuck? What kind of evidence is there for that besides "fucked up assumptions"? Hell, maybe the GUY was sacrificed to accompany HER to the afterlife. They both were young and had arrows in them. Don't see how that leads to the scenario they suggested.
I've been thinking a bunch about what I'll do when I teach next year. Because I have to teach next year and don't know what to do. Or I do have a fair amount of ideas but am sort of afraid my students will hate me for making them do them :D
In total I have lost like 2 days to sleep this week, one post contest submitting and one yesterday just... because I suck.
But one of my hypnogogic or perhaps hypnopompic ideas was: 2-sentence stories. And no long-ass sentences to get around it.
My favorite one that I came up with, which I will probably find far more amusing than anyone else in the world:
"Aaaaah! I'm being sharpened! Oh my god! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!" screamed Woody. But nobody heard him, and nobody cared, because he was a pencil.
I guess technically that's more than 2 sentences if you count his agonized ejaculations as individual sentences. I don't care.
I came up with another thing which I guess is also more than 2 sentences "technically" but it actually prompted a story which is now several pages so there.
Oh for the stick-to-it-iveness to finish things! We inevitably have more ideas than we complete, but I don't want a Coleridgean ratio of grand-idea-to-completed-works.
I am definitely going to make my students turn in an observation journal though.
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1 comment:
Hey, E. It's nice to see a post... I clicked on you accidentally, as I've stopped checking your blog. I wish you well on the contest for money! So, I guess I wish you money at this point, as you have already reaped the benefits of writing/entering.
I like your two sentence story idea. It's a great exercise in economy.... I'm hatching one myself. Here's my first attempt: She punched at the keyboard and then resigned. She knew from the beginning that two sentences would not be enough this time. =0)
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