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oh my pants.
Oct. 14th, 2011 07:15 pmmy grad school friends-and-acquaintances are slowly coming to know me as a writer. it is strange, to call myself that, still, when it doesn't mean the same thing to me as it used to.
in high school, i could honestly say i write novels. i wrote stories over a hundred pages, several of them, when i should have been paying attention in english or physics or pre cal. allison and i compared notes and traded critiques every day, junior and most of senior year. sure, those stories make me cringe now, and i would never let someone read them, not if they paid me, but they were so important to me then, and they were so important to building those friendships with allison and kari.
in college, i wrote characters, and little snippets, and still tried to flesh out longer stories. (i have at least four, that i started in undergrad, with outlines and structure and the potential to actually be something, that never got further than thirty pages; some never made it past the outline and a page or two.)
the first year of grad school, i don't think i wrote anything that wasn't a paper. i fell into my cloud of whatever the fuck that was, and didn't care about anything, didn't bother with anything, and shut down vital pieces of me. it is only within the last several months that i've felt myself awakening again, like a little flower opening slowly in spring time. i have a story that has stolen my soul, that i've researched the ever loving hell out of, that i sort of maybe know what i'm doing with, that i want to see come to fruition. i love the characters, i love the background, i love so much about it, and yet it scares the shit out of me, because i love it so much and that means that there is massive room for failure. in bits and bats, it's coming out of me, and it's spilling out in ways that other people are noticing: oh, what are you working on? what's that green notebook you carry everywhere? who's Oisín? why the hell did you request so fucking many irish fairy tale books through ILL? i even shared, bashfully, tentatively, with my adviser (the asker of the last question, baffled by the stack of incongruous books present during our last meeting), that i was maybe, sort of, working on a novelishlengthmoderndayreinterpretationofirishmyths. for adults. i am the librarian's new darling, and i am thoroughly unprepared to deal with her questions. doesn't she realize how new and terrifyingly fragile this is?
in high school, i could honestly say i write novels. i wrote stories over a hundred pages, several of them, when i should have been paying attention in english or physics or pre cal. allison and i compared notes and traded critiques every day, junior and most of senior year. sure, those stories make me cringe now, and i would never let someone read them, not if they paid me, but they were so important to me then, and they were so important to building those friendships with allison and kari.
in college, i wrote characters, and little snippets, and still tried to flesh out longer stories. (i have at least four, that i started in undergrad, with outlines and structure and the potential to actually be something, that never got further than thirty pages; some never made it past the outline and a page or two.)
the first year of grad school, i don't think i wrote anything that wasn't a paper. i fell into my cloud of whatever the fuck that was, and didn't care about anything, didn't bother with anything, and shut down vital pieces of me. it is only within the last several months that i've felt myself awakening again, like a little flower opening slowly in spring time. i have a story that has stolen my soul, that i've researched the ever loving hell out of, that i sort of maybe know what i'm doing with, that i want to see come to fruition. i love the characters, i love the background, i love so much about it, and yet it scares the shit out of me, because i love it so much and that means that there is massive room for failure. in bits and bats, it's coming out of me, and it's spilling out in ways that other people are noticing: oh, what are you working on? what's that green notebook you carry everywhere? who's Oisín? why the hell did you request so fucking many irish fairy tale books through ILL? i even shared, bashfully, tentatively, with my adviser (the asker of the last question, baffled by the stack of incongruous books present during our last meeting), that i was maybe, sort of, working on a novelishlengthmoderndayreinterpretationofirishmyths. for adults. i am the librarian's new darling, and i am thoroughly unprepared to deal with her questions. doesn't she realize how new and terrifyingly fragile this is?
