Friday, September 10, 2010

Taking Stock Again--and Failing

Fall is in the air. My tutoring has picked up. I started with two students this week, will finish up a postponed tutorial and start another tutorial that will stretch into the spring.


August was not a productive month for me. The plan was to concentrate on writing. I was going to write a memoir piece between 1000 and 1500 words and enter a contest. The entry was due Tuesday and of course I would blog about it.


I wrote several short and medium pieces about the Russia trip and my father's death. The Russian material didn't flow. My idea was to weave my recollections from my journal entries. Oh, there is some good stuff there, but I couldn't bring it to life. I wrote one piece on the midnight train to St. Petersburg. It was too disjointed--it needed some overall theme or structure.


I think I'm too close to Dad's death to write about it. Let me rephrase that--to publish something about Dad's death. It's hard to know if what I'm writing now has any meaning to it. But I continue to write about it it my morning pages--one way of processing things.

As I wrote earlier, I wanted to blog about the memoir contest--about entering it--and later (I hoped) winning it. I'm not comfortable writing about failing. It wouldn't be so bad to lose the contest. I lost much more by not entering at all.

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