There are a few events that have found their way into MFA lore at the University. My housesitting adventure in Professor Joseph K’s home, complete with eating “magic cookies,” is one. After our fall-out, Professor K bitched about to any of his acolytes who happened to be nearby. I happened to have found out about it from Rosalyn’s husband, then husband at Rosalyn’s birthday party. Which now bring me to the other: To deflect attention from herself, Rosalyn has happily spread the cookie monster about me. Of course, Rosalyn’s falling down the stairs had many witnesses. There were the few who saw it first-hand and came directly to her aid, and then there were the other party-goers who found out within minutes. With so many people who knew about the fall, it was very hard for Rosalyn to live it down. And the program’s co-director had first-hand knowledge of it, since she was the party’s emcee.

What is an MFA program without a little heresay? The MFA welcome party was canceled and the reason was spread through the grapevine: The co-director said to Rosalyn that the party was canceled because of her infamous drunken fall down the stairs. Using 9/11 and the “spiritual wound” was bad enough, but this was a personal attack. Rosalyn, who was no pushover, did at least say a few things in her defense.

In pre-blog/MySpace/Facebook/Twitter era, some of us used social networking. On a Yahoo Groups board someone set up for our MFA program, Liza Radley and I expressed our anger over what happened to Rosalyn and the excuses used to pull the rug out from under a tradition. The same board was also used to organize several unsanctioned MFA “welcome parties.”

To give some credit to the program, a bland reception was held in the top-level courtyard of the University’s Humanities building, on the south side of the “H.” But a cheese-and-crackers operation in the afternoon of a school day isn’t quite the same as an evening everyone has set aside to meet each other. But the excuses were totally unnecessary.

I had the impression that the English Department wanted to end this whole party business. The year before, I heard from a friend that the department chair Dr. Muir was quite bitchy and garulous when he asked her for the funds to buy refreshments for the party. Perhaps it would be the last banal fall semester for a while and Dr. Muir just appeared unprofessional. My first semester in the program, however, was marked by September 11.

In years past, there was some idea that there would be a party and the date would be announced. The semester’s arriving class, however, had no idea. We were all horrified by the attacks, stressed out afterwards, and frightened by the developments that were rapidly happening on a national level. And life had to go on. We wrote our stories and poems and read them for the workshops, read literature for our classes, and worked at our jobs. We went back to some kind of normalcy, whether we liked it or not. There was, however, no sign that there’d be a party to welcome the new crop of writers and poets.

As part of that new group, I was disappointed. Were we unworthy of a welcome?

Rosalyn and I e-mailed one of the co-directors of the program about it. We both got responses that amounted to that it wasn’t going to happen. In the e-mail I got, the esteemed master poet said something about since there was this “great spiritual wound,” it didn’t seem appropriate for us to be throwing the party.

Using 9/11 as an excuse? This was definitely exploiting this event to do something that this director probably wanted to do in the first place. Cancelling the semester and giving all of us a sabbatical, a few months to heal, would have also been appropriate if we really want to measure the appropriateness of things based on how “spiritually wounded” we all were. Of course, we didn’t get that. So a party to help welcome our group was definitely a step for us to to move on.

After some effort, the efforts of those of us who lobbied for the party paid off. The retired English teacher-turned-professional student took on the role of hostess one more time. There was food and drink, and the program co-director welcomed us. We had an opportunity to come out into MFA society, and we got paired up with more senior classmates as our mentors. And everything was going well with wine-facilitated conversations in the kitchen and the living room until we all heard a thud come from the middle of the house.

At the bottom of the staircase that led from the living room to the basement floor, Rosalyn took a fall and bumped her head. There would be no more parties at the retired teacher’s house.

Henry was a very smart critic and as drunk as the writers he interviewed, wrote about, hung out with, or all of the above. Actually, he was drunker than any of them. Think of Henry as the Keith Richards of the literature scholars.

Even inebriated. Henry was very sharp. When I took his class on science fiction, he taught while drunk off his arse. No doubt he kept a bottle or bottles of something to drink in his office. Don’t quote me on this. The University also had a pub on campus, so there were also legitimate means to drink and then go on to the next class. The University pub wasn’t his style, though. The strange thing was that he was still very lucid and his comments helped greatly in the understanding of those works. He slurred some words here and there, but he always stayed on line, whether in his lecture or in reading passages from the books.

Henry wore Hawaiian shirts and shorts for most of the year. I don’t ever remember seeing him wear a pair of pants. He only got a haircut every few months, but author photos from some books suggested that he previously had his hair cut just once a year. Drunk and unkempt, he did behave professionally. He did his work as a professor and he treated his students well.

There was something utterly perverse about a professor holding “bar hours.” Professor K, who tried to push perversity in his writing topics, classroom reading selections, and his assignments, often retired to his home and drank with very few students. Professor O’Donough’s weekly dive bar party was a place where students could continue conversations that got cut short by the end of the classes or his formal office hours, relax, and get to know each other and Henry and his wife, also a professor of American literature at the University. I don’t remember a majority of the hours, well, because I had quite a few drinks. And I never got as obnoxious as I did on Professor K’s office firewater.

In the middle of my graduate career, the “bar hours” became trendy. Classmates of mine who had no association with Professor O’Donough – they weren’t in his classes, doing thesis with him, alumni, or even writers he had a professional relationship with – figured going to the dive bar in the strip mall in the suburban border of the City was cool. I didn’t attend the bar hours during this period, though I’ve always been simultaneously amused and annoyed at the trendiness.

In my last year, in the fall, during my final semester of actual classes, I decided to go to “bar hours” with a longtime classmate I’ve known since my late undergraduate career, also someone who had some association with Henry O’Donough. I may have said hello to Henry and some other people. My memory’s not clear here. I’ll blame it on the beer. I remember this scene clearly: I saw Mindy Shatner with her University acronym-embroidered sweatshirt hanging out with some classmates, most likely students of Henry’s wife. She saw me, raised her chin at me to say “What’s up?” After my stint of being the TA of her creative writing class and dealing with her being rude and disruptive to the point of verbal assault, I wasn’t ready to forgive. After all, all of this happened in the spring semester before. I quietly turned away and decided to focus my attention on my beer and my friend. She would be invisible to me the rest of the night. It was the last time I attended “bar hours.”

Henry O’Donough had since retired. I missed his final “bar hours” party. I don’t know where I was nor do I remember what I was doing at the time. The things that he taught about reading science fiction and post-modern works took me time to learn. I continued to learn things long after being out of his course. I could have easily learned the wrong thing from him – that in order to be writerly or literary, getting drunk was the way to go. Honestly, I don’t think he even bought into that idea. He was simply someone who drank and one of those rare people who could work through their intoxication. I think of him from time to time and wonder how he’s doing. Fantastic, I hope.

It’s funny that Professor Joseph K would find himself in the midst of a Kafkaesque nightmare at one point in his career. Some time after I ended my academic and professional association with him, he found himself the subject of a University investigation. I only have second-hand information on this subject. Given that I had been a student and employee of his for two years and that the investigation occurred while I was still in the MFA program, I’m surprised I was never interviewed as a witness. Getting back  to the subject at hand, the reason why the University was looking closely into Professor K’s affairs was that a student felt their grade was at stake after she objected to attending Professor K’s class when there was a sexually explicit presentation.

When I first heard the news, I was attending a birthday party for Rosalyn, my friend who essentially replaced me as Joe’s secretary. Somehow we remained friends despite that drama. However, when Rosalyn mentioned that Professor K was facing an investigation, I bluntly said he had it coming.

I’m clearly not the professor’s biggest fan. I definitely did not have any sympathy for him when I heard about. However, the investigation took a strange turn.

From what I understand, especially from what this grad school classmate told me, was that her complaint was about feeling forced to attend a class session where she was not comfortable with the subject matter. Joseph’s guest speaker was a member of the fetish community who did a presentation on S&M. She also felt how Professor K responded to her request not to attend put her grade in jeopardy. So when the University’s offices responded to the complaint, it seems logical that they would look into if this complaint had merit or not. The investigation, however, went much further.

This is what Rosalyn told me about this process: the University’s investigators interviewed Joesph’s students, about the event. They must have been keeping a dossier on Professor K, for they went after things not relevant to the case at hand, such as allegations of favoritism, unprofessional behavior towards other students, and substance abuse. Joe’s students, including Rosalyn, were asked about these things. And the character issue would become much bigger than the original complaint about a student being subjected to explicit sexual content.

The charges regarding the original complaint were dropped. However, the investigation uncovered Professor K drinking hard liquor in the office. This is something I can definitely verify. When I worked for Joe, he did keep things such as Central American firewater in his office. During my first semester of grad school, I even helped myself to some firewater when I was working in his office. In fact, I helped myself to most of that bottle. One night, when I was the student who administered the class evaluation, where we all filled scantrons about the professor’s performance, I was wasted. Somehow, I thought it would be funny if I hammed up reading the evaluation instructions to the class. Looking back, I must have been grating. There was also the time when I house-sat for Joe that I found his “special” cookies and ate them all. If I were asked about these things, I’d have to tell the truth. So it was a good thing for both me and Professor K that I wasn’t interviewed.

Even without my testimony, the evidence regarding Joe’s drinking in his office must have strong. From what I heard from Rosalyn, the University placed a reprimand on Professor K’s records about the drinking despite dropping charges.

As for the student who complained about the inappropriate class session, she was ostracized for a while because of the loud backlash from Professor K’s acolytes. Then a friend of mine in the program found herself in the midst of this drama even though she had nothing to do with the compaint. Her only crime was that she shared the same first name.

Shortly after I resigned from working for Professor K, I prayed for some kind of justice. I’m sure some of my predecessors who also have their own fall-out stories did the same thing. I hoped enough people would see Joe for the arse he is, especially the sub-literate acolytes who think he’s brilliant because they don’t read. I might as well hope that George W. Bush repent of all the horrors of his presidency.  It’s possible Professor K’s the victim of an over-zealous investigator who wanted to make the case stick against him at any cost. Knowing that they did go beyond investigating the original complaint makes me a little more sympathetic to him, though it doesn’t endear him to me. Whether Joe evolved personally from this experience or not, I don’t know. Perhaps the investigation and the reprimand were more than punishment enough.

I should be over something like this. As much as I can dwell on the whole MFA experience and what a racket it was, people like the Professor Joseph K are a joke. Unfortunately, my dealings with him and his self-serving behavior haunt me to this day. At the start, he was the mentor figure, the one who gave me admission to his inner literary circle. In the end, I got tossed aside. As much as he told people that they should do what’s beneficial to them as writers, he wanted people to take his workshops and tell him how brilliant he was for publishing his slender little volumes of deviant behavior. Regarding his writing workshops, there wasn’t much to get out of them. Publishable in his terms meant “I publish you, you publish me.” As a grad school friend of mine said, fiction could not create a villain as evil as Professor K.

As much as I may feel like I’ve forgiven him, the anger still surfaces from time to time. Personally, being cold shouldered by someone who once built me up hurts. The drama where he took his anger out on me for rejecting him took its toll on me creatively for a while in grad school. Who would think that taking another fiction workshop professor would be tantamount to saying, “Professor K, I’m blowing you off!” Looking backwards, there are infinite possibilities of what I could have done to have avoided being a casualty of Professor K’s unprofessionalism. Unfortunately, there’s no way to change any of that. Looking forwards, I do not need Professor K. I can’t really depend on the history. He is not someone I can count on to be  mentor, a reference, or even friend.

Perhaps if I stuck with Professor K, I might be publishing sick little volumes of my own, dwelling on the same kind of topics that caught his fancy. I could have easily used his name as a reference for my work with his university press journal, though I can’t say I’m completely proud of the work published during my tenure as his assistant or even before or after. I’m not sure if the potential benefits outweigh the price. This person inspired me to get caller ID for my landline phone several years back. This was pre-cell phone for me and it doesn’t speak well of him.

All that Joe is good for now is a character in one of my stories. I’m not interested in a literal novel about the grad school experience, so he may find his way in some other story. After all, I wonder what professor was the source of Sabul in Ursuala K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Be warned, Professor. You are a fair target for my writing, whether in fiction or creative non-fiction.

We’re at a party early on for the University’s MFA program and I mention working with Professor Joseph K. You ask me what he’s like and I’ll try to give you a sound byte answer. After all, this is a party, and the conversation’s not supposed to be too deep. So, here’s what I say: Joe’s a good guy and I work very well with him. I also enjoy his workshops a lot.

My answer would change much later, as I was only one year into my academic and professional relationship with Professor K. Being his secretary didn’t pay much, but I liked it better than working in the supermarket. There, I was paid better and I had benefits, but with Joe, I had keys to the mail room and his office, and I had a code for the English Department copier. I had a place to hang my coat, to read, to study, and even to write. I even had my own desk so I wouldn’t use his. What I had lost in practical terms, I gained in privilege. Which is essentially the case with anyone who goes into something arts or humanities related. I also harbored great hopes that my association with Joe would benefit me in the future. Perhaps I would become an editor or a professor, or even an editor-professor like Joe.

In other jobs where I was at an entry level and the boss were professional mentors, they were often happy to help someone like me move on to another job. They recognized that these jobs weren’t meant to last forever. They knew these jobs were starting points for a long term career track. For example, when I tutored for the English Center at the East County college, the professor who coordinated the program was happy to serve as a reference when I got an interview for a tutoring position for the University. She was definitely a good example of a healthy mentor.

Joe, on the other hand, was not. During the second summer I worked for Joe, the TA’ship that formally was my professor’s secretary job only paid $200 a month and I didn’t get paid after the spring semester was finished, so I tried to find a job. I went high and low. Not surprisingly, I could not get arrested for applying to Target, Trader Joe’s or even Borders. Perhaps I was overqualified with my bachelor’s degree. I sent my resume to a local subsidiary of a an international publishing company and I got an interview. My $200 a month assistant editor job qualified me for a job that paid at least ten times as much, even if it mean losing a title, privilege, and perks. My ability to abuse copier codes might vanish. However, being able to pay my rent and the bills would have been more secure if I got the job. Only, I didn’t tell Joe and he found out from someone else.

Rosalyn was someone I became good friends with in the course of program and she was also one of Joe’s acolytes. I helped train her to do some things for the avant-garde literary journal, including dealing with PageMaker, and I told her the news out of excitement. She then told Joe, who sent me a restrained, but nasty e-mail telling me I couldn’t work at this company and his university press enterprise at the same time. E-mail is often strictly text and it can be difficult to gage the tone. However, he seemed genuinely offended that I wanted to move on to something better.

I did go to the interview. The local publishing house’s subsidiary was located in a downtown high-rise and I even got to see my apartment building from my interviewer’s office. Looking back, I was unnaturally stiff in my shirt, tie, and suit. In this Southern California city, dressing up isn’t natural at all, even though the protocol applies to job interviews. I did not get the job.

I still had my $200 a month job, but the end was coming soon. My personal, academic, and professional relationship with Professor Joseph K had been strained since the middle of the spring semester, my second in the program. I had known him for two and a half years, and he had treated me like a son for most of that time. I looked to him as a paternal figure in my life, mainly because my own relationship with my father was strained. There was a dark side to all this. At one point after Easter, Joe summoned me to his home for an intervention. I became less diligent in my duties as his secretary/assistant editor, and he called me on my flaking out on some tasks. Fair enough. Then he said I had no loyalty to him.* Intuitively, I knew there was something wrong with that statement, even though I wanted to salvage the relationship. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to continue being his gopher, but I just didn’t want to quit. I have learned since then when it’s time to quit, I should definitely do so. To continue is to make things worse, which was the shape of things to come.

Also, he was supposed to chair my thesis. I hadn’t asked him yet, but working with Joe seemed to be the direction by default. There was that other guy, his rival in the MFA program, but I wasn’t sure about him. Joe has said enough to taint my views of someone I didn’t even know. If he was possessive of me on a professional level to the point where it was better for me to work for $200 a month rather than get a job with professional pay, then workshopping with other creative writing teachers was definitely anathema. There was a popular visiting professor and I wanted to take a workshop with her. Oh, I should have known that was the beginning of the end. Of course, I did know.

*As someone who got involved in a Christian fundamentalist cult in my mid-twenties, this raised a red flag. Intuitively, I knew there was something wrong with it, even if I couldn’t rationally defend it as valid. It was only later when I met with a counselor did I find my instinct about Joe’s loyalty remarks validated.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s entry, I want to stop procrastinating. It is my goal for this year, even if I might not cut out all of my bad habits. The idea is to start.

One manifestation of living on Procrastination Street is writer’s block. It is easy to put off writing because the rewards aren’t so immediate. Twittering my time away or posting witticisms on Facebook get more response, but those sentences are sent out on the quick and don’t take much process to make it into a story or a poem that expresses an idea.

I have an MFA, dammit, but I knew a hundred or so people in my program and we were all crammed in the same workshops trying to get attention and feedback, and even praise. Unfortunately, it’s a horribly expensive way to get a writing audience and I’m still paying for it. Another drawback is that some participants can be downright stupid. It’s even worse when it’s framed with smart, intellectual phrasing. All I wanted was the writer’s equivalent of an art studio, but I’ve learned that I couldn’t find it in the classroom or through all the alcohol soaked events I had with my fellow MFA program friends. I even found that a certain professor who should have been my mentor in the program turned out to one of my biggest detriments to my MFA career. Yes, I have written about him too. Thank God I was able to walk away from that and find someone who was a help to me.

Even with the helpful professor, I found I still had to deal with myself and my writing habits. He helped me find poets  and writers to read for my benefit and I took used unstructured spare time to get into the zone. Some semesters I was blessed with plenty of time on my hands, while the last couple of semesters where I worked as a TA were taxing. When it was just a few classes and a nonsense job a few hours a week, I could find the time to creatively zone it. With being with students, I found the experience emotionally draining and I could not get lost in unstructured writing or art time as I would like. Instead, I felt like I was hung over after teaching and that I needed to recover.

Even after a couple of years teaching post-MFA, the energy issue hasn’t gone away. I still feel spent after a class session with students and I have to pull myself together to meet my obligations. After the classes, I feel ruined and I don’t even want to touch a book or to string words together into a coherent story. I don’t completely hate teaching, but there clearly is a personal cost to me. A benefit is certainly unconventional hours—I’m not penned up in a cubicle all day pretending to work while doing Facebook and having my three square meals of I Can Has Cheezburger. The issue, however, is balance.

Ideally, before or after I’ve prepped and graded work and have done the lecture, I could do those things I need as a writer such as write, of course, and read to feed my writing. Even with the constant practice of writing, some rewards, such as publication or adoration, are not guaranteed.

Unfortunately, some rewards are more immediate. Tuning the world out, giving myself over to sloth and watching tons of movies on Netflix Instant Viewing are some quick returns, but I ultimately accomplish very little in the end. And, I just hate myself even more.

I may often desire a “room of my own” or some ideal writing environment. When I lived in Downtown, I had a great room, one with a view. Forster allusion aside, that is an apt description of the place. Living there, all kinds of thing happened to distract me, so having the room wasn’t always the answer. I had some people who stayed with me for a while and overstayed their welcome, but the solution is simple: KICK THEM OUT. However, in that room, all by myself, I could fritter away my time watching too much TV or doing nothing and that was the bigger challenge. It’s something I still face post-Downtown apartment.

Essentially, I need to just sit down and take time to write my stories. That’s what I’m doing right now in the middle of the night with this post. The TV’s not on, Netflix Instant Viewing is not running, and my Twitter Profile/Facebook statuses are silent. If I’m going to sit on my ass, I might as well make it productive. I may not get a perfect draft the first time, but writing’s never been about instant gratification. If I have that great story idea in my head, it’ll take some work for it to translate on paper.

Trying to run to cafés may not always be the best way to go about trying to get writing done. The idea is to be able to write anywhere, anytime, especially where you live. Also, there aren’t always perfect times to write. Just do it. That’s how I’m going to proceed with it.

With that said, I think 2009 is going to be a good writing year for me.

Scott and I claimed two tables at the Adams Avenue Twiggs and had a computer tête-à-tête. This works more for social coffee/internetting versus actually getting anything done.

Coffee and bagel – nice way to start the new year’s, though not to be done every day. They’re handy props to have near a pen and notebook, or even a laptop for writing, but not always good for writing.

At any level in college, students find mentors in their professors. That was the nature of my relationship with Professor Joseph K, or Joe, as I’ll refer to him from time to time. At the time, I thought he was different from all the other English professors at my university. He had a post-modern cool about him. He wore black clothing and sunglasses indoors. His course materials were outside of the canon, which I found intriguing. As I got to know him, he became very paternal towards me. Like my father, he had a very dry sense of humor. I would later learn that he could be just as mercurial.

There were some positive things, especially early on. When I took his upper division course in my last year of college, he gave me some confidence in my abilities as a student and a thinker. One of the things he did was to invite me to take a graduate course the following semester. I was, at the time, trying to find direction as a writer experimenting with various forms. Joe was the editor in chief of an avant-garde literary journal with the university press and he invited me to be part of the editorial team. He soon promoted me to assistant editor when my predecessor found himself too busy to do the job. He saw some of my work, gave me some encouragement, and helped me put together an application packet for the MFA program. He also wrote a letter of recommendation for me.

During the time I waited to get into the program, I had a place to hang my coat and a room of my own to read and write. Joe gave me a key to his office, and it was mine during the daytime. Joe often only came to the office at night before his classes.

As far as publishing goes, he gave me the lead to a journal that took one of his works and I got published alongside him. It was the Gold Lady’s debut. In Joe’s journal, some of Richard Kostelanetz‘s “one word stories” were accepted and I did the artistic formatting. I got to be a published writer and artist within a few month period.

Joe did not make extravagant demands upon me. All I did was check the mailroom for his mail and submissions, logged the submissions, and did a few other errands. He was a pain in the ass during the manuscript editing process, but even that wasn’t bad. I wasn’t expected to bring Starbuck’s coffee to him piping hot, nor was I expected to got unpublished Harry Potter books for his children.** None of the deadlines he gave were unreasonable, even when it came to dealing with the galleys.

I house-sat for Joe a few times. Like the office, the borrowed home during his times away served as a place where I could benefit creatively. He owned thousands of books and it was nice to have access to his personal library. It was a quiet place, away from family, so I occasionally had a place where I could do some work. Of course, there was an episode that wound up becoming part of the university’s MFA lore. It involves some cookies, but I’m not saying anything more.

to be continued…

*Pseudonym from the protagonist of the The Trial by Franz Kafka. The name change is designed to protect the guilty and even the innocent.
**The Devil Wears Prada.

• The student needs to fill out an agreement with the instructor regarding their need to finish their coursework beyond the semester.
• There is usually one assignment that’s needed to satisfy the requirements for a student’s grade, but there may be more.
• The student has one year from the end of the semester date to complete their work.
• After the conditions have been outlined in the agreement and the instructor turns in the agreement, the student’s grade is recorded as “I” or INCOMPLETE.
• Here is the dangerous part: If a student does not complete the work necessary for them to get a passing grade, their “I” or INCOMPLETE will turn into an F.

I’ve never took an incomplete in college. I’ve never been a big fan of paper work, and the less there is, the better. Now, this is an unrealistic desire for someone in my profession. When I was in graduate school, there was some silly piece of paper to turn in to some office every week. Of course, this is a gross over-exaggeration, but I don’t think I’m too far from the truth. The incomplete was simply another document to fill out.

Given that, I did not make it a habit to approach my professor mentors and tormentors for incompletes. I usually finished my coursework by the end of the semester, even it killed me. There were many times where it almost did.

There was only one semester where I ever approached a professor to do an incomplete. It was a course on the great world novel and I chose to my semester paper on Shusaku Endo‘s Silence. This novel’s theme was suffering, which I would ironically experience as I struggled through the year to do the paper.

For some reason, it took me a while to decide on using this work as the topic for my paper. However, it would take me a long while to get it done. I often found excuses not to do it. The following semester, I dealt with drama. I had a personal and professional falling out with the professor who helped me get into graduate school (a cautionary tale against doing graduate programs in your undergraduate alma mater). It didn’t help that I worked as assistant editor for his disturbingly sick literary* journal at the time (I formally resigned mid-year shortly after any sign of friendship and personal regard disintegrated on both sides). I had an unrequited interest in a supposedly good friend of mine who took advantage of it. He lived in my apartment for a while and he didn’t hesitate to cash in the benefits when it suited him. He rejected me at a point when I started to think I had a chance with him. I then kicked him out of my apartment, but my woes were far from over. I wound up seeing a counselor that spring semester to deal with both issues, and one of the things that came up in the conversation from time to time was the incomplete.

In the aftermath, I was dealing with the emotional issues listed above, but I still struggled with getting a silly essay done. I still had to do creative writing for the workshops and readings for the lit courses in my program, which also had essays. I kept putting it off and putting it off, but the incomplete was always on my mind.

I did manage to get it before the year was over. The paper wasn’t great at all; however, I didn’t let it turn into an F. I just couldn’t afford it.

After that, I vowed never to take on another incomplete again. To use a cliché, it was a monkey on my back. I could not stop thinking about it even when I wasn’t working on it, and that was a constant distraction. As for the drama that served as a nice excuse? It soon passed. From time to time, I had to deal with the former mentor on a bureaucratic level. As for so-called friend, I realized he was useless and I never fell into that unrequited trap again. I am glad that the counselor didn’t let me forget about making sure I satisfied the incomplete.

Knowing that I don’t work well like this, I always feel some concern for students who take this on. As a teacher, I’m not too crazy to being tied to any class for a year.

*This is not a statement of literary conservatism on my part as it is more of a pot shot.

Then there’s something called NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. Also, there’s NaBloPoMo, spelled out as National Blog Posting Month. Every month’s some kind of special month. Why can’t a month just be a month? We have enough damn holidays as it is. Nonetheless, some have taken it upon themselves to create that extra kick in the pants for everyone to write more. NaNoWriMo is for those who have that Great American novel in them, but they just need it spit it out the way Linda Blair famously did with green slime on The Exorcist. NaBloPoMo is for the rest of everyone else who’s just too lazy to blog everyday. If you need that extra push to write, then get in on it.

Chris has generated a few thousand words of his novel so far. His word count can be tracked on the NaNoWriMo site. I don’t think I’ll officially get into this. I’m too nervous about submitting any work to the site, even though I know it’s just word count they’re concerned with. However, it is good practice to write every day, so that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll keep you posted on my progress as I go along. As for Chris, just don’t leave this novel or the act of writing it in November. Once this special month is over, keep writing and revise!

Brian and Fredo have gotten into NaBloPoMo. I’ve come across both of their blogs earlier this year when I started to actively blog. There have been several attempts in the past, such as my Live Journal, which went through bouts of lots of postings to dry periods where I didn’t post at all. When I started this blog last year, I also tried blogging on MySpace to create a “mirror blog” that “my friends” could read. After writing a memoir series on grad school and some rants, I fell out of the blogosphere sometime last summer. I got this job (which I’m glad to be out of), and I got nervous about blogging. At the time, I wondered what the hell could I write about besides the dysfunctional people I work with, the incompetent boss, the uptight accountant, inane water cooler conversations, and some assorted bitches I dealt with on a daily basis, especially after the central and local office were consolidated. I guess there is some material there, but I’m still not willing to touch it beyond my open letter posted a few months ago. Getting back to blogging, I have blogged more posts this year than in the past. I haven’t posted every day this year, but I have tried to post regularly, even during August, in which there seemed to be a writer’s drought. I’ve been posting every day this month. All I need is the badge.

Badges? I don’t need no stinking badges! I couldn’t resist this even though it’s cliché. Do I need any badges to keep writing? Not really. However, it’s fun.

Josh’s recent post about writing got me thinking about the issue as well. In discussing some approached to writing, he mentions trying out Stephen King’s approach:

I even gave Stephen King’s 10,000 words a day method an attempt. I ended up producing a bunch of shit.

Stephen King’s method is the closest to NaNoWriMo’s, though they’re not as demanding. I suppose it’s good for full time writers and others who have plenty of time on their hands. The one that works the best for Josh is Kurt Vonnegut’s approach:

Legend has it that old KV would produce one page of writing a day, would pore over that page, writing, rewriting, and painstakingly editing every character, every sentence, every paragraph. Taking a book one page at a time is actually a hell of a good idea. First of all, it’s a fairly easy goal to meet. I can turn out a page of quality content in about 30-45 minutes.

Josh is careful to point out out that each writer is different, so what works for him may not work for another writer. Some may thrive on the marathons!

As for writing fiction, I’ve found I’ve had to unlearn all the writing workshop nonsense. It was easy to get addicted to them, especially in grad school where the program was set up for one workshop per semester. The problems I see with workshops are the that fiction (and even poems) become writing by consensus and that one can become dependent upon those who facilitate the workshop. There are some great teachers out there. On the flip side, there are some egotistical cult of personalities who prey on the weaknesses and insecurities of their disciples. The advice and even affirmation of either case (though the latter can be very destructive) can be a crutch. Then there are the classmates. Some lavish endless praise on some works, while ripping apart others. They’re all literate, they know what they’re taking, so this and that should be changed according to what the group wants. What happens is the literary version of Mexicali soup.

For me, there’s another issue. The people I’ve been in workshops with over the years have become the personifications of the inner critic, what I think what most people want, and even doubt. During the time I took workshops, I would hear these voices in my head, especially after I went home with returned manuscripts in hand. It was stifling, but I now know the issue is that I hadn’t learn to trust my voice. I’m not saying that trusting my voice means that my writing will be perfect, but that I know what I want to say and will work towards making sure it is said how it should be said. No one else can speak for me, nor would I want them to.

For me, it’s just a matter of getting out of writer’s block. The whole point of doing this blog was to keep writing, though I’ve made some friends along the way. If I can keep plugging away at this version of ShindoTV every day, I can set aside some time for myself to write. Oh, I also need to silence all those inner workshop participants. They’re not invited to the party.