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Ancestor Appreciation Day
National Women's Health and Fitness Day
Saint Vincent de Paul Feast Day
World Tourism Day
Birthday - Samuel Adam (statesman)
True Cross Day (Ethiopia)

妹/sunshine_shaman’s Birthday!

 

There’s nothing like being required to do something else to inspire one to bursts of creativity. By the end of my first class on Monday I found myself staring at sixty different verb inflections and a working active/stative system for a language for my big fuzzy aliens. Sixty forms. That’s what I get for taking inspiration from Spanish.

 

Anyway. Creative Writing class is going to be … something. As with many people who like to write, I am arrogant and resistant to being informed that my writing sucks like a black hole. But in this case I’m at least willing to try, which should count for something.

 

The trouble is, my idea of Creative Writing differs from the ideas found in college courses. They concern themselves with Unleashing My Inner Voice and allowing me to Write About The Human Condition and other such frankly boring concepts. (While I find many great writers to be truly great, I also have to admit that most essays by Greats tend to bore my socks off.) I know all arrogant writers think prompts are stupid and that using them makes writing sound forced, but sometimes it’s because it’s true. When you’re trying to write to impress your writing teacher, you’re going to suck. So those introspective, verbose passages I write for my teacher, sometimes very cynically, tend to resemble my natural style in about the same capacity that the small essays I wrote for second-year Japanese did. In reality, the Creative Writing I do best falls into two categories:

 

1. Swashbuckling epic cliché tales of magic or science fiction featuring wizards and starfighters and a disproportionate amount of fuzzy main characters with elaborate cultural, biological, and linguistic backgrounds and an awful lot of wormholes and cyclops elephant things and people who glow in the dark and of course pirates, or
2. This blog.

 

Part of the reason I decided to take this class is to branch out from those; now what I’m going to have to do is curb my cynicism. This is not always easy. Actually, it’s almost never easy. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad—probably it’s a bit of both.

 

It didn’t help that when we went around the class and everyone said what they were currently reading—a lot of big fancy classics, which I suspect were in part mentioned to impress the rest of the class—I brought up, in addition to some fancy pants books, Terry Pratchett—and got scoffed at. I also mentioned that I liked blogs, and my teacher thought that was so absurd that she actually kept making little digs at blogs for the rest of the class. This is not a good way to win the favor of someone who believes the internet to be a dream come true for the humanities,* and who believes blogs to be an impressive foray into writing for a culture and generation with purported poor writing skills.

 

So my choices are to retrain myself not to write in the natural and quite attractive casual blog style, or to take sweet revenge by writing bloody good compositions in that style. I have yet to make up my mind, but either way this class should be interesting.

 

Meanwhile, I have indeed whacked off all my hair again, as I do periodically, to facilitate swimming.  I had thought that this time perhaps I would keep growing it, but as always happens when I make that resolve, practicality won out. My one concession is the Padawan braid. I can live with a single long lock.

 

 

*Although it also is one for plagiarists, but omelets and broken eggs and all that.