mimsy and outgrabe

So, the micro-sabbatical was a good idea and totally, wholly worth the planning, effort, work and (some) trouble, but like the best-laid plans, it didn't deliver everything it promised when it was being conceived in my head. For one, you may have noticed -- and been grateful for -- a conspicuous absence of blog posts, right after I'd written something like, "lookout, I'm gonna blow up your feed," or whatever. It turned out that it took me far, far too long to write that first/only blog post of the micro-sabbatical -- like, about two hours -- and that's probably because I haven't written in the blog for a long time and it always takes me a while to get back into the rhythm of the thing, and writing prose. So, when I'd spent a good part of my precious kid-free, solitary-in-the-house time writing about writing the verse play but not actually working on the play itself, I decided that blog posts were not as beneficial when you're working with a h...

Where did Day 1 go, you might ask? Read on. (If you're not asking, see you some other time!) Last semester I managed to carve out time during the morning to read and write, and that was going swimmingly for about, oh, the month of September, until the inevitable grading and committee-work creep took over, and then I didn't write much at all. There were occasional two-hour spans of time during October, November and December as part of a program I organized at Stuffolk through our faculty union -- and these sessions were good and productive, but I spent most of that time sending out submissions or writing things for the college, and not doing any genuine creative work -- or creative work that I found, well, satisfying. And, as you know, that's not great. Particularly if I would like to keep calling myself a writer. But -- in the moments in between papers, or driving from one campus to another for yet another meeting -- I thought back to the last two times I ma...

My latest blog posts have felt so solipsistic, particularly in light of the fucking chaos and violence in the world that has always existed but seems, thanks to irresponsible and inconsistent mass media coverage, as if it's escalating inordinately of late -- but I'm keeping up with them as a record of my writing process, which is useful in hindsight but feels something like a giant, unrelenting hangover right now.  Sometimes Twitter provides catharsis. Part of this headache-like pressure is very much due to the upcoming script development lab. I told A. earlier in the week that I was thinking of emailing the program and asking them if I could switch from the script development lab to a writer's residency, and he was of the opinion I should just stick with the original plan. He can probably sense that I'm a gigantic coward and that I don't want other people -- particularly people who know what they're doing when it comes to drama -- to read and critique...