current writing and reads, etc.

So, I know it's been a ridiculously long time since my last post. That's probably because I got real burnt out from the two writing conferences I went to (Indiana U and U of Mass-Amherst), and up until last week I couldn't think a bit about writing about writing. However, I got some good headway on some stories, specifically Strange English and The Naked Diner, and wrote a new story, Icarus, which needs a tiny bit of revision, and started another story that's probably kind-of sort-of a lesbian version of Breakfast at Tiffany's, and certainly more modern, and shorter. It's probably less interesting of a plot, but, that's not my focus considering that it's a short-short and Tiffany's is a novella. I really need to work on plot, though, so I'm thinking of purchasing a couple spy novels, hopefully something about a heist, a good mystery, and I got some Truman Capote from Amazon for only about $5 a book: Breakfast at Tiffany's, of course, and In Cold Blood. I probably won't be able to get to these new books for a while, though, because of my Honors Project.

I haven't been submitting anywhere recently but that's because I'm real busy from working on The Truce--I'm on about page 50--and I need 100 pages done by the end of the summer. (Technically, by December, but hell, I want to work on editing the first draft and on the critical essay in the fall semester). So, I'm doing about 5 pages a day this July, so I can unwind a tiny bit in August, and do some reading for the project before I delve into really working on the essay in September-November. I want to have something totally concrete by December, so I can put some finishing touches to everything. Of course, The Truce won't be a final draft, but it will be a good one. And that will be pretty cool. I should contact Prof. Faber sometime in late July, to let him know how everything's going. With all this planning, all of this seems to be going very well--especially since reading Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast really gave me a good kind of voice to come from. Benedetti's a very quintessential Uruguayan voice, so it only makes sense that I pick an essential American one. I'm so excited about this, and I need to stop being silly and just work!

As for reading, I decided that I really need to get back to Virginia Woolf, because Paul Lisicky, who read my manuscript at the UMass conference (I promise to talk about the conferences in the next post), told me I should read her because she'd be good for my work. (He said this in response to Strange English). So I'm reading Mrs. Dalloway right now, and it's absolutely wonderful. I'm sure I'll be finished with the book in a couple of days. I'm also reading Camus' L'étranger in the original French, and while I have to look up words every once in a while, it's ver readable. I should keep doing this, so that whenever I pick up French again (I certainly hope to do it at graduate school--many MFA programs require taking language classes), I can really know what I'm doing.

Just a note: Scrivener, the computer program, has done wonders for me. It's just great.

IUWC Scholarship

Dear Elisa,

Your manuscript has been selected as one of the best submissions to the 2009 Indiana University Writers' Conference. We are pleased to offer you a merit-based scholarship in the amount of $100. You will receive an official letter with an invoice in the mail soon.

Congratulations and we look forward to seeing you this summer!

Sincerely,

Bob Bledsoe Kelly Wilson

Director, IUWC Associate Director, IUWC

Awesome. They know they like me, and hopefully they'll feel that way when I apply for their MFA Program! I'm very happy, and overjoyed about my story, Strange English, which won the scholarship.

A Long Overdue Update

Well, it's certainly been a while, that's for sure. I've got a completely legitimate explanation: I'm taking 17 credits this semester. Some of my friends are going through totally intense stuff. Really, the only reason that I'm posting something right now is because I'm feeling a little bit lonely, it's midterms, and I don't want to work on my Philosophy of Language paper just yet, even if Frege's a fabulous guy.

Writing's been going pretty well; I realized that if I write stories that are closer to the truth--such as the one I just wrote called Berkeley, California--I should try to write them in the third person. I should also try elongating them, as my story will be end up being carried more by plot than character. I turned an intense portfolio of work for a competition here at school for the Creative Writing department, so now a bunch of my works are in tip-top shape, which is GREAT! This includes the titles Red, Strange English, The Naked Diner, I'm Just Joking, and Sleeping with Scarlett. I was describing the stories to a friend of mine and I realized just how bizarre my stories can seem sometimes. Anyways, I had a friend look over a couple, and she asked, "Why aren't you a creative writing major?" That's always totally flattering. But, hey, philosophy and comparative literature make my writing more wonderful than creative writing classes, and that's about it.

I bought the 2008 Pushcart Prize on Amazon.com, as well as Mary Gaitskill's short story collection Bad Behavior (published by Vintage--I found out about her reading an article about her in Poets and Writers Magazine). Anyways, the collection of Puschart Prize stories was actually quite horrendous...the writers certainly had good ideas, but the stories felt ridiculously unpolished, messy, rushed...I was very shocked that they had won such prestigious awards. Perhaps I know too many amazing writers here, because I felt like they certainly could have written the prize-winning poems, and that they had some skills that the prize-winning stories were lacking. (To be fair, I've only read the first three stories and the first three poems.) Mary Gaitskill's short story collection, however, is absolutely amazing. She's wonderful. Her writing is clean and thoughtful, and intricately beautiful. It's also very disturbing. I'm a little bit over halfway through the collection, and I'm very grateful for the writing she's given to the world. As for the magazine I just mentioned, I bought a subscription because the one I bought randomly after a dinner out of town at the Barnes & Noble was totally fabulous.

I'm working a lot on philosophy, which certainly makes my writing far more organized and logical. I'm taking three classes, although one of them is a private reading. Plato's really great--I'm reading Republic and it's very beautiful, although it's got some contentious issues (just like any philosophy, but I would even say more than usual). So, that's my Ancient Philosophy class. I'm also taking a Philosophy of Language class, which is totally mindblowing, so it's great (although a little bit confusing). Aaand I'm taking a private reading in the Epistemology of Emotions with Professor D. Ganson, which is totally great. So I'm writing a bunch this weekend.

My Honors project is going fabulously, but anyways, I'm getting very distracted by a friend, so I'm going to go! And get dinner!

Adieu!

Sleeping With Scarlett, etc!

So, I finished Sleeping With Scarlett, and sent it to friend whose opinion I respect--they really liked it, so that's great. Here's an excerpt:

She shook her head, smiling. “I slept with you for no professional reasons. I just liked you.” The waitress put a candle on our table as they dimmed the place again. Scarlett nodded towards my kir and I nodded back. I handed over the glass and she tried some. “Kind of sweet,” she said after taking a large gulp. “Like you, when I saw you the first time, back at the museum.”

I still have to edit it, but anyway, this is great news! This means that I only have to finish up The Disease and I'll have the rough draft of my Los Angeles/ Strange English short story collection done! After that there will be the rough-rough final draft, the rough final draft, and then the final draft, which is only really temporary, depending on the effect of the passing of time on the work.

As for all my other projects, I'm following what was planned in the last post--except, I want to finish the very beginning draft of my Honors project introduction by New Years. So, that and the short story collection have priority. I'm almost done reading the Allende.

How Everything Goes, Presently

So, I guess I'm going to post again on how is everything is going. Sorry about the lack of entries, but after all, I am in Paris! While my quinoa cooks, I'm going to type up a little bit about how everything goes.

I finished my magical realism short story, so now my projects I'm working on intensely are buffing up the botany story, a magical realism novella in sections (that I will submit to the genre magazine at school, Spiral), and anything else that I happen to stumble upon. Here's an excerpt from the story, originally titled Tunnel of Love (after the Dire Straits song), currently titled Strange English:

I’m sitting in the sand, the Oregon shore, that ocean, the tips of your fingers, everything blue, you open your mouth to say something, and I watch your eyes flashing devotion, but those words still within you are something else, that I can only hear now, as this man gasps and grunts, the way no American boy would dare to do, with your thin bones and light hair, all men like you can do is run, dissipating slowly into air. It all ends as I look into your eyes, emptier than the others I have seen, and this man in front of me, bellows, whispers in anguish, the name of a city which I will later learn, in one of our few last meetings at the coffee shop on Baker Street, and is as split as his heart and as our lives, a blue body of water running through, like a sculptor’s cut, like a ruptured front line.

That's not a very magically realistic part--there's a part with ghosts, and that's the part--but, I really like the trick with tenses I do, which doesn't make much sense here, but does in the context of the rest of the story.

As for reading, I read Colette's Cheri and Camus' The Stranger for my English class recently, I finished an *abridged* version of La Bete Humaine in French for my class (because it's really, really long), and I'm now working on Bonjour tristesse by Francoise Sagan, also in French. I finished Swann's Way pretty recently as well, in English. I'm currently reading Allende's La casa de los espiritus in Spanish, and it's absolutely amazing, and Benedetti's La Tregua is next. As for English reading on my own, I'm a little bit behind. But it's probably a good thing to do some work in my other languages, if I wanted to keep them in good quality.

I e-mailed Prof. Faber and he agreed to work on a translation project with me over the summer, so that's very exciting! I need to pick a poet I enjoy. I should head to a bookstore soon and delve.

I've been listening to Cat Stevens and Billy Joel a lot lately. It's very uplifting. I'm in a really good mood lately, even if I seem to be constantly coughing. I'm going to be doing some grunge work on the botany story TONIGHT and TOMORROW because I decided to make my characters better people so I have to change the plot a little bit.

And that is that, presently!

Update!

So, everyone, clearly I haven't really been updating this blog for very long. Apologies! (Although, I really don't think many people read this blog, so perhaps I'm only apologizing to myself...) Anyway, I really think I should give an update on how everything is going.

I traveled to London to visit Tevi this weekend, and brought a couple friends with me from Paris, and it was absolutely wonderful. As usual, travel did a lot for my writing: I worked on one short story (Strange English), started a new short story/novella (something having to do with a curse), and did some work on the botany story (which I haven't done in a very. long. time.), all on the Chunnel! Both on the way to London and from.

I also bought a new program, recommended by Harris, for only 35 bucks, called Scrivener. You can find details here:
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html
I'd recommend the program no matter what if you have the cash to spend--if you have a good income, or whatever. If you're very unorganized as a writer, then this program will obviously give a really good benefit. I'm actually unorganized most of the time, but when it comes to my writing, I'm not--I just feel that time goes against me a lot of the time. So, this program will help me with concentrating better while writing, as well as being aesthetically pleasing enough that I will work with it often. I'm expecting it to up my long-prose by 20%, my short stories by 10% (they don't take as much research, and in general, I have more practice at them), and screenplays probably by something like 50%. (Poetry is far too manual for me, so I don't think I'll be using Scrivener for that.) However, I think in general it will make writing more of a pleasure, mostly because of the 'full screen view' that I really enjoy--it makes your writing look like it's already in a book, I think. Anyway, look at the details if you're interested. I don't think it's a necessity, but if you're serious about writing and have the money to spend, I'd say buy it.

As for books I'm reading right now, I'm doing a lot with trilingual reading:
In English: Middlemarch by George Eliot; short stories by Vladimir Nabokov, Swann's Way by Proust (this is assigned, so it gets preference maintenant)
In French: Bonjour tristesse by Francoise Sagan (assigned), La Bete humaine by Zola (assigned), L'Amant by Marguerite Duras (the English version is assigned later, and I've already read it, so I figured I'd have a try at the short French version)
In Spanish: Casa de los espiritus by Isabel Allende, Eva Luna by Isabel Allende, La Tregua by Mario Benedetti (preference--I've been meaning to read it for so long!), and some poems also by Mario Benedetti.

So...I'm hoping all this reading will be wonderful! As, I hope, will be the writing! Also, I'm submitting the story I'm working on currently (Strange English) to a competition on the 25th--to find out five days later if I made it...Ahh!!