mining the archives
Since February of 1998, I've kept a pen-and-paper journal that I write in every night before I go to bed. This means I have an astoundingly detailed record of much of my adult life, which my future biographers will be grateful for, though they will require a cryptanalyst to decipher my handwriting.
I don't go back and read my old entries very often, but I do every once in a while when I need help remembering a certain event, or to resolve occasional disputes about what happened when. Every time I look up something in particular, I always discover that other important or interesting things were going on at the same time. This leads me to conclude that my life is constantly fascinating, at least when observed from a distance.
Falling Apart has an autobiographical component, so I did some research into the record of my own past to get details about the episode in my life that I'm basing it on. (Yes, I'm being deliberately vague here.) In reading through two months of journal entries from August and September of 2002, I learned that a lot more was going on at that time than I remembered. For one thing, I was working a bit on what would eventually become The Weather Up There, which surprised me, because I'd believed that I'd started it at the very beginning of that year and then dropped it until NaNoWriMo in November.
I also found these excerpts, which will be of special interest to a couple of my readers:
8/19/02 - Someone at work (not in my department) sent out a message that she's looking for people to start a creative writing group with. I responded. That could be good for me, if it works out.
8/28/02 - Then it was time to go to the first meeting of the creative writing group. There were 4 of us who showed up, and a couple other interested who couldn't make it. We told each other our writing backgrounds and said what we want out of the group. We decided we'll meet every other week, start with exercises, and then try moving on to critiques. We did one exercise today, a simple pass-along story.
This writing group has been through a number of members and formats, but continues today with three of us who meet weekly. We're often a bit too good at reinforcing each other's procrastinatory skills, but we also manage to inflict enough guilt to keep us all writing, and we've each made a lot of progress as a result. The group deserves some of the blame, along with NaNoWriMo, for my regular disappearances into the world of fiction. (Thanks, you two!)
I don't go back and read my old entries very often, but I do every once in a while when I need help remembering a certain event, or to resolve occasional disputes about what happened when. Every time I look up something in particular, I always discover that other important or interesting things were going on at the same time. This leads me to conclude that my life is constantly fascinating, at least when observed from a distance.
Falling Apart has an autobiographical component, so I did some research into the record of my own past to get details about the episode in my life that I'm basing it on. (Yes, I'm being deliberately vague here.) In reading through two months of journal entries from August and September of 2002, I learned that a lot more was going on at that time than I remembered. For one thing, I was working a bit on what would eventually become The Weather Up There, which surprised me, because I'd believed that I'd started it at the very beginning of that year and then dropped it until NaNoWriMo in November.
I also found these excerpts, which will be of special interest to a couple of my readers:
8/19/02 - Someone at work (not in my department) sent out a message that she's looking for people to start a creative writing group with. I responded. That could be good for me, if it works out.
8/28/02 - Then it was time to go to the first meeting of the creative writing group. There were 4 of us who showed up, and a couple other interested who couldn't make it. We told each other our writing backgrounds and said what we want out of the group. We decided we'll meet every other week, start with exercises, and then try moving on to critiques. We did one exercise today, a simple pass-along story.
This writing group has been through a number of members and formats, but continues today with three of us who meet weekly. We're often a bit too good at reinforcing each other's procrastinatory skills, but we also manage to inflict enough guilt to keep us all writing, and we've each made a lot of progress as a result. The group deserves some of the blame, along with NaNoWriMo, for my regular disappearances into the world of fiction. (Thanks, you two!)