Nipples
Why do mammalian males have nipples?
He posited
Quoting St. Augustine
He was not a biologist
She said that she did not know
He said
They are aesthetically pleasing
Only a god could have thought that one up.
She was not convinced.
She said
Don’t males lactate sometimes?
– Pamela Weis, 10/06/2009
Someone in the Slack group I belong to posted a Ray Bradbury quote awhile back:
“The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week—it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just wonderful.”
Per LitHub, this is from “Telling the Truth,” the keynote address of The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea, sponsored by Point Loma Nazarene University, 2001.
I love this idea, and on a semi-conscious level began doing just that about four or five weeks ago—writing one short story per week. So far, so good. I have managed to more or less complete the task each week. I might be a day late now and then, but I have done it.
This week, I am on vacation. Or “staycation” I guess since I am not going anywhere—partly because of COVID, partly because I want to be home. I am pretending for this week that I am a full time professional writer. Or at least I am trying. It’s hard to be super disciplined about it when all I really want to do is lie down on the bed with an ice pack and fall asleep. Our A/C is on the fritz and it is HOT in here.
But for the most part, I am doing alright with this plan. And since I am pretending to be a full time writer for the week, I am also upping my weekly short story goal. Just for this one week, I will write two of them. I will also spend time editing and submitting to literary journals. (Did I mention I received my first rejection letter recently? I think that means I’m a “real” writer now. It feels like a rite of passage. I suspect I will have many many more.)
This also happens to be the week of the second, shorter, #1000wordsofsummer for 2020. Good timing, totally unplanned. So that challenge is definitely helping me with the inspiration and discipline as well.
As for the quality of the stories I’m writing, I hope Bradbury was right. That it’s impossible to write 52 (or 53) bad short stories. I actually think some of mine are pretty good. I’ll find out soon enough if anyone else agrees.
I started writing this post when it had been just over four weeks of doing my day job from home. That was in March. Obviously, I did not finish that post and now what I have to say has completely mutated into something else.
Working from home is great. The cats have certainly enjoyed my constant presence. Contrary to popular notions of cats wanting their humans to get the hell out, our cats spend much of our new quality time together goading me to play with them, sleeping on my desk (or work laptop), and crawling all over me while I attempt to work. Yeah, they like having me home. I know I am not alone in this, and I have mixed feelings about their attentions. I love our cats as if they were human children and relish the extra time with them, but sometimes I do wish our apartment had another room…with a door.
Amidst all of this upheaval, I have struggled to maintain a regular writing schedule. I actually have more time – about 45 minutes more each day. Yet somehow, I am writing less during my morning writing sessions. Not because I sit there and type less or because I am struggling to get the words out, but because I either sleep too late or spend more of that extra time on social media. It’s probably not healthy.
Nevertheless, I have written a fair amount of new stuff since March. I finished another novel (another first draft, that is). And I submitted a short story to a journal. This was a huge leap for me. I fully expect it to be rejected, but we all have to start putting our work out there at some point. I will keep doing that no matter how scary it is.
I’ve also been editing the first novel I finished. Editing is satisfying. It doesn’t provide the same creative outlet as writing something completely new, but it appeals to that part of my brain that likes digging into messy details and making them neat and tidy.
The funny thing about all this stay-at-home-ness is that I feel much less stressed and anxious. I am more content in general. I like being home. I like not seeing other people. Of course I miss friends and family and even my work colleagues, but it would take much longer than 3 1/2 months for me to miss them so much that I would go out of my way to make contact. And I am really hoping I can talk my boss into letting me work from home indefinitely. That doesn’t make me a bad person. It makes me an introvert. It also makes our cats very happy.
