Whoa
Remember my entry about the Neo-Hippies? The latest issue of Time talks about the Twixters: "Meet the Twixters, young adults who live off their parents, bounce from job to job and hop from mate to mate. They're not lazy...THEY JUST WON'T GROW UP."
This jarred me b/c I'm writing several short stories in parallel, one of which involves a Twixter/Neo-Hippie. Except that I have a twist to it (it's general and I will apply it to others) that I think (after reading almost 100 awesome short stories :) has never been attempted before.
I also ran into Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories today. Rats. This hot Indian-American chick beat me to the project I always wanted to tackle: A definitive, observant, and deeply insightful take on Iranian-American people. (I doubt I'm capable of doing this admirably, but I'd like to attempt it anyway, at some point in my life. :)
Granted, Amy Tan largely bridged the gap with The Joy Luck Club, but she mainly covered Chinese-Americans. I figured that Iranian-Americans were still a nontrivial topic. But I fear that Lahiri, with her stories about Indian-American life, has covered the remaining gap so well that any similar work about Iranian-Americans will be trivial and overshadowed.
It's too difficult to cover Iranian-Americans adequately, since relations between the US and Iran are strained, and since the Iranian govt. is too sensitive. I think the definitive work about Iranian-Americans, in the context of both countries, will surface years after things are smoothed out between Iran and America. In the meantime, I'll try to focus on Iranian-American issues that won't inflame one or the other. I need to resolve a personal conflict: I want to be, simultaneously, a universal citizen concerned with topics of universal importance, and also deeply knowledgeable about the state of Iranian-Americans in the US. Thus far, I've focused heavily on the former and not enough on the latter.
I'm 3/4 finished with the first draft of the first short story that I actually want to publish. It doesn't use my new technique, but it's otherwise so important (to me, anyway), that I've been working on it more steadily than on the others.
This jarred me b/c I'm writing several short stories in parallel, one of which involves a Twixter/Neo-Hippie. Except that I have a twist to it (it's general and I will apply it to others) that I think (after reading almost 100 awesome short stories :) has never been attempted before.
I also ran into Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories today. Rats. This hot Indian-American chick beat me to the project I always wanted to tackle: A definitive, observant, and deeply insightful take on Iranian-American people. (I doubt I'm capable of doing this admirably, but I'd like to attempt it anyway, at some point in my life. :)
Granted, Amy Tan largely bridged the gap with The Joy Luck Club, but she mainly covered Chinese-Americans. I figured that Iranian-Americans were still a nontrivial topic. But I fear that Lahiri, with her stories about Indian-American life, has covered the remaining gap so well that any similar work about Iranian-Americans will be trivial and overshadowed.
It's too difficult to cover Iranian-Americans adequately, since relations between the US and Iran are strained, and since the Iranian govt. is too sensitive. I think the definitive work about Iranian-Americans, in the context of both countries, will surface years after things are smoothed out between Iran and America. In the meantime, I'll try to focus on Iranian-American issues that won't inflame one or the other. I need to resolve a personal conflict: I want to be, simultaneously, a universal citizen concerned with topics of universal importance, and also deeply knowledgeable about the state of Iranian-Americans in the US. Thus far, I've focused heavily on the former and not enough on the latter.
I'm 3/4 finished with the first draft of the first short story that I actually want to publish. It doesn't use my new technique, but it's otherwise so important (to me, anyway), that I've been working on it more steadily than on the others.