Thought-Drive

Catching up with a friend, I told her I had learned a wealth of things since we last spoke. And I guess I sounded really serious; she asked me what sorts of things I could've learned in only a few weeks. Before I go any further, the list is actually shorter than you might think. The items' weights were only real to me. It occurred to me that I don't mention the fairly constant stream of rejections I get from various places I submit to, not because I'm ashamed but because it's more or less the only sort of non-bill mail that I get. Every other month I tell myself I'm going to start mailing myself correspondence, mostly blank sheets of paper with smiley faces in the corners. I spoke with a writer friend, the same one who was nice enough to bug me about going to dragon con, and he and I have decided to lean on each other some in regards to redoubling our efforts on the writer's path. But it didn't stop me from thinking about why I keep getting rejected. ...

I'm returning from a brief hiatus during which my computer was at times broken, at times just in pieces. A friend helped out, and I learned some things about how computer hardware works. This of course doesn't mean that I'd be able to perform maintenance myself; as a point of fact, I'm simultaneously confident that I learned some things yet have no idea what those things actually are. Something very similar happened when I read this essay by a scholar self-professed to be disdainful of creative writing programs . Being confused, naturally I forwarded it to my mentor, who is not a "technician incapable of abstract thought" which is what he refers to stereotypical doctors of literature, but a creative writer, like myself (I think?). Not that I learned much of anything from hearing his own subjective view. Or maybe I learned that no one is objective in the matter, which I realized is what I was looking for. The same friend who worked on my computer waxed philosop...

I talked with a new acquaintance recently about my quest for new experiences. Or rather, my acceptance that new experiences will work to my advantage as an author and my half-hearted attempts at seeking them out. As it turned out, the topic of conversation came right around the time that one of my email accounts was hacked. Or perhaps phished, I'm not sure which. I'd heard about the phenomenon before, and seen the towers of rage people became over the occurrence. But I was a bit senseless about the whole affair. I was sad, and deflated that it had happened to me, and felt pretty low about being misrepresented. I even went so far as to be curious as to why someone would spend their time burrowing into other people's lives. I do have that experience though, piled on top of all the others, so I guess it can't all be bad. I also was finally rejected by a quarterly contest I've had the habit of entering repeatedly over the past year. It took longer than usual, and just...