#IWSG: 5 ways I've learned about writing in the last 10 years

My last post was probably premature. I should have saved it for today. Instead, we'll call this Part Two. Real quick, check out my last post. As you can see, I have nothing to be insecure about whatsoever.

Well, maybe just a little. Luckily, I can laugh at myself.

I'd like to provide a caveat to that graph. Yes, I have technically been working on that same novel for the past ten years. I have also worked on other stories in that time period. I also completed all of high school, a 4-year bachelor degree, and a master's degree in that time period. So it's not as though my work on that particular story is anything near being constant.

But also, nearly everything I currently know about writing was learned in these last 10 years.

---

5 Ways I've Learned About Writing in the Last 10 Years

Progress on my novel project over the last 10 years

I think I've got it this time. No, really! Wait. Wait. wait. Nope, it's all crap. What am I even doing.

Owning Writer: Thoughts from Conversations & Connections

The writing conference was hosted at my alma mater — have realized recently that I can now call Johns Hopkins my alma mater, just like Purdue, which boggles my mind — and so for the first time as an alum, I stepped into the building where I took classes as a graduate student. And that means I finally picked up this baby:

My first bound book. (Hopefully not the last!) Technically a vanity publication, but I'll take it!

Yes, that is my copy of my bound thesis. I am somewhat miffed that my full name was not on the spine — after all, it does not look like my name to me; I do not associate myself with the name C. Leuck, as that is also the first initial and last name of both of my siblings; we used to get magazines addressed to C., C., and C. Leuck — but I am so excited to have a copy of my writing all done up like a real boy book. Sorry, had a Pinocchio moment there.

The conference, Conversations & Connections, was hosted by Barrelhouse Magazine, in what I believe to be some kind of partnership with the Johns Hopkins writing program and perhaps some other area literary organizations. And while  they did a top-notch job on putting together a great line-up of events, the parts I enjoyed the most and were perhaps the most valuable to me were simply the, uh, well the conversations and the connections.

One of my favorite conversations was over lunch with a group of writers who I mostly knew at least a little. The experience ranged from no publication to a journalist who recently won a journalism award, but we all had pretty nearly the same insecurities, doubts, fears about writing. The interesting thing to me was that the "I was afraid to own the title of 'writer'" conversation came up. This is a reoccurring conversation among writers. It is, in a way, your origin story, or at least the interesting story. How did you first begin calling yourself a writer?

Living in the Future

I got a smartphone, and I'm not sure how I lived before it. (i.e., last week) The touchscreen aspect isn't difficult, as I feared it would be. The apps were easy to download and set up. It was a bit of fiddling to figure out how to port my email onto the mail function of my phone, but I was absurdly pleased with myself to have achieved it. So now I send emails with that self-important little "Sent from my iPhone" tag on the bottom because I forget to delete it every time and have not yet figured out how to disable it. It is not, as Jonathan pointed out to me, as charmingly ironic as my usual email tagline: "Sent from my freeze ray." [With my freeze ray I will / stop the world.]

I did finish Jurgen and I believe I'll listen to it again. And perhaps read some more books by Cabell. He has a very strange sense of humor and I'm not entirely sure I caught all his jokes. But the ones I did catch were quite dirty. And again I remind myself I must reread Dante's Divine Comedy. As soon as I figure out where I put it.

Jurgen is part of my read more classics goal this year.

"Jurgen" and Limbo

That my life here in Virginia can be reduced to a 5"-by-10"-by-8" storage unit and a small sedan is, on reflection, rather humbling. I'm moving out of the house I've been renting with three other young women while I was pushing through grad school and had no life and few cares about my living situation, and into a storage unit. I mean my furniture is in the storage unit, and a lot of other assorted things, while I am going to be renting a room from a nearby family friend.

I'm buying time, entering a limbo stage of life. I am not sure what I am going to be doing next, where I am going to be living. I would like to get my own place. In the meantime, I am here in Limbo.

I wish I had my copy of Dante's Divine Comedy. Thinking about Limbo has me thinking about the old classics, and their heaven/hell fascination. This may also be because while packing and moving the pieces of my life, I have been listening to Jurgen by James Branch Cabell on the iPod. It was part of Audible's section "Neil Gaiman Presents," which are books chosen and produced by Neil Gaiman. I must say Mr. Gaiman has impeccable taste, and I bought the book with little else to recommend it. While returning from a friend's Welcome Spring party one evening recently (where we appear to have welcomed spring incorrectly as the clouds dropped enormous damp flakes of snow the following day) I listened to Jurgen* travel from Hell, where he married and set up home with a vampire and lectured Grandfather Satan on the appropriate behavior of a democratic leader in wartime, to Heaven, where he argued with The God Of His Grandmother and made a strangely conflicting discovery.