Maybe I fret too much. Sure. Fret. Sounds like a knot to me. A knot I can't possibly undo. If no one says anything about my stories, I think the stories are bad. Or at least failures. Or boring. Or something generally not nice. If someone says something nice, I think awesome and OMG I'll …
Category: neurotic thinking
Maybe Not Everywhere
This may be a lame excuse, but I'm in Waco. Waco! And I've got to be at a roller rink tomorrow morning and the next at 5 am. These are the joys of being a mom to a speed skater. I have trouble writing in hotel rooms. I can write in my home, in cafes, …
Maybe Not What You Thought
Maybe I'm not as neurotic as I think I am. I like to think I exaggerate. That is what writers do, right? Anyway, my bosses bought some of my art and put it up in the school. This semester I happen not to have any classes in that corner of the school, but it is …
Maybe You Won’t Laugh
I may be joking. Interviewer: In your Antologia Personal... Borges: Look here, I want to say that that book is full of misprints. My eyesight is very dim, and the proofreading had to be done by somebody else. Interviewer: I see, biut those are only minor errors, aren't they? Borges: Yes, I know, but they …
I Think–Maybe
I may be wrong about everything. In The Paris Review Interviews Part I, Saul Bellow quotes E.M. Forster, "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" I read this and thought, "Exactly." This is another reason I write. The more I write, the more I work out the world and …
Maybe a Temper Tantrum
Sometimes I may begrudge every other published writer everything. You know, in moments of personality collapse. Meaning, those moments when I'm not the great and fantabulist soul I want to be. (Yes. Fantabulist.) Those moments when I'm resistant, cranky, jealous, and generally not nice. (All you saints out there can begin throwing stones at any …
Maybe Numbered
Blogging may betray my incessant need for reassurance. What else are all these like/share/tellmeyouloveme buttons for? Sometimes I am envious of writers-gone-by who just wrote in the silence, unconnected world of their homes and then waited to hear back eventually from their editor. And then wait to perhaps get a few letters from readers. I …
Maybe Imperfection Is Okay
May beastly things happen in my stories but not in my writing of them. Eleven stories in to Story-a-Day and my brain seemed to have suffered a structural collapse. I finished the story because, well, Time said to. But what really--no maybe about it--bothers me about this story is what it lacks throughout. A layer …
Maybe the Ending Is All Wrong
This story may best be forgotten. I have no perspective. How do you get perspective? How do you judge your own work? I can't get a handle on my own neurotic, self-obsessed spinning. But what makes a story a success? When you read a story, how do you know this one works but this one …
Maybe Characters Do It
Many things may befall your characters, but one of those things, eventually, somewhere, in some story, unless you're writing for children, surely----implied or direct (have I drawn this out enough?), good or bad----is going to be sex. And I'm going to avoid the euphemism "love scene." Plenty of characters aren't in the story for love. …
Marta Bacon 