I turned in my first story on Tuesday (after almost dying from lack of real food and sleep for two days), and I'll be workshopped next Tuesday. My story is set in modern Japan, and is about a woman who secretly lives in a man's closet (unbeknownst to the man) (this is the first time I've ever used "unbeknownst" in my life, and it is awesome).

Things I Think I Have Going for My Story:
-An overload of cultural details and information. I can write Japan way better than I can write America. Maybe because I don't write America. Or anywhere else, besides Vague Generic Unidentified Land.
-Plot. I do have a real plot with developments, and it might be kind of interesting. The progression is mostly logical, though perhaps not linked as well on paper as it is in my head.

Things That I Think Suck About My Story:
-The ending. I struggled so much with the last scene, and it's only the way it is now because I ran out of time to mess with it any longer. I'm sure I'll be embarrassed when I go back and read it. Lame.

-My writing. I am not a lyrical, poetic, or flowery writer. I suspect my style is "fanfic style," if there is such a thing. Direct and unadorned. Gets to the action, but doesn't really have any literary merit to speak of. I guess that's what I get for reading too much fanfiction and too little of other things.

-My man character is not developed enough. I spent most of my time trying to figure out my woman, since it's her POV.

-Information overload? I think I stuff too many ideas into my story, and not all of them are necessary. Some of this is probably information about Japan that I just wanted to stick in for the sake of having it there to educate my readers.

Anyways, there is so much wrong with my story, I can't wait to be ripped apart and shredded into tiny pieces (with some sugar coating, because the workshop folk are all nice people).

Argh, research paper draft. What an ugly, incomplete draft. Die die die.

Nothing quite so vexing as when people who know nothing, or very little, about publishing try to give you tips about the process to try to be "helpful." The following is a conversation I had a dinner:

Random Dude A Who Sat Down At Our Table: "I think if you have a few chapters, you can submit them to the publisher and they'll tell you if they want you to finish the manuscript."
Me: "...No you can't. At least not in fiction. And certainly not for an unpublished writer. You need the full manuscript, yo. And who submits directly to publishers these days anyway? Agents, dude." (Okay, I didn't actually talk that way. That's my revisionist head voice version.)
Random Dude A: "Uh, yeah, I think that sounds right."
No, really?
Random Dude B: "How do you know this? Have you gotten in contact with publishing people already?"
It's called the Internet. Seriously.)

And particularly vexing, I say, because I don't have the patience for such useless chit chat when I haven't yet started writing the 10-15 page paper on Confucius and Mencius due the next day.

The dreadful time of finals has ended at last, and I am going home tomorrow! Today I finally summoned the courage to open my story files, which have gone completely untouched in the last month (and a nightmarish month it was. It went like this: Thanksgiving break=research/reading time for classes, last week of classes/doing non-final papers & presentations, reading week/finals, and exam week/finals), and peeked. Eep. It's going to take some effort to get back onto whatever train of thought I had been taking.

The thing with plots is that if they're well done, they look so easy. The best plots are the ones that aren't forced. They're natural and build out of the other elements present in the story. But when you're plotting, oftentimes the other elements come later, in hindsight. Or sometimes they don't come at all. Then you have Plot-FAIL. Which is where my train is headed if I don't turn it around.

Back home in Ohio! It's so green, and the sky is so blue, and the windows are not gray with pollution. Wow. No sound of traffic or neighbors' voices, no more crazy humidity and high temperatures, no more cockroaches anywhere, and very few mosquitoes, thank goodness. On the downside, there are still bugs--a large black ant was crawling on my leg while I lay in bed reading manga, and I proceeded to flick it from my leg and whack it with an LSAT book, to little avail since it was on my bed, and then I took some tissue and killed it. Yay. I vacuumed up a bunch of dead bugs in the upstairs rooms and felt relieved.

Drinking directly from a faucet again. It feels strange. Super absorbent toilet paper, three squares of which are the equal of four thin sheets of toilet paper in Taiwan.

I went running outside yesterday morning while the sky was still black outside. It was 3 a.m., I was jetlagged and out of shape, and the electricity had gone out, so I decided it was time to do some exercise. I ran a mile really slowly. 11 minutes and 45 seconds. =_= Today I waited until there was some daylight, around 6:30 a.m., and ran the same distance in 11 minutes and 8 seconds. I'm getting back into shape!

Today I did laundry. Oh, the dryer is wonderful. In Taiwan, we hung up the laundry outside to dry, since we didn't have a dryer, and the clothes would feel all stiff and crinkly afterwards, and you'd have to iron it if you didn't want it to look wrinkled. Today I pulled the clothes out of the dryer--soft clothes!--and folded them, and that was that. Bliss.

To end, an article that perfectly details my unproductiveness in writing: "What Took You So Long? The quiet hell of 10 years of novel-writing."