Journal 5

I've fallen off this blog way worse than I intended.  I've still mostly posted daily but there's been some stuff going on in my personal life, plus grad school, plus pregnancy.  Sorry for the vague comment.  I hate that and am normally a pretty open book but what's going on isn't my story to tell so I'll just say that it's hard and it hurts to watch and not be able to help.  It takes up a lot of energy and I don't have that much to spare so it's impacted the frequency of my writing as well as my ability to focus on a story and see it through. 

Grad school is confusing.  I was so excited to start it and loved the readings and the assignments.  But I feel like I'm losing a part of my writing style in trying for the grades I want.  I'm ok with it for now but we'll see.  The professor wants more specific detail and so I'm spending a lot of time trying to paint a more complete picture of a scene which seems like really good practice.  But as I'm reading other people's works, I don't feel like every scene contains this type of detail.  So then I start to lose myself in questioning how to do it "right."  That and I've been annoyed that I can't get any of the professors to actually individualize a course.  The program is supposed to be individualized and the feedback is very detailed and helpful and I'm doing fine.  I just really wanted to focus on working and reworking and reworking a piece since all I've ever done is work on something for a few days and then put it aside, never to revisit it again.  It seems like editing and redoing a story should be pretty standard but it's not.  The expectation is that you do that yourself and get drafts in two weeks early if you want feedback (which I'm pretty much incapable of doing.)  So I've been struggling with whether the program will be a good fit for me or not.  I tried to make a case for changing the course with two different professors to exclude some of the more academic writing in favor of including more than one draft of a story but both seemed to get in a snit about it and turned me down flat.  It feels like they think I'm trying to get out of the work of writing which just irks me and reminds me that something is lost in online communications at times.  At others, a certain intimacy is gained.  I share details on blogs and emails that I'd likely not tell in person.

So here's where I'm at.  I'm going to go easy on myself a little.  You know, on account of I'm pregnant and got some shits going on.  I'm not going to worry if I don't post every single day but I'll really try to.  Maybe I'll embrace my less detailed, more free form writing here and so there's a place where I don't have to worry about grades.  In the first thirty or so posts on this blog, I developed some ideas I still really like.  I'm hoping to do that again in the next few weeks.  So here's to hoping.