Falling on my face, english major style
I'm royally screwed. At the moment, I don't appear to be able to write myself out of a paper bag. I've been trying to put together the damned story for the magazine for the last week, and I get a paragraph in, realize that what I have so far is crap, and end up deleting it and starting over. Not the most productive method by a longshot. I'm overrun by ideas, and none of them go anywhere, no matter how awesome or terrible they might be. I'm running on a freaking literary banana peel.
I think half of this is a severe fear of melodrama. Everything that's come out so far has been incredibly overplayed, and I've got this irrationally intense fear of looking utterly ridiculous when I finish something. To go for bad analogies, I feel like the person showing up for the business lunch dressed in full out formalware from the forties. And even if we don't ever go over the submissions as a group, I still don't want to know that I wrote something that everyone's reading and going "...what the hell is wrong with her?"
...I don't know what happened to my confidence between fiction class and here, but if anyone finds it beaten and kicked in a gutter somewhere, could you give it directions so it can come home? I'm not a fan of this panicky realization of writing impotence, or of the tendency it gives me towards whining.
The only half consolation is that I can probably sneak an extra few hours to get something done. The magazine is tiny, and we're not going to have many submissions; I'm guessing the other people aren't going to mind if I send the piece-that-isn't in tomorrow, if I manage to get it created in time. The files for voting aren't getting sent out until Friday anyway.
Alright, off to go continue shaming myself into doing what I'm freaking studying to be able to perform on command.
And that's the end of the self pity party. I'll probably have a little more self respect left when this crisis is over if yall just skip the cut and move on to your regularly scheduled flists.
TTFN