I love my face.

I'm not the prettiest girl who ever lived, that's not what I mean. I love the story my face tells.

At a Turkish restaurant the other night, justbeast stroked my hair, which is very long and black and said "You almost look Turkish--no, wait, Danish nose!" He then booped my Danish nose.

When I look in the mirror, I see so many stories and families there. I do have long black hair, incredibly thick and naturally wavy--the gift of Sicilian grandmothers. Olive skin and dark lightly frizzy hair would make me look vaguely Turkish or Arabic (I pass as native anywhere in the Mediterranean, generally), especially when I haven't been hiding from the sun, except for the round little Danish nose, the remnant of scholarly folk from Odense, snub and cheerful as a North Pole elf, and the broad cheeks one of my brothers and I share, the last wisp of Cherokee in us.

I have, like any good Mary Sue, olive green eyes. Really and seriously--they were hazel when I was a kid, but sometime in my late teens they calmed down into a deep, dark green. I always thought this was an incomplete dominance thing as my father has light green eyes and my Italian family has mostly brown eyes, but two of my female cousins also have these eyes, and they are not related to my Italian side, so I wonder if it doesn't come from somewhere on the other side of the family, possibly our Dutch great-great-great grandmother. I have a full mouth--I don't know where this comes from, both my parents have thin lips. It's a mystery--every face has a few. And then there's the broad shoulders, awkward on a woman, that I see in my uncle's frame, too. The high forehead, which becomes a receding hairline in the men of my Welsh blood.

As I get older, I look more and more like that broad-cheeked half-brother, the one nearest in age to me. When we were young we didn't look at all alike, but I see him in my face now, and in our identical forefingers. (Such a weird thing to notice, but our fingers and fingernails are shaped exactly the same.)

There are all these amazing people in my face. People who came over an ocean in 1670, 1914, 1920. People who hid their history, or wore it plainly. People who crossed the Continental Divide, or were forced to walk to Oklahoma. People who dreamed and lived and made love and worked and created and wept and died, of which I am a unique terminus--especially so since I have no full siblings. I am the only repository of my particular genetic story. And I wear this story every day, as though it's nothing, as though my life is the only one I live.

There's something amazing about that, about the ways in which every face is an end-point of an extraordinary story. And the stories go on in our children, of course, but everyone is still their own evolved end-point. and since I have no children yet, I am a lonely prong on our antlering facial evolutionary beast.

I like to think about these things. It makes me feel alive, a part of Something. A mirror is a glass that shows the agony and passion of a thousand human lives.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Last chance to RSVP for our fabulous Parasol Picnic--somewhat poorly timed due to everyone being at ComicCon, but still! Meeting at the old trolley memorial--pillary gazebo thing at the Greenmarket in Brooklyn at 5, walking to the park. Bring your own comestibles.

I will likely not be back in NYC till February, so this is your chance to see me!

If you are definitely coming, please to leave a comment!

Also, shadesong is bravely launching on her massive Blogathon effort tomorrow--I'll be back in the saddle on the Blogathon next year, but for now, go here to sponsor her fundraising efforts for the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. she has many awesome items up for auction that I deeply covet.

Current Mood: blah

What. the Fuck.

Hay guys! What should we do tonight? Same thing we do every night, Pinky, ruin a beloved franchise

I know! Let's make a new X-Files movie! It'll have no aliens and nothing to do with the mythology, INSTEAD, it'll be just like an incredibly long, drawn-out, 3rd tier Season 1 episode! EXCEPT instead of being fun or having any spark or sense of the old time awesome crimefighting duo, it'll embrace the dreary fucking overly serious garbage everyone hated in the last two seasons! AND THERE'S MORE! The plot will be a half-assed, poorly thought-out medical bullshit magical stem cells women in extremis gagfest, so unrelated to anything that anyone, including Mulder and Scully, cares about, that this might as well be Law & Order: the Motion Picture, combined with the most tired "Scully's faith is tested" nonsense we can scrape up off the Season 7 floor! And THEN, instead of showing even a modicum of joy, ever, in Mulder and Scully's relationship, we'll just show them breaking up. Oh, and there will be almost no paranormal content at all, except for vague mumblings from Billy Connelly, who is, let's face it, no Clyde Bruckman. Because really, what everyone loved about the X-Files was watching two middle-aged C-list actors wander around aimlessly looking depressed and not making out until they stumble over random gay evildoers through the magic of prayer. After 6 years and 2 epically bad final seasons, we have to get back to basics and give the fans what they want!

Oh, and December 22nd, 2012? Is that, like, when the next Batman is coming out?

Current Mood: not pleased

Given The Seven Devils of Central California Rhysling win, and The Eight Legs of Grandmother Spider placing last year, part of me is tempted to write a series of poems: The Six ______ of _______, The Five ______ of _______, and so on, down to one, then put them all together in a chapbook called Numeration.

These are the things I think about when full of Turkish food and rose hip tea.

Current Mood: full

I spent most of my weekend crawling around Ohio caverns and drinking out of underwater rivers. I emerged to discover that my poem The Seven Devils of Central California won the Rhysling Award for long-form poem this year.

Ahem. See icon.

I really didn't think I would win this year--I thought if I would ever win, it would have been with The Eight Legs of Grandmother Spider last year (it took second place.) I didn't expect anything--it's such an amazing year for the Rhyslings, with so many great poems nominated.

That said, I couldn't make it to Readercon this year, and I joked that obviously, since I didn't go and sit hopefully in an auditorium in a pretty dress, this is the year I'd win. Well then. Lesson noted.

I may or may not have done the Little Miss Sunshine scream in the parking lot. I couldn't possibly say, as it might ruin my reputation for being cool.

Who am I kidding? I am completely not cool. I checked the email three times to make sure I hadn't misread it. This is my first award for poetry, and I still can't really believe I won. The world of speculative poetry has been very kind to me and my often difficult work, and I'm so, so grateful. I kind of want to just hug everyone.

It never ceases to amaze me how far this poem has gone--it's also being reprinted in the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. I mean, it's a very long, complex, multicultural poem about women's history. I'm proud of it, but I don't always understand why it has such legs.

Anyway, I'm going to keep squeeing in my house and giggling with delight. If you want to read the poem, it's here at Farrago's Wainscot, the wonderful folks who initially published it, and in my new poetry collection, A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects.

Thank you to everyone who voted for it, everyone who has supported my poetic work, Farrago's Wainscot, and justbeast, who when I was blocked and tearing out my hair said: "Hey, why don't you write about devils in Southern California?"

Current Mood: jubilant

Internets, you fail to entertain me. How dare you come to my house with nothing but fascistic reproductive measures and racist editors? You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

Of course, I have nothing to say, either. So I shall stay my hand of doom and not destroy the internets with my wrathy lightning-filled boredom elemental attack. Today.

I did see a film called The Five Obstructions the other night. It was so very, very lovely and interesting, and remarkably kind. Lars von Trier, Dogme 95 director, who is LOKI INCARNATE I SWEAR, challenged his idol, experimental filmmaker Jorgen Leth, to remake The Perfect Human (an already bizarre and beautiful short film that I also now idolize and if I had a digital camera would totally make some sort of similar beast) five times, each time conforming to obstructions provided by Triers--no shot more than 12 frames long, film in Cuba, act in it yourself, make it a cartoon, etc.

I expected it to be a fascinating artistic exercise, but in the end it turned out to be something more, one friend trying to lift another out of depression and artistic stagnation, trying to show him love and devotion through endless challenge and harsh judgment that is the flip side of adoration and comradery. The final obstruction brought tears to my eyes--the film is a perfect combination of intellectual exercise and emotional truth.

Leth is such a sad man, and he can barely tolerate being on camera, but there's a moment, when Triers requires a cartoon, and he just looks lost, like I hate cartoons, what the fuck am I supposed to do? I wish this were over. And then his brain figures out a way to make the film, and he breaks into this awesome little-boy-about-to-do-something-naughty grin.

And secretly, I want someone to do that to me, so very much. I want to be challenged and hemmed in like that, bent under the impish will of someone I respect and admire. Obstructed. God, it looks like so much awful, brutal fun.

Want. Pine.

Current Mood: the shah of blah

So I have this obsession. It's been going on for awhile--since early graduate school, when instead of taking the easy route and getting the damn English Literature degree, my brain took a hard left at Medieval Studies. So it's been about 6 years now, (which seems obscene! It was yesterday I was that dewy just-married thing poking about in Old French books and cuddling up to a life of compromise and loneliness). It's an obsession that fueled the title of this blog, the icon to your left, and is but one of the reasons I own a pair of manacles.

I'm talking about anchorites, baby. Nuns. Supernuns.

People tend to get these perplexed looks on their faces when I light up and tell them I think of myself as a nun. I get so excited I can hardly explain it, and that seems strange of course, after all, I'm neither Catholic nor celibate, with no intention of becoming either. But it's like explaining to someone how you know what your totem is--impossible, but necessary for the understand of this driven, jittery girl. Allow me to explain.

An anchorite (or anchoress, take your pick--I prefer the non-gendered term) is a nun, but not really. A nun becomes a bride of Christ; she is married to God in her initiatory ritual, and lives her life in a commune, a cloister, intimately connected to her sisters and the world, for whom she works and toils.

And anchorite is straight up punk rock. Her initiatory ritual is a funeral. She dies to the world. She is closed up, alone, in a small cell attached to a church, called an anchorhold. Often she is initially buried there, and exhorted each day to dig up the soil of her grave with her fingernails. Sometimes she is manacled, bound to her duty. A priest tends to her, but more often, the folk of the village come to her, bringing bread, milk, honey, beer, fish, listening to her wisdom. She meditates, she fasts, she flagellates, she spends her life in contemplation and deprivation, and often, as in the case of Julian of Norwich, writing books. She is directly connected to God--her spirit goes into the ether, and brings back visions to her village. She is an oracle, an academic, a hermit in the midst of life.

Except there's this little document called Ancrene Wisse. Rules for Anchorites. On the theory that there wouldn't be rules about things that people weren't doing, the lives of anchorites seem to have been not entirely hair shirts and flagellation. You may not have overnight male guests (so they should definitely leave before midnight), large banquets, more than two handmaidens. It's not all merriness--there is a lot of talk about rotting in one's cell and how one should "love your windows as little as you can" and never let a man touch you through the window--unless he can provide excellent reason he should be allowed to. One must also pray less in order to read more, for "reading is good prayer." The Song of Solomon is used to illustrate how Christ feels about anchorites, and we all know how that little ditty goes.

The accompanying document to Ancrene Wisse is Hali Meidhad, A Letter to Maidens, which explains to three young girls that life in the medieval world plainly sucks, and to be married to a man who will make you clean and cook for him, fuck you until you bleed with no care for whether you enjoy it, only to die in childbirth, is pretty much a drag. Being an anchorite, on the other hand, is awesome. It was freedom. It was surcease.

I'm fascinated, always and utterly, by the idea of such a woman. Removed from the world yet deeply in it, privy to all the secrets of her town, cared for by folk while she reads and writes, while she watches wheels of fire spinning in the heavens. To be chained, to be disciplined to a lifelong task, to be a wild thing clapped up in darkness for such a purpose. You can see why this might appeal to someone like me. It brings strange tears to my eyes to read Ancrene Wisse, which is separated into the Inner Rule and the Outer Rule for governing one's life, and is obsessed with animal symbolism and endless classification, as I am, as I am.

And there were many of them, a network of women in holes, a network of light across wild fields and dark barns, women in ecstatic activity, touching the edges of the world.

Secretly, though I do not believe in a Christian God, this is what I want to be. I want to be a cyber-anchorite, chained to her computer, which is the church of the modern world, lifting her pelican-heart to heaven and bringing down such mad, beautiful, impossible books as live among the clouds. Manacled hands on a keyboard of light. A movable anchorhold, an izbushka. Tended to by a stern priestly-wicked thing who loves and fears and blesses. Receiving all who need her, trading words for bread. Conscious of death, racing against it. Closed up safe in her own little house, just big enough to contain her. I want, silly as it sounds, to sit at the edge of the internet, which is my village, and seethe as madwomen do, take a man's name, shed my clothes and utter terrible, marvelous verses. To be so full of purpose that I shine. I am at my best when I am an anchorite. I am at my worst when I have forgotten how to go to ground.

And to put out my hand through my beloved window, from time to time, to clasp another's skin and kiss their fingers.

The wilderness is the solitary life of the anchoress's dwelling, for just as in the wilderness there are all the wild beasts, and they will not endure men coming near but flee when they hear them, so should anchorites, above all other women, be wild in this way...

--Ancrene Wisse

Current Mood: indescribable

Well, it's been a thrilling day at Chez Cat.

Both my dogs are throwing up and stressing out and in general needing to be as close to me as possible--which is fine, but they are not small beastlings, and it does make for about two hundred pounds of collective dogflesh pressing in on me at all times. I've put them outside for the moment so as to have some peace. Poor co-dependent wolves. They get lonely, they throw up.

justbeast and I are heading to the Allegheny mountains with vrax this weekend for camping and questing. Next weekend is a rare uncommitted, and then off to New York to see everyone we love there, resting at the lovely home of regyt and novalis. (Propect Park Bring Your Own Parasol Picnic on Saturday the 26th--comment if you are local or in town and want to come!We want to see you!)

Then comes the flood of August, with business trips, our anniversary, and a scathedobsidian/pretendpeterpan excursion to exotic Indiana.

It's a Four of Swordsy kind of time--holding pattern. Waiting on news from agent, nothing really due, activity on the horizon but not yet here.

I've been reading The Ice Storm, which is weirdly compelling all the while seeming completely cliched, as the genre of the desperately lonely and morally bankrupt suburbanite saga has been so thoroughly overdone in movies and books of the last decade. This is practically a How To: Write About Suburban Angst! manual. It's especially awesome that the novel begins with a long list of things Americans didn't have in the 1970s. Presumably to put us modern readers in a suitably humble mindset--because obviously the internet, hybrid cars, anti-depressants, and satellite television fixed all this.

Also, I'm hardly titillated by a Key Party at this point in my life, though it's clearly intended to shock and mortify my delicate sensibilities. How will I wrap my head around the clearly insane, complex, and perverse concept of wife-swapping?

But what strikes me about the novel is how utterly it breaks all the rules of my recent workshops--if I hadn't seen the movie I'd have no idea what the book was supposed to be about after 115 pages, the narrative voice is all kinds of murky and one-note despite four POV characters in its unending emo-spiral of privileged white angst, and nothing has actually happened yet--the Key Party, on page 107, is the first actual non-flashback action in the entire book.

You can get away with this in realist fiction, I think. Especially in suburban wasteland realist fiction. It sets up the feeling of trapped ennui nicely. (Though I have to wonder what the hell is wrong with all these people who act like suburbia is this prison they were sentenced to--American Beauty, Little Children, so on and so forth. They chose to be there, chose to move there, chose to stay there. They all have so much money that moving, either to rural or urban environments, is pretty damn easy. So shut the crap up, spoiled sacks of Starbucks! Also, almost none of these stories end with anyone leaving suburbia--it's like the Matrix, it's easier to die than leave. Gosh, being rich is so very, very difficult! The rest of should sit up and take notice and stop whining about everything that isn't rich and pretty and depressed.)

I feel like realist fiction allows more structural freedom, and speculative fiction allows more freedom of narrative. Where that leaves me I have no idea.

Either way, I am cooking up a lamb roast and mango-tomato salad for a picnic dinner by the Chagrin River, followed by a dumb fun screening of Hackers with my l33t h4xx0r boy. Suburbia is not actually hell--you bring your hell with you, to city or farm or in between. Ask Sartre.

Current Mood: balanced

Oh, INTERNETS! Look what you did! How could you? What were you thinking?

In the history of serial killers, no one can begin to compete with you, O Dreaded Internet. Why, you've killed: Literature, Art, the Record Industry, social interaction, decency, copyright, marriage, the Publishing Industry, Our Children's Innocence, and possibly God. You must get up very early in the morning.

And now, you've added Classical Music to your body count.

I was listening to NPR this afternoon and while it usually takes a great deal to make me roll my eyes in a car with no one present to feel my pain, my pupils spun around like freaking pinwheels as four middle-aged white people bitched and complained about how the internet and "rock music" killed classical music.

One whined that this was the "Golden Age" of classical music, but no one cares, somehow! He then went on to list the ways you can listen to classical music as evidence for the Golden Age. Which...is your problem, right there. Golden Ages are for composition, not for consumption. It's a Golden Age for iTunes, but I'm gonna have to go with Austria in the 18th-19th century, when people were, you know, writing timeless, immortal music. The problem is not the internet, it's that classical composition has migrated, and the snobs just don't want to follow. More on that in a moment.

At this point the critics--to a man print venue orchestral music critics, and the fact that the nation can host more than four of these is proof that classical music is diong just fine--began to complain that no one knows how to listen to music anymore, they just listen while driving or working, instead of "crossing Europe to hear a single performance of Mahler," as, I guess, God intended.

Allow me to take out my iPod earbuds and do my best California Girl.

WHATever.

It was really hard to hear you guys over the ROAR of your raging privilege. It is a good thing that we can all hear Mahler any time we please--nothing ever, ever takes the place of live music, but come on. Most of us can't afford orchestra tickets full stop, let alone crossing a continent for a single concert. And Mahler? Your problem again! You can only name Philip Glass--you know, the everyman's composer--as any kind of force in instrumental music today, yet castigate people for being too fat and stupid to take a spiritual journey across a continent to hear music that hasn't been relevant in 75 years. Beautiful, yes. I love Mahler, as I am emo and that's what emo kids do. But relevant? Hardly.

It boggles me that these morons can be paid to wring their hands over the fact that no one pays attention to their geekery over what they claim is a thriving, exciting medium, yet continually , mechanically reference the same four composers, all white, all male, all dead, all over-performed to the point where many of us cannot listen to them anymore because saturation has robbed them of all meaning. Yet they still make their living commentating on performances of these same pieces, over and over. (They also bemoaned the death of music criticism for about 20 minutes. This was particularly awesome as they chided each other about writing so that we poor commoners could understand music on a fraction of the scale they do, all the while I was muttering: just wait till I get to my blog, motherfuckers! The blogosphere has made such painful condescension on their parts unnecessary, and they can go back to being the Pick-a-Little Ladies they are. God, are all New Yorker columnists this prone to gasbaggery?)

Guys, seriously? Classical music is dead, if it is dead, because it is not longer a vigorous art form. It is not supplying what Beethoven and Mozart and Mahler and Dvorak supplied, and rock music has surpassed it in invention, open-mindedness, and experimentation. Hell, rock music features plenty of classical music. Is it sad that it has been surpassed? Maybe. But in fact, symphonic music is alive and well and bustling--just in a place that these snobs would never deign to mention.

Movie soundtracks. This is where the great composers of our time are, you pretentious fuckmittens. Jon Williams, Hans Zimmer, Danny Elfman--their best work, with film subtracted, is as stirring and brazen, sorrowful and complex, technically brilliant and tonally subtle as anything in the classical section, with very, very few exceptions. Not to mention video game soundtracks--Nobuo Uematsu (Final Fantasy) is an absolute master. No accident that orchestral performances of soundtracks are among the most popular concerts. But to admit that that is where the money, and therefore the talent, has gone, is to wallow in the mud with the rest of us instead of crossing the Alps for Mahler.

And the funny thing is, if there's a young Beethoven out there, it's a skinny girl with a cello in an apartment in Minneapolis, bowing her heart out. And guess what she's doing? She's recording her work and uploading it. The next generation of composers will be born from, thrive in, and live on through the Big Bad Internet that killed all your friends.

Of course, saying NPR is out of touch is like saying Cleveland might have a pollution problem.

But seriously, it's a dangerous world--watch your babies, lock up your daughters, hide your valuables--THE INTERNETS WILL KILL AGAIN.

Current Mood: annoyed

Oh my god. justbeast's parents have the most amazing stories.

Tonight, over catfish and fried bread, we were treated to the tale of how V. as a very young man worked as a dolphin researcher on a barren island in the black sea, and how he and his fellow researchers were so hungry, Odessa being very far away, that they tried to catch one of the wild horses that roamed on the island by trapping it in their house. It ran around in circles wrecking everything until someone tried to catch it by the tail, at which point the tail ripped off and the horse jumped out the door. They also traded the gunpowder that they dug up from the bottom of the Black Sea aremoved from shells for milk and flour in town.

V. met T., justbeast's mother, because the university let the young biologists spend the winter on the medical school campus--sharing a room with the cadavers. T. was a medical student, working with dilapidated open-heart surgery machines that inadvertently crushed blood cells from time to time. In the summer, she returned with V. to the island, to cavort among pink-eyed phosphorescent shrimp and jellyfish. She arrived to meet him on a ship with crimson sails called Dream.

Really.

justbeast and pere adjourned to make coffee as T. began to talk about the old days in Russia. She told me exactly how a KGB officer would come and how they would get information from wives about husbands--so friendly, so innocuous: just tell us, we already know, it doesn't reflect on you at all. About living under Brezhnev--when he began, there was caviar in every store, but no one had any money to buy it, and when he ended, there was nothing to buy, but everyone had a full refrigerator, because everyone had learned how to steal.

But what killed me was how they talked about that barren island, and the stars, and the phosphorescence, about young men sneaking off with lovers into mosquito-infested weeds, about loving the taste of fried bread so much when you had had nothing all day, working in the sea. About how young they were, and how romantic, how little they knew about the world, that summer in the sea. And T. saying, as I poured my last vodka: all I ever wanted to bring with me to America was the smell of sea-grass on that island.

Life is so strange and beautiful and varied.

There are times when I am so grateful to know these people. 

Current Mood: awed

I went to two writing workshops this year--my first. I sort of backed into this gig; I didn't go to Clarion or Odyssey or Alpha any of the other foot-in-the-door workshops. I didn't even take many writing classes in college--I only needed to be told point blank I had no talent or hope of being a writer three or four times before I gave up and figured Classics was a more solid career choice. [Insert wry grin here]

So it was all new--traveling to live and work with other writers I respect enormously for a week. There were good and bad points during both Rio Hondo and Blue Heaven--I might have wished for more time for composition at Blue Heaven, as the critique schedule was intense, and more casual discussion of craft at Rio Hondo. I would not give up the time I got with bram452, Maureen McHugh, tobiasbuckell, Melinda Snodgrass, or Paolo Bacigalupi for anything.

But at both workshops, I got really and truly depressed around mid-week. It was hard to shake; I only really cheered up towards the end.

See, being a writer is terrifying. Writing, writing itself, is wonderful and full of fire, at least for me. There's nothing I'd rather do. But the practice and business of being a writer horrifies and scares me, and at these workshops, there's a lot of time and reasons to think about it.

Between reading and listening to success stories and being inspired, I kept thinking--what am I doing? Why am I even trying with all this experimental shit? I struggled at both workshops to lift my head above water, to believe that I shouldn't, if I wanted to keep going, jettison what most people call pretentious and inaccessible anyway and try to write something at least a little commercial? After all, some of the writers there were my absolute heroes, and they're having great success not fucking around with structure and language until no one knows what the hell they're talking about.

It's not that I can't continue publishing what I'm writing now, what I am driven to write. Maybe not with NYC presses forever, but I have fair faith I can keep doing it in one way or another. But that isn't going to feed my future kids, it isn't going to pay a mortgage, it isn't going to give us any freedom at all, ever. If not for justbeast and his kindness, I'd have long ago had to be an office girl, since Classics does not provide so solid a career path after all. Let's be honest: it's highly unlikely I'll ever be on the bestseller lists, and this business is pretty fucking cutthroat these days. I wonder how long I have left to perform to expectations. The average career length is...short. Where will I be in five years? I wonder if I can make it that long. I wonder if it would even help to try writing something much more traditional.

And yet, I have to believe that the reason I've come so far in less than four years is that I am different, I have something to offer. Where is the balance between that difference and putting food on the table? Could I be more successful if I let go the recursive structures and complex language and dreamlike stories and wrote something else? I don't know. Nothing is assured success. And the fact that the question even bears asking implies that I am somewhat close to being able to support myself, that it's on the horizon, otherwise I wouldn't sweat it at all. But it got me really depressed in the workshops, because everyone's having these fears, whether their sales are better or worse than mine. And what they value in books was not always what I value--but what they value sells. Any workshop is full of vastly different skills, and that's all to the good, but it's hard to keep your own chin up amid all the competing opinions, rules, ideas. And my chin went way down, in stark terror that I would not be able to keep this up, that I was doomed to fail at the whole writing world, that the rest of them had something figured out that I didn't, came from an entirely different, success-stitched cloth, and what I loved to write would be the thing that doomed me.

Some heavy shit to deal with when surrounded by people in front of whom crying and spluttering: jesusfuck I just want to keep working would seem really weird. It's taken me weeks to come out of it, and I still don't have any answers, at least not solid enough answers to apply them in any real way. I learned a lot of things at these workshops, and those go gleefully, joyfully, into the "now I know better" bag, but the more esoteric, arcane aspects of managing a career trouble me deeply, and I don't know what to do, really. It's all very well to be a brave little toaster and keep on burning bread, but I want to support my family, I want to take care of people, I want to be massively competent and able. But we all want to make a living at this, so it's tiring to rail at heaven for a middle-class income. Ugh.

But I read things like nihilistic_kid's essay, and there's spark of thinking that somehow it's ok, that I can fail and at least I did let everything hang out and bleed all over my pages. At least I did my best.

But it's only a little ok. I'm still struggling with all of this, and unsure of where to put down my foot as I take the next step.

Current Mood: cynical