Good stuff’s happening lately. On Sunday, I got unstuck with The Beacon, and now have a pretty good idea about how all five layers (!) of the novel are going to be working. Now it’s just a matter of getting back to the scribbling, but I’m excited about it again. And after a week of being blocked and disinterested, that’s a good feeling.

Also, found out that an abstract I proposed to the MnCUEW (Minnesota Colleges & Universities English and Writing) conference was accepted, so, in addition to the Undergraduate Research Symposium on campus in late April, I’ll also be presenting “Talking Across Our Boundaries: A Case for Creative Nonfiction” in front of real-live professors and academics next week. Kinda freaky, actually, but I love that paper and the ideas in it. That’s coming up on April 3rd.

I do not know how to type properly.  When I actually stopped and watched myself do it, I realized that I use only my right thumb and index finger, and my left thumb, middle and ringer fingers.  I use my left pinky to hit the left shift.  I don’t know that I’ve ever used the right shift button at all.  It’s never really bothered me before–I’ve written three novels that way, and pretty quickly, but since I’ve been trying to transcribe my fourth, I’m noticing how badly I really suck at typing.  I’m hitting wrong keys all over the place.  Two sentences ago in this very post I gave up on proper typing and went back to my crab-claw style.  It was just taking too long, and I was hitting all kinds of wrong keys; and though it’s just as bad accuracy-wise this way, at least I can go faster than a depressed tortoise.

It made me think of other things that I do in an overcomplicated way because I never learned the “proper” way.  Two immediately came to mind, and I’m sure there are others.  1) I have a hard time jumping rope going forward.  I’ve always been much more comfortable going backward.  2) I don’t tie my shoes normally; I make two “bunny ears” and tie them around each other.  I blame my kindergarten day-card provider for that one.

The jump roping and the shoe tying don’t so much bother me, but my typing is terrible.  I want to learn how to do it properly and accurately, but it takes so much to completely relearn a skill like that.  How many other things in my life do I do incorrectly simply because I learned it that way and don’t want to take the time to learn correctly?

It’s Friday night, and I find myself with nothing to do.  Seems like, I go all week, waiting and pining for the weekend to get here, and when it does, my excitement kind of deflates.  Had a nice dinner tonight with my partner and a friend of hers who was in town, a friend she doesn’t get to see very often but loves dearly.  So, after noms I found myself with a night completely to myself.  And I had a lot of things that I wanted to do–half a Ted Chiang collection yet to read, an entire novel yet to type out–but I ended up just sitting at my desk watching episodes of Firefly.  A satisfying night, but I’m left feeling restless.  I’ve been finding it harder and harder to relax lately; just kick back and do the things that I want to do.  I think  part of this is, because free time away from job or school stuff is so rare, I have all of these things that I want to do when that free time comes.  But, while my personality type loves being busy, I hate feeling like I have things hanging over my head.  As a consequence, when I have a night like this away from school or work, I end up not doing the things I really wanted to do because, within that free time space, they feel not like joys but obligations.

Eh.

On a side note, I was directed via Sophisticated Dorkiness to Black Cover, a blog that obsessively searches for the perfect little black notebook.  As a self-professed stationary geek–the pen aisle at Wal-Mart gets me excited; the journal section at Barnes and Noble has the strange quality of making me forget my poorness–I loved the obsessive attention to detail this site has, details normal people without deep love for impressively-bound blank paper.  For the last several years I’ve been using Moleskine notebooks without any real thoughts about what else was out there.  I mean, Picasso used a Moleskine.  Hemingway used a Moleskine.  It’s gotta be the best, right?  Not so says Black Cover.  Definitely worth checking out.  On the pen side of things, I’ve been using my blue Sharpie Pen almost exclusively for the past few weeks after getting a pack in the mail from my mom, another self-professed pen slut.  Also, been using Papermate PhD pencils since high school.

Alright, now maybe I’ll go get something productive done.  This novel isn’t gonna transcribe itself.  Then again, my bed isn’t gonna sleep in itself, either.

Woke up this morning in a funk, like nothing was interesting, like I wanted to just sit and do nothing.  But there was that whole class thing, and a paper due tomorrow morning, which I thankfully just finished.  It’s about the novel The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, and in it I discuss how Christian supersessionist political conceptions are revealed through the rhetorical orientation of the….nevermind.

I put the novel in my top three novels of my college career, along with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and William Faulkner’s Light in August.  Absalom, Absalom! comes in at a close fourth.  But now my first paper for my senior seminar is done, and I can spend the weekend concentrating on rounding up more information for my Understanding Writing project–I’m trying to clarify the position of creative nonfiction as it relates to composition studies.

I read a great article last night in which Harriet Malinowitz characterizes the divisions within English–literary studies, composition/rhetoric, and creative writing–as three divided fiefdoms, each of them waving banners and whistling, yelling to prospective students, “Pick me!  Pick me!”  Alright, so I added that last part.  But creative nonfiction is hard to place, because it seems like each of the divisions wants it, which is cool for me because I get to posit a bridge between these divided groups–a division that I think is stupid anyway–and maybe, just maybe, make the world a little brighter.  We shall see.

So, that’s this weekend.  And hopefully I’ll finally get to play a little of Fable II this weekend.  The day after it came out, I basically lost my partner for a day, but she’s almost to the end of it now.  Then the madness starts over, because, of course, you can’t play a Fable game just once.  Or twice.  Or five times.

I’ve been reading Ted Chiang’s short story collection Stories of Your Life and Others, and good god, dude can flat out write.  He’s not a prolific writer, just a handful of stories, and I think he’s currently working as a technical writer, but his stories are like little pocketwatches made of bone, ticking away precisely, almost unfathomable in their intricacy and craftsmanship.  That’s why it makes me sad that he’s not readily carried in mainstream book stores.  It takes a lot to impress me when it comes to sci-fi, a genre which, with all of its brilliant beacons of awesome, still is stuck in a mire of genre conventions and slush.  Not Ted Chiang.  It’s fucking awesome.

Started typing out my fourth novel, the third Oddry novel, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, which I started writing in longhand in England over the summer and finished about a month ago.  It’s strange copy/typing a handwritten manuscript like that because, even though it’s been a long time since I wrote it, I find myself predicting my next word or phrase.  I’ll think as I’m typing that a particular word of phrase should be added and, low and behold, when I turn back to the manuscript, I already had it written down, four months before.

Right, bed now.