Wednesday, July 7, 2021

Water and Waiting

Of late I've been trying to get rid of clutter. I am bad at this. Usually I feel the need to purchase more things in order to get rid of the things I already have: I want containers to organize stuff that should just get thrown out, for instance. In this case I bought a fancy scanner so I could scan in all my old files, stretching back before college, and I took up a lot of space in the living room setting up the scanner along with a shredder to dispose of what gets scanned. It's worked, though; I've gotten rid of a lot of paper, and in its place have a half-dozen bags of shredded stories, poems, notes, and articles. 

For whatever reason, I didn't like the idea of tossing these shreds in the recycling bin and having the city haul them away. I wanted to personally transmute them into something new. So, naturally, I bought more stuff: the equipment needed to make handmade paper. 

I took to this practice immediately. It uses the hands and the eyes and water and waiting. I have enough shredded paper to make hundreds of pages of handmade paper, and I may yet use it all; I had hoped to use this paper to create hand-bound chapbooks of my own work which I could sell or give away (literal transmutation of old creative work into new creative work), but I'm not sure that will happen. The handmade paper has a lot of alphabetic fragments on it which might make new work printed on it hard to decipher. 



The process of going through all my old documents has been freighted with emotion. My college papers show me that I write almost exactly the same way about film now as I did in 2002, and that I cannot write a decent paper about anything else. My old stories and novellas are terrible, far worse than I remembered, with fun [ed.: not fun] surprises I'd forgotten about altogether. I'm embarrassed for these stories, and for me, because I sent them out to magazines in all seriousness. Horrifying. 

I only vaguely recognize the person I was in college. She wrote comments in the margins of her course readers that were sometimes insightful and sometimes painfully dim. She had relationships with people of whom I do not remember one eyelash. Her opinions were strong, but pretty poorly informed. I can see the writer in her straining to surface. 


In other news. 

This weekend I begin teaching an online course about overcoming perfectionism. I've been flogging it everywhere possible, in as many social media groups as I can. I can't wait for it, in truth; writing and assembling the materials got me excited about sharing anti-perfectionism strategies. (If you somehow missed all my shouting about the course and are interested, you can sign up here, until Friday or Saturday I think.) 


I got to talk to a major inspiration of mine on the phone and I was a big pile of scribbled anxiety in the shape of a person, but I don't think he noticed. 

The Plan 9 book is chugging along toward publication. Still no news on a release date, but you'll hear about it, o readers of blog. The cover is great and I can't wait to share that with you, too. 

My therapist recommended that I put together an actual schedule for my days, now that outside work doesn't shape them. I did: read in the morning, lunch + break for something on TV, write in the afternoon. It's amazing. I'm finally coming back to reading after a series of halting breaks, and my project is to empty out the shelves of unread books I might have mentioned. So far I'm doing a good job. It's all a part of cleaning and culling, trying to have less clutter in my life. Or at least temporary empty space, before I buy more clutter to take the place of the old. 

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