tenth.

Here it is, friends, the final blog post. I won't be keeping up with this after the class, but it's been real. No, really, it has. I have honestly and truly been writing in this blog.

I think out of all of my semesters here, I've learned the most about peer editing through this one. I came here knowing that peer editing is scary, and I still believe that. I knew that people don't actively want to hate on you for writing something (with some exceptions, natch, but you're always going to find those), and I still know that. But when it comes to the actual critique part, where I sit there and listen to my story being read out loud or watch people reading it and I hate hearing the words I wrote coming from anyone's mouth, even my own, I think I've improved a bit.

Sure, I still dread having to sit there, mouth shut, listening to people say what didn't work. But then again, I've always tried to be a "first time perfect" writer. And that, readers, is incredibly stupid and one of the worst things you can do. I mean it. There is always, always, always something to fix. Even when you fixed that, there's something else.

So going into a crit session, ready to say "fuck you, I wrote it and it's fine," isn't going to help me much. Or at all. And going in there, ready to break down because I thought it was perfect, what I wrote, and hearing that it's not is the biggest blow to my ego and my judgment? Also not going to help.

It's one of those things I've known on a subconscious level for a long time, but never bothered to really think about or accept. A single piece of crit, no matter how gently-worded, would've ruined my day years ago. Now I just take it, grateful, and use it to get even better at what I love doing.

We've done a good job here, classmates.

ninth.

Almost at the end. Trying out a bit of CNF practice instead of the usual posts about me and my thoughts-- oh dammit.

______________________________________________

"Grandma wants to know if you've written anything new lately."

It's a question I dread hearing. Awful poetry? Check. Roleplaying with friends that I've passed off to my family as "collaborative writing" so that they don't think I'm completely wasting my time? Check. New stories that she can't even read because by now that computer-looking machine in the room that was once my grandpa's study won't help her see the words? Check.

There's a poem she has in the house, framed, in her kitchen. I wrote it seven years ago and she hasn't taken it down. My dad keeps telling me she liked that poem and that he liked that poem.

I hate that poem.

I look back on things and they're clumsy.

"We liked the story you wrote, about the girl and the violin."

The one I wrote six years ago. I hate that story.

For me, it's not like looking back on something and realizing I've improved. It's looking back and realizing it was never good, and what was I thinking when I wrote it? What are they thinking, praising it this far down the line like it's still some kind of work of art?

You tell your kid, "you're an artist!" when they smear fingerpaints on a large piece of paper, on your old shirt you loaned them as an art smock, on their skin. You tell your kid, "you write so well!" when they do a paper for school or when they write a poem that's decent for a young teenager with delicate emotions.

But I'm older than that and my grandma deserves something better in that frame than something composed on a dirty school bus, typed up and saved on a floppy disk because I didn't have a flash drive yet.

At the time, I thought it was good enough to share. Now, nothing is. I don't have achievements, I have scraps to hide away. I don't have things to be proud of, but she keeps thinking there is. She wants to be proud.

At the time, she would tell me she didn't think she'd live to see me graduate high school.

Then it was my brother.

Now here I am, six months from graduating college and she's still there, but I don't think she can see it anyway with how bad her eyes are.

I think, when I graduate, first I'll read off the text on my diploma. And after that, I'll read something that's mine.

eighth.

I've been trying to write more, as of late. Not just for school, but for personal reasons, as well. It's sort of nice to get back to it after so long, but I think my expectations for myself are hindering me in this. Even with CNF, it's difficult. It's not enough, I think, to tell something accurately, but to tell something well. Rather than to present facts, one should present the emotions and what happened and do all that...well, creatively, obviously.

I don't think I'm able to do that well. It's an issue for me, not wanting to write or not writing or not thinking I should write because of that. The most frustrating part, though, is that I can't pinpoint my weaknesses in writing. I can look at my writing and I can read it, sometimes without cringing, but I can't look at it and know what's bad, all I know is that it's not good. It's not what I want it to be. If I were an artist, it might be easier, because then I could look at it and compare it to a mental image, the thing I'm basing my work off of, but with this, there isn't anything I can do, it feels like.

No matter what I write, it's not good enough. No matter how many times I write it, it's not good enough. No matter how much I edit, it's not good enough.

Stephen King once said that you can make a great writer out of a good writer, but not a great writer out of a mediocre writer. I'm afraid to know where my ceiling is.

seventh.

This blog has now reached one hundredth of the page views of my other blog hosted on this site. What a milestone! Eighty-five to eighty-five hundred. Normally, I might make some sort of celebratory post or something of the sort, but it would be the most boring celebration. I don't even have cake.

No, instead I wanted to talk about writing again.

Another difficulty for me is to write about emotions. That sounds strange, I know. But writing about feelings is so tough for me. I don't know how to tell what other people are feeling, or how to explain what I'm feeling. I know I think "I wish I could punch them" about someone before I realize I'm angry about them. I feel things and can only put them into other words before I can understand the feeling. I suppose that makes it fine in writing, where I'm showing instead of telling something, but it feels like it's horribly inconvenient.

I think it's more of a problem in fiction writing, when I'm better at saying what happens than wanting to write about emotions. I don't like writing about feelings since I never know how! I know what people should feel and I know what makes sense, in some case, but I don't think I can fully grasp that humanness to emotions, that feeling of change and not always being right in emotions and the discrepancies among people when it comes to emotions.

I try to put everyone in the same state of mind and I suffer as a writer for it.

Does anyone have tips on this? I really need help.

sixth.

Endings are always difficult to write, I find. Fiction, or nonfiction, I never know how to end things. I know what comes at the start, and at the middle, and everything leading up to an end. But never the end. Maybe it's because every story, no matter what, is a work in progress.

I was born in 1991. I have lived 21 years and some months. My story is not yet over. I've had days that ended, I've had months and years and little stories that have ended, but they all weave into one another, and tearing out one thread to make a story of it does little but unravel the entire piece. When I write, I don't write for an ending, I write to tell something. When I tell someone something, it doesn't end just because I may say it does, there's always another day, another month, another year.

Death, too, is not an end. Death is a stop. I wouldn't choose to end my own story with my heart stopping, I refuse to think about the fact that with my life ends all recollection and all trace of me on this earth. My bones, my hair, my body will still exist. The people I love and have loved and who have loved me and who knew me will live.

I've often thought about that, the idea of all of me fading the moment my heart stops. I don't want that, I refuse that. I will reject that. I want something to live by, something that will outlast me. A painting that outlasts its artist, a book outlasting its author, a creation outlasting its creator. Not a living creation, in the sense of owning a heartbeat and breath, but something that will live for me.

To have created something, like putting your soul in it and setting it free, isn't it an interesting thought?

fifth.

I said, last time, that I was wrong when I thought things would change after that friend of mine came back.  She came back, of course, but things didn't change.  The only way they changed was that she no longer told people about those characters.

I'd blamed myself, at the time.  I'd thought that it was because of me that she was like this.  That because I played along with her at that time, because I fed into her belief, that I ruined her.  She told me that it wasn't my fault, but I still believed it was.

And then she got involved with the sisters.  One my age, the other a year younger, both normal at a first glance, maybe a bit odd by the fifth, oddness confirmed by a conversation.  I knew the older sister from spelling bees in elementary school, but I didn't speak to her again until high school.  We got off to a decent start, until she told me about her nightly activities.

"You what?" I'd asked.  I couldn't believe what she'd told me.  Not because it was amazing, fascinating, but because it was absolute bullshit.

"I fight demons."

Well, then.

I mentioned this to her younger sister the next year, as the older one had included her in these obvious delusions.  She'd said it with a serious face, that every night, she went to another realm to fight demons.  But I just had to know what her sister thought of her spreading that around.  She must have been so mortified.

"She wasn't supposed to tell anyone about that!"

Fuck me sideways.

So now I knew two girls, both of whom believed that they were nocturnal demon fighters in some magical realm.  And they were apparently serious enough about this to have written a 126-page story detailing their battles, werewolf boyfriends, and anything else that they had ripped off from episodes of Buffy and Charmed.  And then, so was that old friend of mine.

And just like that, she was one of them.  A third sister.  A demon hunter.  And I just had to give up.  What else can you do?

Really.  What else can you do?

fourth.

I don't make good decisions.

The truth is as simple as that.  It's not always, and they're not always life-ruining decisions that I make, but every once in a while, I get myself into things so deep and so ridiculously...well, not good, that I think most people would look at me and ask "what the hell were you thinking?"  And usually, it's something like, "I thought it was a good idea at the time."

It was one of those "good idea at the time" situations that led me into a place I can only describe as Crazytown.

To most people, if a girl came up to them and said that she believed that there were other people inside her head, that she could switch between them at will and speak as them and have them take over her body, that would be a sign of a person who probably belongs in counseling, or maybe a hospital.  For me?  I thought she was awesome.

Already, I imagine people shaking their heads and cringing.  Maybe not, thinking I was five.  No.  I was fourteen, and instead of running like hell in the opposite direction, I decided, I want to try that too.

I created characters.  At least ten of them.  All with their own personalities, all very much involved with that other girl's.  It was like our own secret world.  We had long conversations, switching between them and talking about them like they were, well, real people.

I was fourteen years old and while I didn't believe that these characters were real, I was lucky.  I thought it was a game.

She thought it was real.

When she went to the hospital our sophomore year of high school, after running out of the cafeteria, shrieking "they won't let me leave!" I thought that was it.  That she'd come back, that she'd be done with it, and that we could be friends again, instead of some on-again, off-again, half-fictional relationship.

Of course, I was wrong.

third.

Naivete is the subject of the week (and the weeks to come, at that), this week.  I figured I'd get some practice in before I start my actual piece by writing about...well, the subject we're talking about.  Giving some of the other theme ideas some love, or something.  Speaking of which:

Kids, anyone under the age of...let's say 16, just to be a little bit sure of ourselves here, are going to be pretty naive in love.  They're going to be stupid.  I was stupid.  You ask me for a bad relationship story, I say "which one?"  My first "love" was a kid in my elementary school.  He was semi-famous for being able to stretch his ears out and pick his nose with his tongue.  We spent most of our fourth and fifth grade years "breaking up" and getting back together.  Our first kiss was secret, ducking our heads underwater at a YMCA pool for our lips to meet.  We thought we'd be together forever, because we didn't know any better.  I think, by now, he's forgotten about the time he climbed the exposed pipes on the bathroom walls when our school underwent renovations.  It's one of those things I still remember.

It's naive, yes, to think that anything lasts forever.  Love, or life, or anything about us.  Love lasts as long as it can survive, with or without air.  I know people for whom love has lasted for years.  I know people for whom love has died.  I don't like to say "forever" when it comes to love, because I'm not that naive.  But I'm naive enough to think it will last, when I have it.  I don't go into love thinking it will die.  I hope.  I hope, but I don't promise myself or anyone.  If it's a good run, it's a good run.  If it's not, then it's not.

But I know better.  People stop loving people, or people forget people.  I said once that I don't like to talk a lot about my family, so I won't, this time.  I'm sorry.

second.

On navel-gazing (subject courtesy of one portion of "Keep it Real": it's always been a concept that is both clear and unclear to me. On one hand, it seems natural that people should want to talk about themselves. Rarely does anyone ask "how was your day" and mean it if they do not want to be asked the same thing. Like an invitation to navel-gazing, please, please, tell me about your life. Even the people who never know what to say can find words, if the words are about themselves.

And of course, I wouldn't say that I am any exception to this.  The interrogation tools are unnecessary, I can go on at length if you need, I promise.  The problem, however-- as though there is only one problem with this, that's almost a joke, and you can laugh-- is very, very simple.

I am a constant sufferer of a condition that I call "being painfully boring."  Awful, dreadful, terrible.  Of course, it only takes the right words to make boring exciting and the wrong ones to make the most exciting days as dry as the crumbs at the bottom of the toaster.  Yes, yes, certainly, I will tell you about my day, and then I have to put in all that effort to make it sound good.  Readable, if you wanted.  Such pressure!

Navel-gazing is somewhat of an act, putting yourself in this cage at a zoo for all to see.  You write, scratch on the paper like a monkey would its head, people watch.  Look, it's creating something.  Look, it's a story. Or maybe excrement.  It's easier to create the latter than the former, and so the latter is often what readers get.  What a shame.

Of course, isn't this own work some sort of navel-gazing?  This whole blog, in fact.  Me looking for enlightenment, or answers to everything, writing my thoughts down as if they may lead to that for me or for someone else.  Self-indulgence, really.  Complete and utter excrement.

I try, I do, to make something more than that.  A piece of work, something proper.  To write about myself as a person and not as a tool of my own writing, a hand wielding itself.  To answer those questions about myself because anyone asking deserves more than the act of looking down at oneself, taking a lifeless photograph and uploading it without comment.  It's the least I can do, of course.  That, and return the favor:

How was your day?

first.

In high school, I read a book that changed my outlook on creative nonfiction-- well, on nonfiction in general. To that point, I hadn't really known that nonfiction could be creative-- I thought that anything nonfiction was sort of a dry piece of work, you'd pick it up and read it and it was full of details and facts that no one in their right mind would ever want to read about.

Obviously, I know now that I was wrong in thinking that.

But what really taught me this was a book-- "Please Don't Kill the Freshman"-- by a girl named Zoe Trope. This wasn't a memoir, it was a diary. And it wasn't full of dates and facts and things I'd feel I would have to memorize for some unknown reason. It was like prose. Flowing and full of metaphor and style and it was something I wanted to read.

So I read it. Or, really, devoured it. Her prose was full of mystery. It made me wonder about her life. It made me, in a way, want to be her. In another way, I was her. I don't feel empathy when I read the words "I feel sad," but I do feel it when I read the swirl of feelings, laid out in some way or another, with brutal honesty and clarity. I tried to understand her. I did understand her.

I was her. All the other books at my high school library were about people that I couldn't identify with at all. They had feelings and lives to which I couldn't relate, so I read them and I felt disappointed and let down by them. But this was one of the few books that I had access to, at a time when my family wouldn't have understood, that was about someone like me. Someone with the same kinds of whirling emotions, someone who was different from the rest of the world around them.

This book made me feel somewhat like I belonged, even if I was a country's width and eight years away. It made me wish I knew more, outside the confines of cover-to-cover and the size of the pages.

I found the writer, online, years after this had been published. She lives a normal life now, away from her rebellious homosexual teen years. I couldn't explain why, then, but I felt a little sad. It's funny how these things work out.