I FOUND THEM!!!

Thank God! I found the three stories I need to read and critique for my creative writing class tomorrow night! I'm SO relieved! I found them under a stack of papers on my desk at home, intact, and ready to meet the blood-red ink of my pen! Ha! Seriously, though, I'm not going to mark them up with a red pen, much as I'd like to. I'll use a nice blue pen, instead. It's much less intimidating.

SO! Now that that's taken care of, I can start concentrating on my story. While I'm still debating whether or not to continue on with "False Memories," or try to come up with something else, I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that I just might have to submit "FM" simply because it's the strongest piece of work I have right now. I just wish I knew where it was going from here. The Instructor (who really needs a name, doesn't he? I can't just keep calling him "The Instructor;" that sounds too formal, and it's not at all a formal class. Plus, he'll be teaching the memoir writing class I'm taking in the spring, so I'll be mentioning him quite often. Therefore, I'll call him Marc, for no other reason than it was the first name that popped into my head. So . . .), Marc, told us last week we should let the character tell the story; let the character lead us. My character, however, has been vague and distant and moody, and not at all interested in chatting with me right now. I know it's mostly my fault her life is suddenly all messed up - heck, I wrote it that way - but what I'd like to know now is why her life is messed up, how it got so messed up in the first place, i.e., who is responsible for making the mess, and what needs to happen in order for her messy life to be cleaned up.

Maybe I should just sit down and write whatever comes into my head. Just start writing, and hope my character comes to talk to me; to lead me in the right direction, or at least lead me in some direction. Even if it's a dead end, we'll have at least gone somewhere, and might've gotten some answers, and besides, we can always turn around and get back on the right path.

This story writing business is really much harder than I thought it was. At least when you're being serious about it. When I would just mess around with some ideas or stories or whatever, it was no big, but for some reason, this time is different. This time I really want to come up with something . . . good. Good as in . . . publishable. A frightening thought, to be sure! Being a published writer is something I've dreamed about since childhood, but I've never had the nerve to really pursue it. I've never finished a real short-story (with the notable exception of "Sensitive Persuasion" a pseudo romance-type thing I wrote for The Young Writer's Conference in, I think it was 1982 or '83), and my two finished NaNoWriMo novels - while over 50,000 words long - were a lot of bullcrap mixed in with some legitimate scene descriptions and dialogues, character descriptions, flashbacks, memories, and thoughts. Material enough to work with, certainly, but digging through all the crap to find the diamond in the rough is, well, time consuming, and just a bit overwhelming. So. I guess I'll just write, and see what happens. Maybe I'll finish "FM". Maybe I'll come up with something else. Who knows? Guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Reading: You've Got to Read This ed. by Ron Hansen. This week's stories are "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien, and "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Conner, as well as three short stories submitted by classmates.

Classic Book: Animal Farm by George Orwell.

Listening to: Nothing.

Writing: Working on "False Memories." For now.

Gratitude: Finding lost objects.