Meditation on Writing

In case anyone has noticed my relative silence over here for the past few weeks, it's not because I have become suddenly shy again (as far as I know I am still a newly-minted extrovert). On the contrary, I have been engaged in a not-so-secret project that involves writing at least 50,000 words in the month of November and calling it a novel. At first I thought, "oh, I'll try this and get bored with it like I usually do and that will be that." But just past the halfway point, I've got over 26,000 words written--and not just one word repeated 26,000 times--and I think I might actually make the deadline. It's not something that I ever expected to happen, and I'm still a little cautious about discussing it at all, in case that causes me to self-destruct. I am very good at enthusiastically starting projects and historically pathetic at bringing them to a satisfying close. So: cautious optimism. As I've been forcing myself to write the required 1,667 words a day, I've also been thinking about my history as a writer.

I have consistently been a voracious reader, but writing was something I only did in fits and starts throughout my childhood. I am still quite proud of the short story I wrote some (cough) years back from the point-of-view of a Rain-Blo bubble gum ball, even though the story itself may longer exist.¹ As a young adult with no actual ability to make geeky friends who were my age, I spent a great deal of time generating D&D characters . . . but never actually played the game. To this date I still have not played D&D once (much less an entire campaign), but that's OK, I suspect that character generation (and character names) might be the best part. Then I went to college, and all of my writing time was taken up with things called 'papers', some of which didn't actually feel like work.²

After graduate school (Master's #1), I worked two simultaneous jobs as a technical writer, so there still wasn't much space in my life for "fun" writing. However, despite not liking to read short stories all that much, I used to write them, in the form of fan-fiction, for other people to read on the internet. Most of the archive sites for these stories seem to have mercifully disappeared, and I'm not going to say much more about that. However, I do still have a t-shirt that vaguely references that time of my life, so as long as I keep it I will always have a gentle reminder that I used to be passionate about TV. Eventually I developed this blog as an outlet for my desire to write. It allows me to keep up on my more formal prose with book reviews, and once in a while do a little navel gazing.

I've always had a secret desire to write a romance novel, and have a rough half-dozen started on various forms of media that are now obsolete and therefore inaccessible to me.³ When I started reading my mother's romance novels as a kid, I felt that I was enough of a judge of quality to arrogantly think "hey, I could do this!" I mean, who hasn't picked up a "trashy" romance and thought that they could produce something equally bad, if not slightly better? This month is my opportunity to finally put my money where my mouth is. At some point (in September or October), I volunteered to write a novel that will probably only appeal to a very small subset of people, but which will make me happy to write. And I think that's what actually matters.


¹It may actually still exist; there's a lot of stuff in the garage. But that's another post entirely. If I find it someday, I'll be sure to post it here, so STAY TUNED. In the meantime (spoiler alert), if I remember correctly, it doesn't end well for our gumball hero.

²My favorite papers were for Literary Theory. One involved ten pages of deconstruction applied to the message inside a Cadbury chocolate egg wrapper, and the other was a discussion of "Jesse's Girl" as a tale of homosocial desire (we had been reading Sedgwick). For the opportunity to write these, I have to give all the credit to my friend and mentor Dr. Tromp, the same person who facilitated footnote 3.

³The same is true of my 120+ page senior thesis on Emily Brontë, but I like to think that I could recover that with the help of OCR from my hard copy, if ever there was an emergency in which my scholarship--DIGITIZED--was the only hope for humanity. For reference, the title is: 'Through life and death, a chainless soul': Emily Brontë's Poetic Reconfiguration of Romanticism, Female Authorship, and the Critical Paradigm. Available only in one college library in Ohio, my living room, and my father's house. Oh, to be young again.

Meditation Index

Meditation on My Other Job

Some of you (by which I mean the 1.2 people that actually follow this blog--and my ego thanks you for that) may or may not have noticed that I haven't updated much recently. This is not because I haven't been doing things worth noting (of course I have, everything I do is noteworthy--but I digress) but because my time has been taken up by my Other Job. By which I don't mean "mother," because that seems to be more of a state of mind rather than an occupation. I mean, there are any number of mothers and fathers out there who (unfortunately) aren't fulfilling their theoretical duties as parents. I see them in the library all the time. However, I digress!

Those of you who read all about how I became a Librarian-with-a-capital-L might recall that I spent some time as an editor and technical writer. I am here to tell you that that phase of my life is actually ongoing, and I adore it! Every year for the past many years, I have had the opportunity to edit the conference proceedings for a non-profit organization (and old employer of mine) with an entrepreneurial focus. Hundreds of pages of papers, written by engineering professors (this can be scary, if you haven't had the joy of reading works by scientists) and entrepreneurs, which must--after my careful ministrations--be presented as one unified, carefully formatted whole. Heaven! As you can see from my recent Twitter updates on the subject, addressed to fictional Engineering professors who are making my life difficult, I do have a very enjoyable time:

Engineering professors: It is OK to use commas. And periods, esp. to break up 7-line sentences. Also, I *hate* the expression "follow-on."

Engineering professors: It is really OK to pick a tense. Ideally past or present. It would also be fine to write headings that make sense.

Engineering professors: Not everything has to be written in passive voice.

Engineering professors: It is only polite to standardize HOW YOU SPELL THE LAST NAMES OF AUTHORS YOU CITE so I don't have to waste my time.

Engineering professors: Please don't use words like "inhibitory," they make my brain hurt.

Engineering professors: I will let you keep your ridiculous acronyms, since you seem so attached, but you are going to have to CITE properly.

You just had to go and cite an international dissertation, didn't you?

Engineering professors: *sigh* feel free to use an "s" to make things plural when you are talking about more than one of that thing.

And so on, for thirty papers or so. I don't know when I started to love editing things. Maybe it was inherited from my mother, herself a consummate editor? The first time I did it professionally was when I spent a brief time in college working for the Writing Center, helping my classmates figure out how to put sentences together. I've edited legal papers, curricular materials for grade schools, computer software manuals, brochures, any number of my spouse's undergraduate and law school papers, and of course every misspelled and extra-apostrophe-laden sign that I have ever come across. I much prefer editing to writing things from scratch, and most things that I do write never see the light of day because I am continually tinkering with them. This is not to say that everything I turn out is perfect and polished; I am as susceptible to typos and (particularly) rambling as any writer, especially here when I am pretty much writing to myself. But I confess that I do re-read my blog posts an undisclosed number of times before hitting "publish," just to make sure that I am presenting something that I feel comfortable with. So, if anyone needs another pair of eyes to review something, feel free to send me a message, and I will get out my colorful (not always red!) pen.

Now I suppose I'd better quit thinking and get back to work.