You Are Among Friends

While writing my monthly short stories, one of the challenges that I face allllll the time is trying to avoid the word "suddenly." I love sudden moments and I (unconsciously) put one in almost every story I write. People are always seeing horrible things or suddenly running toward or from something. But I think the word "suddenly" is too easy; I feel like I should be able to describe the moment well enough to INVOKE (or whatever) the thing actually suddenly happening.

Usually I close my eyes and I try to re-remember the details of my car wreck, all the heat and the glass and the noise at once.

Some photos from Cambridge:

Things I'm not ready to deal with just yet:

• my Gmail inbox
• returning to my receptionist job
• loading new film into my hipster camera
• my desperate need for a haircut
• how much I want to quit Facebook
• the Intervention marathon on A&E today

Things I am so super into dealing with:

• Runaway by Alice Munro, which I am reading very slowly so it will never ever end
• all the annoying pre-semester paperwork I just finished and sent out
• WRITING THE BEST SHORT STORIES I HAVE EVER WRITTEN, RIGHT NOW
• reminiscing about Cambridge in the summertime, so sunny and walkable
• a cold can of PBR while watching fireworks from our roof last night
• actually submitting stories! To places that publish stories!
• ...the Intervention marathon on A&E today

right now, the writing tactic that works best for me is to keep track of how many words i've written, marking the time and number every time i sit down, like i'm punching in a time card.

today i slept in late in my warm bed with my favorite warm person, ate a bowl of cheerios with cold almond milk, did some house-cleaning (this feels so much better in the spring than in any other season) with larry, figured out how to reasonably hold my hair back (answer: two severely mismatched pigtails) and left for the next part of my day: yoga, champagne, a massage, and a FORTUNE TELLING session with my mom and her best friend, peg. i'm as giddy remembering it as i was anticipating it.

the tarot card reader looked me in the eyes and said you feel like you're spinning your wheels, but you are not spinning your wheels. the patience you're learning now will make you a better writer. and even if it is all hocus pocus and voodoo, it still felt so good, to hear those words from a stranger.

"Sometimes all that saves me is being willing to make mistakes. There are projects that strike me as so beautiful, important, complicated or just plain big, that they convince me of my own inadequacy. This awful state of reverence leads to paralyzing brain freeze. Times like that the only way out is for me to decide, 'To hell with it. I can't do it right, so I'll do it wrong. I can't do it well, but I can do it badly.' Sometimes, with luck, while I'm sweating to do it wrong, I stumble on a right way."

--Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love

(quoted by Poets & Writers)