describing your work

I won a prize (yay me, the money is nice but the validation, especially at a difficult time, is even better), and they asked me to write a blurb about it. And now that I've already sent the description off, I feel like it sounds retarded.

I was trying not to make it all "Bler bler, here's how profound my themes are, in academic language." But my themes are profound, dammit. :P I dunno, it just sounds a little preachy. "Only by blah blah does he reach greater awareness of his self and a communion with his surroundings."

But that's kinda what happens. >_>

Argh. Anyone wanna PR this up for me in like, 2 days?

Oh, and I took a cab today and the guy was asking me what I wrote about. And I was like, mythology and animals and biology and science and stuff. Which, again, is true, and I have no idea how much of a picture it actually gives of what I do, and/or how lame it sounds.

God, I hate when people are like, "So you wanna be a writer when you grow up? :B"

No, I am a writer. Already. Thx.

I'm not sure I really even get that. Like is "writer" the sudden completion of some process of metamorphosis? Achieved once you get a book deal, perhaps? Now I'm just munching on my leaf or coccooning myself up and turning into genetic goo, on the way to some awesome transformation. A proto-butterfly that might be snatched up by hungry birds, and therefore shouldn't call itself a butterfly yet.

I do like bug imagery, and bugs. (I like moths better than butterflies. Butterflies are too laden with twee symbolism, too overused as decorative motif. Butterflies are a monophyletic clade in Lepidoptera, and I only dimly grasp, at best, the wider significance of that although I could roughly define "monophyletic clade" using lots of hand gestures.)

But really, as far as I'm concerned, if you write, you're a writer. That doesn't mean you're a good writer, but come on, I take this seriously. It's the closest thing I have to a "vocation," and even if I had some other job, that would be the thing that pays the bills, writing being the important thing and the vital ambition.

What's that poem that's basically about this? The gist is that you spend years, you know, writing and developing shit and no one takes you seriously (e.g. "You wanna be a writer?") and then finally, at some point (e.g. book deal) everyone's all, Ooh, a writer! and it's like they suddenly get that you were one all along. Well, either that or they actually do think that you, as a writer, magically coalesced into existence at the signing of said book deal, whatever relevant writerly properties you had, or activities you engaged in, being the piled gunpowder that isn't necessarily going to ignite, the wet questionable firework, the setup. For the punchline. This is a tangle of pseudo-metaphors.

I am glad the strike tag works on this. I was afraid it wouldn't.