I am handling it better this year, the pressure of so many things going on at once. I know that I just DO this, everything at once for a few months, and then take it easy for a while.
That said, It is 10:30, I still have three of my classmates’ stories to read so I can critique them thoroughly before class tomorrow, a facebook campaign to launch, and any changes I make to the draft of my story that I am turning in tomorrow. I suspect that after I read my classmates’ stories tonight, I will have a little freak out about my own and want to change everything, but I am trying to be happy with what I have.
Workshops are scary. Letting eleven other people read something that is unfinished, that I know is unfinished, leaves me feeling extremely naked, and not in a Misbehaving Tuesday kind of way. But, workshops are also great ways to learn, and great ways to get some momentum into a story that needs a shove. I am starting to get mad at this one, so it is the right time. Presently there are only two things I like about it: The title, The Illusion of Flying Backwards, and this paragraph:
One night I was lying awake in the top bunk, in the room I shared with my cousins on those trips. Over the sounds of ice in glasses and my aunt shuffling a deck of cards, I heard the adults talking. “That kid, it’s like she don’t know how to play. Just stands there, staring at the water, all blank, serious all the time. Whoever heard of such a thing? A kid who don’t know how to play.”
On an entirely unrelated note, amidst the thousand other things going on, I am thinking about Apple’s marketing of the iPad. As word gets out about how good it is -even to the geek world that scoffed- I wonder if Apple intentionally hyped the product but underhyped its capabilities, knowing that the word would spread quickly enough. If they knew it was that good, they would also know that word would get around, and that kind of marketing is WAY more powerful than Steve jobs standing on a stage, saying “everything works! Really, alot!” Apple has a history of underpromising and overdelivering, and it sounds like the iPad does just that. Still, I won’t buy one just yet. One of the very practical, intelligent things I learned from my father is never to buy the first model year of a new car, and I apply that to tech, too. But, next iteration of iPad, I’ll be in line.
