I'm really glad that I chose to go out to eat with Josip. He is extremely friendly and extremely interested in what we are doing as students. It is always nice to meet people that are down to earth. As far as craft, I did receive a short brow-beating from both Josip and Dr. Dumanis to write about experiences in my life. Not necessarily transcribe what has happened, but at least use those experiences as triggers. Both of them told me that if I write down unique things that I have seen or experienced, sometimes the story will just write itself. That would be nice if stories wrote themselves. I would have a thought, and my computer would just start spitting out pages on its own.
Katie said something at the dinner that I thought was spot on. She said that her favorite stories (Night Visitor's, Tchaikovsky's Bust, and another one that I'm forgetting at the moment) were the ones that turned out to be most the autobiographical for Josip. As it turns out, nearly all of the stories had some connection to his life in one way or another. In Neighbors, the math teacher that had a bomb dropped on his house was a math teacher that Josip had growing up who really did have a bomb dropped on his house. Josip wasn't next door when it happened, but he used that in part of the story. The store that gets trashed and then rebuilt by friends and neighbors overnight happened to a friend of a friend of Josip's. Hearing these anecdotes solidified in my head the fact that in the 37 years that I've been in college, I need to start mining out my brain for tidbits like these.
Most of you have probably never noticed, but there is a little stat counter at the bottom of the page. It just topped 100 unique visits sometime between 3pm yesterday and 10am this morning, which I feel is pretty cool. If you have bored, blogger geek friends, please let them know about our little blogs. It would be neat if I could get 1000 unique visits by the end of the semester. Also, if any of you from class would like to add a counter, just let me know.
I have to work at 7:30am tomorrow. I hate 7:30am. I think normal business hours should be 1pm to 9pm. That way, people can still get a decent night's sleep and there would be plenty of time before work to do chores around the house or exercise or whatever else people do. Plus, all anybody really wants to do after they get home from work is relax anyway, and what better way to relax than to just go to bed?
3 comments:
I think the work day should be 9 am to 12 pm. Three hours is plenty of time to get things done. You just have to be productive. I bet that half the people out there only do "actual" work for about three hours. So there. Three hours. Then you get off work at noon and have 12 hours to do whatever you want to do. You could go ride horses, or play golf, or make gourmet dishes for the many guests you invite over for dinner. That's what I would do.
Writing about your experiences seems like a good thing to do. I don't think I've really done that...I just make up a bunch of crap and loosely string the events together with prepositions and adjectives. I might write my next story about my cat.
That counter thing looks pretty sweet. My counter would probably be at around 15. How do you get a little counter thing?
The other story that I really liked was 59th Parallel.
I think part of the reason we (as people in general) hesitate to write from what we know is because anything beyond a funny little anecdote can be a very scary thing to lay out in front of an audience, much less a workshop of ten people sharpening their pride-destroying-knives.
But yeah, I usually think that dinner with the writers is the best part of the whole visit.
I wrote a long blog, just for you.
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