Week 1

Mid-point (All right, the last-mad-dash-to-the-finish-line) check.

I blame traveling, then trying to settle in at a new place, for the lack of sad attempts at writing. Also being a little scared because I've just realized I may have to submit manuscript for the creative writing course starting in....two days.

Should start on that.

On the other hand, I now have a fairly sure idea on the story I want to edit and submit, and where I want to submit it, so I'll get started right on that.

Seriously, having this deadline every week - even if it is self-imposed - was a good idea. Otherwise I really wouldn't get much done out of class, and while writing classes are fun and very helpful, many of them eye-opening, they can also be limiting in exploring genres. I am hoping that this semester, I will be able to spur myself out of the closet (heh) in class about my a bit geared towards fantastical tendencies; last fiction writing class I took, I focused entirely on realistic fiction, something I really hadn't done for a long time since beginning to write in earnest (I tell people I've been writing since I was seven, but producing more than 10,000 words came a bit later than that).

I think I'd self-imposed that boundary, that distinction between SF and literature that gets discussed and debated too often. I subconsciously figured that if I started spewing fantasy on my writing, both my professor and the other students would find absolutely no literary merit in my stories. And writing realistic fiction was fun, too - I got characters out of it that I fully plan on turning into a longer manuscript.

But it's time to reconcile those two warring spirits in me.


"The kids sensed, if they could not say, that fantasy, and its robot child science fiction, is not escape at all. But a circling round of reality to enchant it and make it behave. ...The children guessed, if they did not whisper it, that all science fiction is an attempt to solve problems by pretending to look the other way. ...

Do we want the stars? We can have them. Can we borrow cups of fire from the sun? We can and must and light the world."
-Ray Bradbury, Dusk in the Robot Museums: The Rebirth of Imagination