Friday Rants and Raves - March 7

[sarillia]

It's that time again! Made any progress lately? Anything exciting happen? Got something to vent about? Let's hear it!

This week's picture is from an artist known as De Es Schwertberger. You can click on his name to visit his website and see more of his work if you're interested.

Comments

[lunabee34]

My writer's group meets tomorrow, so I finished a short personal essay I'd written about being a shitty Tooth Fairy for my kid. LOL I've read and responded to two of the four submissions and will finish reading those tonight.

[sarillia]

You're in a writer's group? What's that like?

[lunabee34]

Pretty great actually. It's composed of two fellow professors and another woman who is a beginning writer but is proving to be pretty phenomenal at it. This will be our first meeting a couple years; with work stuff and three new babies among us LOL the group kinda took a back seat.

I can trust their suggestions and advice. It isn't the useless circle jerk that college workshops often end up being and it keeps me accountable. I have to write something to turn in.

[sarillia]

From what I've heard, you're really lucky to have found such a good group.

Part of me likes the idea of that sort of thing but I'm still working on getting used to people commenting on my writing. I need to take it slow. It's not thin skin exactly. I'm fine once I actually hear what they have to say and I can respond to criticism, but imagining it beforehand and worrying about it is awful.

I've had psychologists tell me that anticipatory anxiety is often the worst and that's definitely true for me.

[lunabee34]

I can understand that. I have that kind of anxiety about other things. I think because I am a teacher by profession and so much of my job involves writing and having other people read and comment on that writing in a variety of contexts (whether it's students reading material I've written for a class or an editor reading a lit review I wrote or my chair reading the narrative I wrote about how awesome I am and need tenure LOL), I lost any intense anxiety about feedback on my writing early on and out of necessity.

I know I am lucky with my group. They are awesome. Two of the four of us have MFAs in creative writing, I have a Ph.D. in Victorian lit, we all have BAs in English, and one of us has an MA in Library Science. Three of us are published in some capacity, one of us prolifically so, and I've held several editorial positions. I am surrounded by awesome. But we self-selected so that helps. We weren't stuck with each other.