A Grim Beginning

I haven’t posted any of my personal essays yet.  Four of them were too personal.   I’m going to post my favorite one, though, very soon.  It’s called “Creating a Steampunk Garden,” and I actually created one, which was exciting on several levels.

Meanwhile, the last week of Professor K’s essay class coincided with (collided with) the first week of my Coursera course, “Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World.”  I signed up for it because I have an overwhelming desire to be educated in the fullest, most liberal sense of the word.  Sadly, this ambition clashes with my overwhelming desire to rare back in the recliner and read for fun or watch DVDs.  Life is full of hard choices for us wannabe intellectuals.

I read the list of assigned books carefully before I joined up and saw NO mention of Grimm’s fairy tales.  I hate Grimm’s fairy tales, original and bowdlerized, and have since I was a child.  It seemed to me, when I read the list of assigned books, that the first assignment was to read  Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, one of which I love and the other of which I find confusing.  That darn White Knight, always falling off his horse.  What was that all about?!   So I had a pretty bad shock when I saw that the first assignment was actually to read a whole book of Grimm’s fairy tales and report on it; this during the week that I was trying to edit my essays and collect them in a portfolio for Professor K.

The Coursera essay assignment isn’t due until noon today, so I was unpleasantly surprised this morning to receive an email from them, scolding me.  How did they know I hadn’t read the fairy tales and wasn’t intending to submit a concise essay about them?!  Yikes!  But it turns out that they were admonishing me to share my thoughts in the Forum.  What they apparently don’t know is that I have already checked out the Forum.  The first thing I saw was an impertinent question regarding  my religious affiliation.  Why do you want to know, and what are you going to do with the information?, was my gut reaction.  (One can never be too paranoid, in my experience.)

So, okay.  As far as I’m concerned, the class starts with Alice in Wonderland.  I will read the assignment and write my concise essay.  I will share some of my thoughts on the Forum, and see what happens.

Us Bad Kids always redesign the syllabus to suit ourselves.

In and Out of the Sock Drawer

Professor K referred to the sock drawer several times in last Friday’s class, and it makes me laugh so I’m adopting it for my own.  I’ve been pretty disappointed with most of my essays so far — in fact, I deleted two of them after I’d uploaded them, but then they came back in their entirety with Professor K’s comments, so I went ahead and stuck them in the sock drawer with the rest.  Now it’s time to pull my portfolio together and I’ve taken another look and guess what!  The essays aren’t so bad!  They need varying amounts of rewrite, but they’re going to be okay!  Yay!

I wish I could say the same about the cover I designed for my Kindle short story collection.  It was in the sock drawer for at least two weeks and I loved it when I put it there, but this morning?  Not so much.  It seems too pale.  Well, it’s a white ghost on a white background; that could explain some of it!  Also, I made the mistake of reading a critique of Kindle and possibly all other e-readers: Amazon is watching you while you read!  They know when you start, they know when you stop, they know if you make notes on things or share a giggle with your S.O.  They can even take your book away from you any time they want to.  Maybe I paid too much attention to the Red Menace when I was a child during the Cold War, but I find this really creepy.  It’s totally put me off the whole Kindle project.

I’ll just concentrate on the portfolio for now, and get back to Kindle when I’ve forgotten most of the nasty details.  (For the record, some writers and publishers are on board with liking the feedback, but they’re going to have a hard time convincing me.)

My Brain is Stultified

Like the trolls on Terry Pratchett’s Diskworld, my brain shuts down in the heat, and this 100 degree weather is playing havoc with my writing mind.  However, I did finally write drafts of the two assigned essays, one a literary journalism and the other a literary something else, I forget.  My essays both sound like the same kind of essay to me, but so did most of the assigned “professional” essays in the textbook, so I’m not going to let that worry me.

Usually I write like Poe, and have an ending (even if it changes) and a good working title in mind before I start, but this time I wrote like Robert Frost’s “ice melting on a hot stove,” so I have lousy titles and NO endings.  I’m gonna have to rely on the … proofreaders?  Backstabbers?  Ah, feedbackers!  (See what happens to my brain in the heat?)  Anyway, I hope the feedback will help.   I’m in a new group this time, and I happen to know they’re formidable writers.

I didn’t write my weekly post last week; I forget why, but I had an excellent title: “Ghosts and Gimmicks.”  The ghosts were because several in class, including me, had ghosts in their essays, and the gimmicks is what one of the guys in the back row said the professional essays relied on too much, and I agreed with him, except that he thought it was negative and I thought it was positive.  I totally agreed with him that the hettle essay was TOO gimmicky.  I still don’t know what a hettle is, but I really liked her “How I Wrote the Hettle Essay.”

It was the “Searching for Marvin Gardens” essay that really turned me on.  Gimmicky, yes; but so clever and flowed effortlessly between the light and the dark.  Many years ago, for a major news magazine, I transcribed a week’s worth of interviews about what happened to Atlantic City, so I had a real appreciation of the essay.

I should read all these assignments again in October when it’s cooler.  My brain likes October.

One of my new essays is about steampunk flowers, and the original title was “Steampunk Flowers,” but as of this morning I’ve revved it up to “Creating a Steampunk Garden,” which isn’t any great shakes, but at least it’s evolving.  The other essay is about rest cures, and it’s called “Rest Cures,” and when I wrote to Professor K to moan about it he said it sounded “rather drab,” and to “Jazz it up!”  (His punctuation.)

How does “Jazzy Rest Cures!” sound to anybody?