Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Writing/Reading: Just for Today (My mind may change later)

“Value the process, not the product” must have been said for me. Since my mental age is six, several decades younger than my biological age, I go for instant gratification.

I love to write the first draft for anything. A bit of fixing I can take like a multivitamin pill, but more than that makes me cringe. My bad, big time!

For the same reason, I don’t like to send anything out for publication, and if and when I do, I feel disgusted with the whole thing. No, it is not the rejection; I can take rejection pretty well. I hate losing so much writing time over stupid stuff. As I said, my mental age is six, and I am like Alice in wonderland, but I don’t want this six year-old, yours truly, to have tea with the queen. The protocol kills me.

As Jane Yolen said, “Write the damn story. Nothing else matters.”

As to my reading, I finished Anita Shreve’s A Change in Altitude. Well-written book, absorbing, but maybe it is me, I didn’t understand the relationship of the ending to the core of the main conflict in the story. The main character felt responsible for the death of another mountain climber as she angered the woman by acting close to her husband. The jealous woman did something stupid and fell to her death during a climb. Thus, remorse is the theme of the story as remorse ruined the main character’s life for an entire year. Then, at the end, the protagonist climbed the same mountain again and reached the top. This is supposed to be a positive ending to her remorse.

But her remorse was causing the other woman’s death; it wasn’t the remorse for not making it to the top. It seemed to me the ending was only a consolation prize that had nothing to do with the core of the story.

Maybe not all writing has to make sense, but I really like Anita Shreve. What did I miss?

I am back to reading Faulkner again after a writing.com member inspired me with "Invalid Item"   by A Guest Visitor . As I said, a six year-old mental age is like being in Neverland, and I like jumping about.