My reading at the seminar went well. I didn’t stumble too much with the French, which is good since the words are mine and were written directly in French. Glad I didn’t block up. All positive feedback. I was hoping for some negative because, as long as it isn’t spiteful, it’s helpful. When comments started going, everyone was talking at once, people were trying to figure out the main character. Why did she do this? What made her this way? I got a comparison to Hitchcock, to Rosemary’s Baby. Pretty damn pleased, I have to say. When it came time for negative comments, our seminar clown made a word play joke. So not even really negative. I wasn’t allowed to say anything so I mimed hitting a baDOOM-TCHiiii on a drum kit. It was pretty wild to share my fiction with 30 near-strangers and not have any negative feedback, though. A first for me. Of course, since I am F.I.N.E., it won’t go to my head.
Yes, I just made an Aerosmith reference. I will probably never win a Booker or a Pulitzer just because of that. That is, if I ever get published.
A month to the next session. No theme. Thinking I’ll try something based in London since I’ll be there next week. Knowing me, I’ll have an idea for something Booker Prize-ish and end up writing about the ghosts of British rock stars.
So in the end, exercise 3 was NOT the Le Guin/Roddenberry thing I was thinking of. Instead, it’s a revenge story with a slight nod to the community theme. Excerpt:
I volunteered for the watch because my livingroom window faced the bank on the corner. The lighting was better outside the bank and we wanted to be sure to catch her in the act. For years our neighbourhood has suffered from her generosity. The legend was that a woman who lived in the neighbourhood had some issues with the mayor of the 10th arrondissement. Some said it was over taxes. Others heard that a former mayor left her for another woman decades before and she had decided to punish every mayor since then. Whatever the problem was, her mode of revenge was unusual.
Tomorrow I read my first short story written directly in French out loud to a bunch of people I barely know. Nervous!
Writing fiction is still helping me deal with some frightening stuff like a brain scan (it was clean — except for all that brain matter). I really am not sure what I would do without the writing. Or my brain.
I had my doubts about returning. I did. But this afternoon there were fewer people. 18 rather than 28. The discussion was a little more lively on a writing fiction level and less on an ideological level. The woman who almost threw down about another attendee disagreeing with her over something totally subjective was absent. That was not bad. The painfully pretentious kid with the noncommittal moustache skipped out, too. The die-hards remain. It’s good.
A couple of people had an argument about how long it takes for a human corpse to stink after death. I am calling them Les Experts now, which is the title for CSI over here. This was after we read ‘A Rose for Emily’ by Faulkner. They don’t know Mississippi or Faulkner (when? what? who’s talking?) and this is one of his that is easier to parse. Jake wants me to read my second exercise, ‘Maddie’, to the group in two weeks. Going to work on the presentation. It will be my first reading in French of my first short story written directly in French. One of the older women, an Austrian, told me that she was excited about getting to read my stuff. That gave me warm fuzzies, though I fully expect to be ripped to shreds by some if not all because I’m a neurotic freak.
Next assignment: The Community. This makes sense with all the first person plural in the Faulkner story. I think I’m going to try my hand at a Le Guin/Roddenberry sci-fi thing. Have never written sci-fi in my life. Not sure that I can tackle a genre and writing directly in French at the same time. Besides, I cannot write in my voice when I write directly in French. It’s a different voice. One that I might get to know better one day if I make an effort, but it’s not me. It’s still me when I get translated, with a few bits and bobs lost, but writing directly in French? It’s not me. It’s another me. Maybe I should write a short story about a community made up of all the different versions of me. Nah. This one is about a community of scientists studying a community of beings who speak a dying language.
Unless it isn’t.
