The catching-up list

[discountsatori]

Past

My sister and I ran a race on Saturday. Not together, though -- one of these days it'd be nice to keep up with her, but on Saturday she crossed the finish line seven minutes before my side stitch and I did. It was a hilly course through some older suburban neighborhoods, and I downed my halfway-point reward water too quickly and wound up making my way to the finish line in a half-jog, half-trip that lasted about two miles. In the last half-mile, the first-place finisher cruised by and called out "Looking good!" to several of us as he blithely re-ran the course. I just stared down at my feet and leaped over some obstacles in the gutter (women's underwear? Beige and silky?) and turned up my music. At least there were bagels and muffins and various coffees at the end!

Present

I've been working on my fiction in earnest, which is the biggest reason that I haven't been writing much in here. The only way I could show you how MASSIVE this development is would be to take you back over the last, oh, nine years of hard drives littered with first paragraphs but no final paragraphs, ads for contests going yellow on various corkboards that have hung above various desks, lots of dreaming about going to Iowa, lots of reading Bird by Bird et al. and trying to create the best writer's life for myself while leaving the actual act of writing to wait politely, sitting with good posture while I posted a lot of journal entries and fooled around with five different NaNoWriMos before finally, finally coming back around to short stories. The only short stories I finished in recent years were either for my creative writing workshop with GFN in my last year of college, or for a couple of contests after college. But those stories read like journal entries with the names changed and a trite ending tacked on for the sake of deluding me into thinking I had written something approaching fiction. And they were finished, always, right before the deadline, with no time for even five minutes of revision triage. One sat in front of an editor's eyes bearing several embarrassing typos.

But now! I have three stories that have moved past the first-draft stage and are actually being revised. One of them is sitting on a clipboard next to me with Adam's red pen markings and leakings all over it. Another I'm going to print out at work tomorrow so that Adam can have some fun with the new red pen he got for the purpose of marking up my stories.

The best thing about these recent stories is that they are NOT ABOUT ME... because you and I, dear Livejournal Update Box, know how much time has been wasted chewing over that rather inessential subject.

Most recent movie: Sunset Boulevard

Most recent books: Naked, by David Sedaris (finished Tuesday), Stargirl, by Jerry Spinelli (finished tonight). Next, I think, will be If I Told You Once, by Judy Budnitz.

Neko Case. Right now I'm listening to Blacklisted. I haven't felt this way since Little Earthquakes, people. Shhh.

Future

A week from now, I'll be sitting all by my little self at the Sufjan Stevens concert. Adam likes to respond to his name by pretending he has misheard me -- "Who? Blupjan Bleevens? Poopjan Peepens?" -- and thus he was not invited to join me (nor would he want to, not after December's Florida road trip which had me playing Illinois for hours and hours). About two months ago, I woke up early on a Saturday morning to be among the first to hop on the Ticketmaster site and grab a ticket for the show. But the time limits for the filling out of their forms made me nervous, and none of my logins worked, and so, somehow, I wound up losing a second-row seat, and then a front-row-of-the-balcony seat, until I finally wound up with a seat somewhere up in the nosebleed section where I saw Wicked with my mom a couple months ago. I'm going to try not to be bitter, because this show will be the reward for so many evenings last November and December when I left work late and dejected and looking forward to nothing more than listening to "Chicago" while driving home in the dark.