I'm Just Not a Fudger

All this week I've been writing. Yesterday I typed and did a sort of partial revision. The dreadful story is starting to come into focus, and indeed I think it's going to be all right, although right now it's fragmented and inconsistent and has a crummy ending. The story requires research, because I'm writing about real events at a real location that I've never visited, so I spent some time yesterday afternoon watching a documentary and reading. Today I'm hoping to rework the beginning, the end, and factual aspects, and then I'll set it aside for a few weeks. Unless reworking drags into the weekend. I think I'll end up with something under 5,000 words, which will be very very nice.

It would not be crazy for me to fudge details of the events and the location, because I'm not exactly describing the Louvre. I thought of doing so as I was typing yesterday, thought about just making things up instead of researching as carefully as I could, because then a whole lot of my work would be done and I wouldn't have to shape my fiction around the truth of the matter. But really, I just can't. It's not in me to fictionalize if I'm writing about a real place.

Meanwhile, I'm still plugging through Proust. I love it. Like Moby Dick, it would be untrue to say that it's not irritating and hard to push through in places, but it's a perspective-changing book with so much beauty and wisdom in it. School starts on Monday, so I hope to make it through the final 300 pages before then, but I'm not giving up on the book - or, more factually, the first volume of the book - until I'm finished with it, either way.

These are the books for one of the classes I'm taking:

How cool is that?

After the spring semester was over I took a look at the available classes for the fall, and I found that one of the professors I had in the spring was teaching a graduate seminar on Faulkner and Morrison. These are both writers I love but hardly understand. Exploring them in dialogue, in a class, sounds gleefully fun to me, but I wasn't sure if I'd be able to take a class that was meant for grad students (actually second-year grad students, at that), because I'm sort of technically an undergrad. But I asked the professor and another decision-maker in the department who'd had me for a class, and they both said that if the administrative aspects of enrolling in the class lined up, they thought I'd be more than fine, so I am SO THERE. On Monday. I'm not gonna lie to you, Marge, I'm excited.