If I have not been in touch, stopped answering my phone, never called you back, dropped off the face of the earth since that last email you sent me, here's why. I've been starting this: http://www.paragraphNY.com. I still am. One more week until we open. Praise be.

Since last I posted, in the month of May 2005, I've graduated. It was a rather anticlimactic graduation, even the part where I bound two copies of 120+ pages of my work. A Masters degree in creative writing is a somewhat furtive passage, a convenient excuse to stay home many a night and day, but hardly something that will change the course of your life once you're done the way, say, an MBA or doctorate in psychology would. That's not to undercut the past two years of work. It's just to say, well, it feels much more like a beginning than an ending. I've got some stories I'm not ashamed of, or not entirely ashamed of. I've read my work aloud a whopping two times and feel like I'm building courage to do so more frequently. I have about half of a short story collection written and am ready to focus some of my effort towards getting published. Da DUM.

A few more weeks left of graduate school, which means it's time to get cranking on the critical paper. The Masters of Fine Arts program requires a 20-page critical essay on any topic of my choosing along with 70+ pages of fiction, again topic of said choosing. The good news is that the fiction, about 90+ pages of it (thank you very much) are in pretty good shape. (Did I just say that?). The critical paper, on the other hand, is, well, on the other hand.

Here's what I've decided. I'd like it to be fun (fat chance), maybe funny (fatter chance), and maybe on Lorrie Moore. She is a writer I've always been drawn to, and now that I sit down to write about her, a writer I realize that I'm a few books behind on. As a form of calming elevator music to quiet this fact, I've been searching for any piece of critical information ever written about her online. And I came across this essay, which doesn't get me any closer necessarily to that 20-page thing, but it does have a gentle way of easing the mind.

A few weeks not working now, and still I feel the privilege of getting up in the morning with no rush to shower and leave. Or should I say the rush of waking up early and not having anywhere to go or be? The theory is that the days are dedicated to finishing a short story collection, otherwise known as my thesis project, but I'm finding it far too easy for days off to be construed as oodles of free time to hang out, myself being the worst offender. Today for instance.

Fall semester ended a week ago Wednesday, my last semester of regularly scheduled classes in my graduate program and the start of my final semester thesis project. The thesis consists of a collection of fiction, in my case short stories, about 80 pages worth of them, and a critical paper of about 25 pages. I've got eight stories to revise and no clue what to write for the critical paper. I'd like to make if something fun, but under the pressure of making something fun, it usually comes out the exact opposite. A friend suggested a title that I'm keen on: "Things That Make You Go Hmmm," but that's only because it makes me laugh. Another thought is to make a MadLib-esque booklet of college and graduate school application Personal Statements. Much too complicated and not interesting enough to explain here. Maybe the idea can speak for itself.

"Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person, it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person....

What I haven't posted in quite some time is fiction. Which is strange considering it's what I say is the main focus of life since entering graduate school and dropping down to part time hours. If you break down the hours of my day, the main focus looks more like this:
- Sleep (7+ hours)
- Food: eating, getting, preparing, waiting for the check (3+ hours)
- Email (2+ hours, c'mon admit it's a time suck)
- Dog (2+ hours)
- Triathlon Training, including shower (1.5-2 hours)
- Job search (1-2 hours)
- Moving around: city or apt (1-2 hours)
- Communication: phone calls, chitchat, IM (1-2 hours)
- Unaccounted (2-3 hours)*

It's officially my first day of being unemployed. I'll save the story of how I lost my last job for another entry. So far, I've applied for one job, sent a slew of emails, had a slew of instant message chats and did a slew of laundry. I've also committed to writing articles for The Scoop, the Tompkins Square dog run newsletter and have drafted two so far. My triathlon training partner asked me this morning how big the readership is for the newsletter. I have no idea, but I believe it's more than this blog....

Ninety days ago and counting, I completed my first year of graduate school. I also rode my bike too hard this past weekend after a long hiatus and am suffering with back and hip pain as I write this post. But what does that have to do with the valuable lessons a budding writer paid $16K+ this past year to learn?

I learned that...

How aware do I want readers to be that they're reading my fiction? I'd rather have readers, the short of it. The long of it is here, my most recent assignment for class... I told you this program is not as rigorous as most graduate degrees, right?

Ah, the magic of deadlines. Much of what I'm paying so much money for in grad school -- to have someone give me a date when a story is due and have a classroom of people relying on that date. A piece of my latest below. The workshop that I'm handing this in for, like no other I've been in, is anything but supportive. Much of the reason I signed up. A secret wish for someone to tear apart my work, make my worst fears come true, and maybe help me actually get somewhere.

Is it lame to keep publishing writing assignments? Here's another:

In this condition, stirred by men without voices, men propelling machines, metal to metal, hammers to metal, muscle to machine, hardened, thick-layed, stubborn surfaces ground to rubble; and not only by men but by women, dressed for work, in clothes that were put on after the second or third try, and tried with three different pairs of shoes, heels drumming on the kitchen floor, the bedroom floor, the bathroom floor back to the bedroom floor to check the mirror once more before drumming down the hall onto the street;

The assignment was to write a scene where two people are talking past one another. I thought immediately of my family. My family gatherings consist of lots of talking but little conversation. Reason being, conversation requires listening and most everyone in my family prefers to talk, regardless of who else is talking, who else is listening, how loud the television is playing, how much the kids are whining, what presents are being opened or how much food is in your mouth. You get the idea. I haven't quite figured out how it all goes down, but here's a first attempt...

One assignment, one that I've done before: to write a scene using only nouns and verbs to describe the action. No adverbs or adjectives allowed. I sneaked a few in. Can you find them?

She was not there when he pulled up to the Sunday school at twenty minutes after noon. She knew he’d be late. She started walking home rather than watch the other kids get picked up and the parking lot empty. He found her on Grove Avenue four blocks away. He slowed his car out of traffic, two tires slipping onto the concrete lip of the road, wheel rims spinning close to the curb. She refused to notice. She kept her chin set, her hands dug into her pockets, her toes squeezed. People were swerving around them, slowing down. One woman made to pull over and she waved her on and got into her father’s car. She did not want her father to be a spectacle.

I've read Proust. I can say that now. Okay, so millions of people can say that now. What I'd rather be able to say that I've read Proust, understand Proust and can eloquently speak about Proust. (I can't.) And it's not like I read him in his native language or intend to read further in the one book of an 11-volume series that I did attempt (made it halfway by assignment not choice). And would I have made it more than 10 pages without assignment? I guess that's what grad school is all about.

My first assignment was to write like Proust. A Proustian extended metaphor, Proust style. It's convoluted and long. Does that mean I succeeded?

One of this week's writing assignments was to write about what you or your character has had to say NO to. Here's the result so far:

Kathy’s inability to say No was an accepted fact of her make-up, just like the way her hair was flat except for the bump of a cowlick at the top of her scalp or the scar on her eyebrow from a run-in with the coffee table as a little girl. It was something had settled into the residue of her being, the stuff that made her Kathy.

But Kathy still thought about it. She grappled with it silently as something that she knew could logically be trained out of her system yet baffled by her inability to do so. When she looked around, she saw her life comprised of the results of her inability to say No, or mean it when she did say No. Each of her four children were four representative episodes (there were many others) where she had failed to convey No to their father.

One of my first writing assignments as a grad student in an MFA creative writing program was to write five love stories, no more than 20 words each. Here's a sample. The rest follow...

1) She contemplated running over, or perhaps swerving around her husband kneeling in her headlights but unlocked the door instead.

I am commenting on 8 short stories and studying for the GRE. Please stand by.

In the absence of elevator music, the writer's equivalent:

One answer to the ongoing debate I've been having with myself regarding the benefit of public readings...

Received my first rejection today. I respect the publication for rejecting it. The ending was no good, not to mention the most of what preceded the ending. The fundamental problem with my fiction is that it does not have purpose.

Gearing up for a day of writing. Planning ways out of a day of writing. There is a reading event in Red Hook where they are giving away free cookies. Never been to Red Hook, have a soft spot for cookies, free or otherwise, and a writing event is related to the act of writing itself. How's that for rationalization?

Bring them to the brink.
A character who burns her hand on an iron that tips over.
A character who gets hit with a hunk of subway construction metal.

Looking for some book recommendations? I can't say I have read even one of these, but I trust the source.

Plot. Over dinner she asks him if he would prefer to have a marriage that settles into a good sex life without friendship or one that settles into a good friendship without much of a sex life.

Plot is simple. Event A causes event B, which causes event C and eventually leads to some type of conclusion D. Plot is sometimes carefully disguised in writing workshops as

As soon as I enter the a music, all the CDs, titles, artists I had stored in my mind for just this moment melt away. Gone.

''Plots are for dead people, pore-face."
Lorrie Moore

Ha. A favorite writer of mine feels the same way about plots as I do. Plots, brack. And because a writer like Lorrie Moore shares my sentiment on plots, maybe, just maybe, I really am a writer.