Movie Moments LXXIV: Nolan Edition

Happy Christmas, Ellery! Not that time has any meaning anymore, so SamtsirhC YppaH or whatever. I've picked a trio of Nolan films to investigate and am looking forward to living 2022 like a matryoshka doll. Also, this is the possibly the closest my scholarly and fannish writing have ever been.



Previously, from the Oeuvre
Seen:
Batman Begins, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet
Not Seen:
Following, Memento, Insomnia

What's the Deal
Whenever I think of Nolan, I hear, like, a basso profundo gong strike and a rattling perception of time. The Batman movies, of course, aren't as fluid as the others--comic books do time travel, but their modules are linear. Nolan's work isn't cheery--does anybody smile, ever--but it's not exactly morose, either. It's...ontological? Ontology leaves no room for merriment.

November Review-a-thon and Could You Repeat That? CLIII

I've never been ambitious enough to do full-out NaNoWriMo--it's the "No" part of it that doesn't work for me. I excel at short pieces of fiction things, and very long ago felt I was a kind of poet, but no, nothing at all that approaches novel-length. In the past I've endeavored to post fanfiction for every day of November, and time and again I've coordinated AcWriMo. It's the writing non-stop that always becomes difficult for me--I get distracted, I get depressed, I wander off. And I am, in fact, in the downswing of a steep depressive episode.

But I also have to write. So friend Amelia and I are trying to do a review-a-thon thing for November. We will try every day to share our thoughts on things we have consumed. I am running a couple of hours behind, because Margaret Atwood was speaking on my campus, and she is DELIGHTFUL. Droll and nimble and silly and sincere. I picked up Hag-Seed and The Heart Goes Last, but I brought along my copy of Angel Catbird for her to sign.


The Heart Goes Last and Hag-Seed, shiny and newly-purchased!

Anyway. That is my excitement, and possibly happiness, for the rest of the week. Until tomorrow, here are my favorite bits of words from all the books I have read recently. That is somewhat like a review, right? Or, at the very least, a clear signal of how I experienced these texts, and how they echo in my head.

Could You Repeat That? CLIII
Favorite Lines of Recent Reads

Invisibles: The Power of Anonymous Work in an Age of Relentless Self-Promotion, David Zweig
To get to the top of your field, you need to do more than simply perform your job well. To be exceptional, you need to perform your job differently from what is prescribed.

Kitty in the Underworld, Carrie Vaughn
Rules of the underworld: don't eat pomegranate seeds. Don't eat or drink anything the fairies give you. When you enter through the gates, you must remove all your clothing, all your possessions. You must bring an offering of blood to the shades who dwell there, especially if you want to ask them questions. When you leave the underworld, don't look back, not for anything.

Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream Desserts, Jeni Britton Bauer
Ice cream desserts are like my favorite people--they look the best when they are starting to fall apart.

Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, Kai Ashante Wilson
"I said," Demane repeated, "I don't do that." His mortal mask slipped a bit askew, and he couldn't hide, for a moment, the piece of him that was perilous, a god.

Last First Snow, Max Gladstone (x2)
"Sometimes we need pain."
"Easy words to speak from the comfort of a penthouse."

Two Serpents Rising, Max Gladstone (x2)
He sought the dry blue sky for an answer, finding none. "I need a drink," he said at last.

Three Parts Dead, Max Gladstone (x2)
"What choice will you make?
Abelard opened his mouth, intending to say, the Lord will guide me. He caught himself, and settled instead for, "The right one, I hope."

Inheritance, Malinda Lo
There was something magical about it: this warm September night, the yellow-and-green flags fluttering from the ceiling, the salsa burning hot on her tongue, the Mexican Coke a rush of sugary sweetness. This is normal, she thought, and she wanted to cry.

Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, Lindy West
I know that this bear's name is technically Little John. But Little John is clearly a character being played by a bear actor named Baloo, who also played himself in The Jungle Book and, decades later yet seemingly un-aged, in Tale Spin. (Sub-theory: Baloo is the thirteenth Doctor.) I'm calling the bear Baloo and this conversation is over.

And...

I had waited so long for someone to pick me. And then he changed his mind.

Low Midnight, Carrie Vaughn
If they were going to be disappointed and ashamed of her, she would earn their ill will.

W is for Wasted, Sue Grafton
Watching her drink was like watching roses bloom by way of time-lapse photography.

Kindred, Octavia Butler
Sometimes I wrote things because I couldn't say them, couldn't sort out my feelings about them, couldn't keep them bottled up inside me. It was a kind of writing I always destroyed afterward. It was for no one else.

Four Roads Cross, Max Gladstone
So whither the beast, and whence its roughness? Insects keep their skeletons on the outside; human beings only display their structure under force.

Short Stories from Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship, and Dangerous Hobbies, JK Rowling
She left him devastated, and set out for London three days later.

Hogwarts: An Incomplete and Unreliable Guide, JK Rowling
The castle is a congenial place for ghosts, because the living inhabitants treat their dead friends with tolerance and even affection, no matter how many times they have heard the same old reminiscences.

Short Stories from Hogwarts of Power, Politics, and Pesky Poltergeists, JK Rowling
A love of all things saccharine often seems present where there is a lack of real warmth or charity.

Once Broken Faith, Seanan McGuire
"Don't mistake me for a friend because I sometimes choose to be friendly," said the Luidaeg. "Don't pretend you have some sort of control over what I do. I'm First-born. That means something. Even here, even now, in this washed-out mockery of Faerie, it means something. If you forget again, I'll have to leave you with something to remember me by. So please, Arden. Because I loved your father, in my own way, in my own time, don't make me remind you."

Chaos Choreography, Seanan McGuire
I put a hand on his knee, hoping it would be enough to hold him in place. If it wasn't, I was going to witness the remarkable sight of my grandmother punching my husband in the throat.

The Girls, Emma Cline
I thought that loving someone acted as a kind of protective measure, like they'd understand the scale and intensity of your feelings and act accordingly. That seemed fair to me, as if fairness were a measure the universe cared anything about.

Feedback, Mira Grant
I almost jumped to my feet and ran after her. In the end, I couldn't make myself move. I just sat there on the kitchen floor, staring at the cupboard, and waiting for the future to begin.

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, Volume 1, Amy M. Reeder, Brandon Montclare, Natacha Bustos, and Tamra Bonvillain
I love science. Science class, on the other hand...science class can be hard.

The Sleeper and the Spindle, Neil Gaiman
Each hammer blow sounded like a heartbeat.

Silk: The Life and Times of Cindy Moon, Robbie Thompson, Stacey Lee, Anapaola Martello, and Tana Ford
SILK: Get them out of here--
SPIDER-MAN: Silk--
SILK: It's me she's after. And he needs help. I'll buy you time: Go! Then come back. Definitely come back after.

Death's End, Cixin Liu & Ken Liu (translator)
Against the lights of New York City, Wade's figure appeared as a black ghost, his eyes glinting with a cold light.
"We'll send only a brain," he said.

Grunt, Mary Roach
US government button specifications run to twenty-two pages. This fact on its own yields a sense of what it is like to design garments for the Army.

Kitty Saves the World, Carrie Vaughn
Since I couldn't tell my pleasant, easygoing mother that I was on my way to trap and assassinate the two-thousand-year-old mastermind of a global vampire conspiracy, I made up something about a onetime chance to interview a very important person for the show. Mom made impressed and encouraging noises and didn't ask questions. Bless her.

The Best of Intentions

In the month of April, friend Amelia posted every day on her blog, and it was lovely. I know lots of folks who keep a schedule for writing blogs, or articles, or whathaveyou, and I always have lots of grand plans. I have notebooks and scribbles and ideas, but the follow-through? All the reasons people have for not writing are all the reasons that hamstring me. I have a lot of intentions, but nothing ever seems right.

Today, somebody called my writing--not anything significant or public, just some internal commentary for a thing--incisive. It sent a thrill down my spine, the reminder that people like how I write, and even more, that I like how I write. So maybe I'll try this blog-every-day thing, even though I'm four days behind. I'll try some stuff, even if it's never as developed as I want. Get it out there, right?

In other news, I screencapped my Evernote list of books to read (yet another document or program or app or scribble that indicates all the books I aspire to consume). I meant to say something about them, but I think I'll just leave this snippet as it is.

Here at the End of All Things

So I was writing up the acknowledgements portion of my dissertation, and it occurred to me that most of the people I'm thanking are folks that might never know they're being thanked. I mean, with a thesis/dissertation, we send copies to our committee members, then print out a couple of copies for the archives and then...that's it. Weird, right? So I figured I'd post the acknowledgements and prologue out here, for all the world to see. (Given the way these documents get processed, I might be violating some sort of copyright? We'll find out. YOU CANNOT COPYRIGHT MY GRATITUDE, FACELESS EDUCORPORATIONS.)

Anyway. Here:

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgement pages are tricky beasts, and I’m not ashamed to admit that this will always feel incomplete. But hey, if you're reading this: I am thankful for you. You have made an impact in my life, and that is reflected in the work that follows.

In the summer of 2013, I received a Purdue Graduate School Summer Research Grant, which allowed me to spend a good amount of time gnawing on books and articles and ideas. Because of a funny sequence of events, Professor Michael Salvo graciously signed my grant application form at the last minute, and I'm grateful.

As I've held administrative positions in ICaP and the Writing Lab, Linda Haynes and Tammy Conard-Salvo have been superb guides and role models. Joy Kane, as well, has been a great ally and sounding board.

I was lucky enough to participate in the early years of WPA-GO, a collection of colleagues and peer mentors who helped me talk through my project, in various iterations, at every conference. The support of @womeninTC and #getafterit scholars was incredibly helpful in these past few months, as well.

I've had productive conversations with Libby Miles and Amy Ferdinandt Stolley, at very different times, but being able to bounce ideas off them kept me going when I wasn't sure I was on the right track. Kyle Vealey and I have had several long conversations about mêtis and infrastructure, and I always came out of them with a better idea of what I thought. A couple of Writing Lab tutors, including Marc Dziak, helped me fine-tune early presentations of this project, which is probably why it's as coherent as it is. During an Assessment seminar in Fall 2011, Professor Richard Johnson-Sheehan coached me through an article that is now a large chunk of Chapter Five.

When I started at Purdue, I wasn't quite sure what this whole "rhetoric" thing was about. I'm thankful for Kristen Moore, Jen Talbot, Megan Schoen, Cris Elder, and Laurie Pinkert, all of whom mentored me in different ways. It took me a while to find my feet, but they were always there to keep me steady.

My cohort has been a weird and wonderful group, and I've been glad to have them for support, as well as productive disagreement. I am especially grateful for Emily Legg and Adam Strantz. While I might have been the only avowed WPA in our group, I've learned a ton from working with them.

Without Mary McCall, Gracemarie Mike, Jeff Gerding, and Jennifer Justice, I would not have survived this year. There are no words that can express how much I am thankful for their love and support.

Professor Samantha Blackmon, Professor Linda Bergmann, and Professor Jenny Bay have been tremendous mentors and teachers. They helped me grow.

On one of my very lowest days, Professor Patricia Sullivan sat with me, and she said, "Let's start a writing group." Her generosity is astounding; her mentorship is a blessing.

Professor Thomas Rickert has been an endlessly encouraging and patient chair. His questions and, yes, puns, have helped me relearn how to think on paper. In my very first semester, I took his Institutional Rhetoric seminar; I've been writing with that class in mind ever since.

My family has been lovely and supportive, even when I didn't make very much sense to them. Christopher, Andrea, Alexandra, and Mom and Dad, I hope I keep making you proud. And, finally, to my departed grandparents, Eliseo and Mercedes, Pablo and Paz--I am a scholar because you gave me books. Thank you, always.

Prologue

In my first year of doctoral work, I took a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) seminar with Professor Linda Bergmann. On our first day of class, as she began to define WAC, she stopped and sighed. "It's impossible," she said. There were too many variables to account for, when trying to establish and build an interdisciplinary program. In addition to reconciling what "evidence," "organized," and even "writing" meant to an array of disciplines that approached learning in a multiplicity of ways, in addition to the unwieldy task of articulating what students want, being a coordinator of a WAC program involved the delicate political negotiation of making a large group of faculty do extra work. "It's impossible," she continued on, "but we try anyway."

And I was a lowly first-year, stuck in with, primarily, a group of advanced graduate students who had been acting as scholars and program-builders in complete (it seemed to me) confidence. That class, in many ways, was my first introduction to the discipline of writing program administration, both as a concept and in comportment. Honestly, it was terrifying, but I kept my head down and pressed on.

So, five years later, we come to this, a deeply personal story written in a key I'm still learning how to play. I'm attempting to reconcile a lot of ideas and identities and stuff, and not a single one of them plays nicely with the others. On most days, I've been pretty sure completion of this whole thing wasn't possible, but, well. I'm told we only deal with the impossible, here.

Thanks, Linda. 

#GoScholarGo: Thoughts from an Academic Tweeter

Can I confess something, y'all? And I say this cheekily, like this is just between you and me, but I also mean it sincerely because it may still be transgressive: I never feel so at home as an academic than when I'm tweeting at a conference.

It's not just that I'm really good at tweeting--and, let's be clear, I am. One of my mentors, Professor Pat Sullivan, asked me about my live-tweeting decision process, and my first response was, "You have to predict the future." It was partially a joke, but partially not, and some time I'm going to put my thoughts on tweeting into a coherent how-to of some sort. In any case, my academic adoration of tweeting isn't just because I feel comfortable doing it.

No, it's something else. It's something about access and networking and on-the-cusp relevance. It's being able to share thoughts with people who can't make it to conferences. Not just that, but sharing thoughts from a sparsely-attended panel (for many reasons, including time and/or programming conflicts) with the, at the moment, 209 people who follow me. And maybe only a third of those 245 are academics, and maybe only a dozen of them actually read my tweets. But, hey. Those are a dozen more people thinking about intersections of racism and admissions policies, or the impacts of testing culture on basic writing pedagogy, or how feminist practice can make for better databases. And maybe a half-dozen people think about it, and maybe two people pass it on.

But...I get to be a part of that. It's kind of thrilling, and it's immediate, and it's more connected than I feel to academnia, almost any other time.

And it's writing. And a lot of days, lately, it's really hard for me to write. Or even think of myself as a writer, and that's a vital part of myself that I need to keep alive.

So, I tweet a lot at conferences, and it's important to me. And yeah, I think it's important for this weird nebulous thing that I like to call "the field."

Anyway, Storify is a handy tool, and I used it to archive my tweets from the past two conferences I attended. Click on, if you're interested!

The Association for Teachers of Technical Writing

• Panel A3: A Series of Odd Things That Happened While Programming Databases
  Starring Jennifer Justice, Jeff Gerding, Heejung Kwon, Patrick Love, Talisha Haltiwanger, Christine Jach, Amelia Chesley, and Nick Marino
• Panel B6: Data Narratives: Streams, Stories, Genres
  Starring Stuart Selber, Kristen Moore, Tim Elliott, Michael Knievel, and Dan Richards
• Panel C5: Big Data Policy and Ethics: What Technical Communicators Should Know about University Contracts, User Agreements, and Digital Information Control
  Starring Heidi McKee, Ann Hill Duin, and James E. Porter
• Panel D4: Research Methods, Frames, and Challenges
  Starring Rebecca Walton, Lucia Dura, Ryan Moeller, Ryan Price, and Kyle Vealey

The Conference on College Composition and Communication

• Opening Session
  Starring Adam Banks, Gail Hawisher, Cynthia Selfe, and Howard Tinberg
• A Session Featured Speaker: Angela Davis
• Panel B9: Voices from the Asian/Asian American Caucus: Opening Up Our Disciplinary History and Scholarship
  Starring K. Hyoejin Yoon, Terese Guinsatao Monberg, Jennifer Sano-Franchini, and Linh Dich, with appearances by Asao B. Inoue
• Panel E14: Wireless Women: Gender and Access in the 'Wide Open' Web
  Starring Daniel Liddle, Carrie Grant, and Liz Lane
• Panel F38: Rethinking Difference in Composing Composition: Language, Translation, Genre, Modality
  Starring Bruce Horner, Anis Bawarshi, Juan Guerra, Nancy BouAyash, and Cynthia Selfe
• Panel G14: WPA-Outcomes Statement Revision for a Multimodal, Digitally Composed World - PART II
  Starring Darsie Bowden, Beth Brunk-Chavez, Dylan Dryer, Bump Halbritter, and Kathleen Blake Yancey
• Panel H20: Methodological Discovery: Opening Research Design to Invention and Instability
  Starring Libby Miles, Pat Sullivan, and Michele Simmons
• Panel K27: Feminist Ruptures, Feminist Responses: Toward a Deeper Democracy
  Starring Shirley Logan, Cheryl Glenn, and Joyce Irene Middleton
• Panel L05: Teachers and Scholars of Basic Writing: Renewed Debates Over Policies and Practices
  Starring Elizabeth Hollis, Kerry Lane, and Sugie Goen-Salter
• Panel N36: Never Mind Geoffrey Sirc: A Tribute Panel
  Starring Cynthia Haynes, Byron Hawk, Victor Vitanza, Jenny Edbauer Rice, Jeff Rice, Thomas Rickert, and Geoffrey Sirc

The thing is, this doesn't even cover everything that I did out there.

There was the super-heartening Women in Tech Comm luncheon, which I had never joined before, but felt so welcomed when I did. And, of course, the Purdue Rhetoric and Composition reunion party, which was filled with hugs and delicious, delicious pizza.

There was 4C4Equality, at whose table I spent a good amount of time, even though I was only officially there for an hour. There were the amazingly lovely C's the Day folks, who awarded me a fistful of sparkleponies after I spent FIVE YEARS without any at all.

There was the ridiculously early Council of Writing Program Administrators breakfast, and the cheerily late WPA-GO mixer (and I happily joined those who closed that mixer down, even though I'm no longer part of the leadership).

There was the Asian/Asian American caucus, where I got to talk about how I fit, and where I fit, and how any of us fit, and what it all meant.

And there was meeting up with old friends, and making a bunch of new ones, and breakfasts and brunches and coffees and lunches and dinners and movies.

But yeah. Conference tweeting, y'all. It's where it's at.

*All credit for the #GoScholarGo hashtag should go to Abigail Scheg, who is pretty much my go-to role model for academic tweeting.

Accounting and Counting Accounts

I've been thinking a lot about social media, and about the way people say a lot of things about the way they work, and how those statements are always totally wrong. I've also been thinking a lot about how much I use social media, and the presence it creates for me, and the absences that result. And I've been thinking a lot about stories.

So here I am on Blogspot, in the same way that I was once on Livejournal and Dreamwidth. (And, technically, still am.) It's a space for thinking and positing and navel-gazing. That can mean a lot of different things. On LJ/DW, I was occasionally emo (hence the frequent derision, nowadays, about LJ as a space for teenage diaries of all ages), but for the most part, it was a community of support. For me, particularly, it was a community oriented around fandom: fiction, vids, graphics, meta-analysis, griping, and tons and tons of squee. I loved it there, and for more than a decade, it was the place where I could talk like I talk and not feel like a freak. Grad school diverted me away from LJ/DW, for lots of reasons, but there was also the proliferation of social media sites. I didn't care much for MySpace, though I had an account. When I moved to Poland, though, I also got onto Facebook, and then a year later, I was in grad school, and the blogs kind of disappeared. And yet, yeah, here I am.

It's only in the past year or so, though, that I've glommed onto other forms of social media. Google Plus is nice but kind of vacant. Twitter is, actually, my favorite form of social media, with its constant (and difficult to archive) influx of news and quips and trends. In the past month, I've picked up Instagram and Pinterest, which I've decried in the past. And I downloaded the Vine app two days ago.


PINTERESTING.
I'm not sure what any of this means yet, and I'm not sure what it means for my ethos. I've got a Facebook thing going, and I'm fortunate (as I move into the job market) to feel confident I can proceed as I have been doing. Twitter's even more fascinating, because I've carved out an academic presence there, even though the majority of my tweets are about television, movies, and games. The other stuff, I'm thinking through; I have mixed feelings about the push to cross-post and sync everything, especially since I have similar audiences in each space. Why should they remain separate? What are the benefits of merging? How much does interface change the way I react to cross-posts? Why can't I search anything? Right now, I'm in wait-and-see mode. I've got to use it to understand it. Speculating without data is the ungendered form of mansplanation. (OR IS IT?)

The Project (my method of glancing, sideways, at my dissertation without invoking panic or guilt) is all about this kind of accountability, I think. I want to look at Writing Program Administration and the things we think make it, but everything ends up being stories. They're articles and books, true, but they're also cautionary tales in the hallway, and bibliographies posted to listservs, and the roll of somebody's eyes in the middle of a meeting. The things we know about what we do are actually, honestly, feelings. I just need to chalk out the boundaries of how we articulate them into facts.

Also, I may have to set up a LinkedIn account before the job-hunting season is done. This makes me sad; a year ago, I wouldn't have one except over my cold, dead body. But I guess we go where the audience will listen? The demands of interaction are weird.

Or maybe it's like The Truman Show?

So this morning I was leisurely walking down the hallway in my apartment and noticed there's a smoke detector installed on the wall.


It's about a foot above eye level, right outside the bathroom.

A number of questions ran through my mind at that point. Has that always been there? The casing is cracked--does it even work? How do I know it's a smoke detector and not, like, an NSA monitoring device? Or a Cylon plot device? (It says something about the state of cyber-paranoia nowadays that my first leap was to the NSA, rather than Cylons. WHO AM I?) But, yeah. A smoke detector, hanging out, and I'd never seen it in two years!

Except, false. Of course I'd seen it. I've lived here for two years; I have walked down the hallway innumerable times. I have seen that smoke detector every time and just never thought about it.

Huh.

There are lots of things that could be said about the things seen that go unseen, the invisibility of the everyday, the--sorry in advance--the always already there. I'm a writer and a scholar--these sorts of observations are the entirety of my wheelhouse.

We could talk about infrastructures we take for granted until we look at them, and they break. Think about calling 911, and all that goes into the organization of it. Think about the eerie, horrifying beauty of tornado sirens. Think about walking down a busy road and coming to a block that doesn't have a sidewalk.

We could talk about the assumptions we carry around, unchallenged until it's apparent that they can be harmful, or limiting, or wrong. Think about that hazy, reflexive mental picture you have when you read or hear the word doctor, or gamer, or friend. Or suspect. Think about your epistemology, the way you recognize that something you know is something knowable. Think about the last time you said something was "common sense," or claimed that "everybody knows that." Think about the last time you hurt someone's feelings.

We could talk about losing places, or things, or people that we need, and how we tried not to think about it beforehand. Think about the stages of grief. Think about friends we've spent the past four years with, the ones who are moving away, and how that changes the way we consider all our relationships with everybody, ever.

(Obvs, when I say "we," I mean, "I.")

What I'm going to think about for the rest of the morning, however, is why I didn't think to check for smoke detectors when I first moved in. I remember checking for a fire extinguisher, but not a smoke detector. Inefficient.

Long Time, No Weblog

Blogs are kind of a weird thing, right? Alyssa Rosenberg recently talked about about the evolution of blogging, and how we're moving away from personality-driven blogs and more towards, I don't know, blogging collectives that are corporatized and sustainable. But are we? I mean, if you want to make money on it, sure enough, or if you need a place to do PR for your book project or your Etsy or your whatever, yeah. But if you're just somebody whistling in the dark, or wanting an audience that's just a tad more vast than a spiral-bound Lisa Frank notebook, then what?

The micro-blogging represented by Facebook and Twitter has been keeping my weird craving for feedback pretty well-fed, I'll be honest. If there's one thing I know about my writing, I'm a steady hand at punchy one-liners. But I also miss the opportunity to write long-form stuff, and I've just fallen away from the Livejournal community over the past couple of years. (Which makes me sad, in a lot of ways? I mean, we all make jokes about emo teens and their online journaling, but I can pretty confidently state that LJ--and its predecessors--provided a community of support that I couldn't find elsewhere for fifteen years, and that ain't nothing.) But a couple of things are spurring me back here, specifically:

1. My trip to the Philippines a month ago. While I did some Facebooking and some chatting online, I felt pretty disconnected from my life and my loved ones. To compensate, I wrote these long, rambling journal-type things that I sent to a handful of folks. They were long and without much form, and I had so much fun writing them. I might post excerpts later.
   
   
2. I should be am starting serious work on The Project, almost six full months after I completed my prospectus. I've gone through, like, three reframes, but now is the time to get moving on this thing...or drop out of grad school. AND DON'T THINK I'M NOT TEMPTED. In any case, my friend Grace suggested I blog about The Project, and I remembered that writing begets writing, or it does for me, anyway. When I write one thing--whether it's a movie review, or a response to an article, or a piece of fanfiction--I want to keep writing. I actually love writing; it's just terrified me lately.

So here I am. Let's see what happens.

502 Blog #2: Don't try this at home, kids.

(This past semester involved writing a lot of bloggy-type things for my classes. In an attempt to make this blog more than just movie squee and TV critique, I'll be reposting some of them here, for kicks. They will sometimes be edited to provide context--often I am responding to specific articles--but the overall content and tone will remain the same.

The following blog was written for Writing Lab practicum, in which we were specifically asked to talk about our own writing process.)

I would be a horrible first-year composition student.

I remember someone, sometime last year, talked about how computers are forcing us to reconsider the traditional writing process: pre-writing, drafting, revising, designing, etc. I always feel slightly guilty when students (or now, I suppose, tutees) ask for pre-writing strategies, because I never do any of the exercises textbooks advocate. I don't freewrite, I don't list things, and I don't draw bubbles or trees or Venn diagrams. I put the piece of writing (whether it's an essay, a review, or a blog) into the back of my mind and let it...percolate.

I have been known to draw weird stick figures in the margins of notes for other, unrelated things. They travel the outlines of my notebook, hopping over blue lines and morphing into arrows that suggest form.

When I'm being very diligent, I force myself to create outlines, but often this happens after I've written my introduction. Yes, I write my introduction first. Yes, this is something I tell my students they shouldn't worry about. Yes, this also is a catalyst for guilt.

After I have my introduction, I stare at my working thesis ("working" because of stylistic rather than content issues), and then start outlining. I write paragraphs when I feel like I can complete them. (I can't write sentence by sentence.) If there isn't a logical transition between paragraphs, I add "TRANSITION" in bold letters, in brackets, and when I'm unlucky in formatting, I forget to take those notes out.

I almost never move paragraphs once they've been written. I delete them, and I add them, but they're where they are because that's where they fit.

It's possible I found myself writing fiction first, before I discovered essays, and that's why I can't explain writing except in haphazard, mystic terms.

I am reluctant about letting other people read works in progress, because I don't have that rough draft to second draft to endless iterations of drafts process. It's either something that can be read by an audience, or it isn't.

When I read what I write, I can hear my voice in the back of my mind, reciting. I'm conversing with someone, maybe a couple of people, but never a group. We know each other well.

Everything I write is either the worst thing I've ever written, or the most awesome thing I've ever written.

There is no going back. Well, sometimes I go back. I usually include too many commas.


[originally posted 26 August 2010]

I mean, there's history, but there's something else.

I just wrote a postcard to a friend, and then had one of those moments of looking at what I wrote and seeing it as something else. I thought I'd take a moment to preserve it, and I hope she forgives me for sharing thoughts that would otherwise belong only to her:

...there's something very compelling about deserts, and cities sprung, unlikely, in the desert. Some strange combination of determined and obscene. Desert cities are rife with stories that have nothing to do with history.

I was originally talking about Phoenix, but it's also about Las Vegas, and Barstow, and my adoration of New Mexico. I like places that grapple with mythology.