re-emerged
Jul. 21st, 2010 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aamcnamaraI wrote 64 whole words today!
There are, as always, excellent reasons for this. One is that I showed off my political cartoons to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
1crowdedhour at the library. Another is that I started reading Delany's About Writing this morning.
And then I read it on the bus to the library, and possibly missed my bus back from the library while reading it at the stop (I was reading! I'm not sure!), and read it on the alternative bus back toward home, and while walking home from said bus...
In summary, I think Samuel R. Delany is really, really awesome. I knew this already, and in fact had read several of the essays here contained before (in Jewel-Hinged Jaw), but even the short months since reading Jaw had given me a different perspective on those pieces, and they are surrounded in this by other essays and letters and interviews...
Delany makes me feel ignorant, unsophisticated, like I never read (anything, or anything good), and like I don't try hard enough. He consistently humbles me in every single way possible and some I didn't think were. Also, every time I read his essays or letters or interviews this one quote from DWJ's Year of the Griffin comes floating back to me--the one about Elda floating into breakfast with her mind feeling like a stack of umbrellas that have been opened, some of them inside out. My mind usually feels like that afterward.
So writing, even sixty-four words, feels like a major accomplishment. Instead of reading Delany's essays and going "I could never have that determination to the work, I may as well give up now" I took it and grabbed a prompt and wrote. Okay, two paragraphs (one a sentence of dialogue), but still! Not becoming completely discouraged! This is victory.
And then I stopped and wrote over three hundred words of analysis of possibly what those two paragraphs imply about the rest of the story. There is probably way more I could write down, and will. But in the meantime: sixty-four words! Hooray!
(The thing that is not a word is 'rimned', which I totally thought was a word until I figured out that I was conflating 'rimmed' and 'limned' into one portmanteau word that meant what I wanted it to. Now I think that 'rimned' should be a word. Intuitive? Votes?)
There are, as always, excellent reasons for this. One is that I showed off my political cartoons to
1crowdedhour at the library. Another is that I started reading Delany's About Writing this morning.And then I read it on the bus to the library, and possibly missed my bus back from the library while reading it at the stop (I was reading! I'm not sure!), and read it on the alternative bus back toward home, and while walking home from said bus...
In summary, I think Samuel R. Delany is really, really awesome. I knew this already, and in fact had read several of the essays here contained before (in Jewel-Hinged Jaw), but even the short months since reading Jaw had given me a different perspective on those pieces, and they are surrounded in this by other essays and letters and interviews...
Delany makes me feel ignorant, unsophisticated, like I never read (anything, or anything good), and like I don't try hard enough. He consistently humbles me in every single way possible and some I didn't think were. Also, every time I read his essays or letters or interviews this one quote from DWJ's Year of the Griffin comes floating back to me--the one about Elda floating into breakfast with her mind feeling like a stack of umbrellas that have been opened, some of them inside out. My mind usually feels like that afterward.
So writing, even sixty-four words, feels like a major accomplishment. Instead of reading Delany's essays and going "I could never have that determination to the work, I may as well give up now" I took it and grabbed a prompt and wrote. Okay, two paragraphs (one a sentence of dialogue), but still! Not becoming completely discouraged! This is victory.
And then I stopped and wrote over three hundred words of analysis of possibly what those two paragraphs imply about the rest of the story. There is probably way more I could write down, and will. But in the meantime: sixty-four words! Hooray!
(The thing that is not a word is 'rimned', which I totally thought was a word until I figured out that I was conflating 'rimmed' and 'limned' into one portmanteau word that meant what I wanted it to. Now I think that 'rimned' should be a word. Intuitive? Votes?)