I'm really not sure about my 2200 word story The Party Lines. Characters are pretty shallow, plot seems to be a contrivance to satisfy two anecdotes told by a central character in first person narrative voice. My story as produced for this assignment is really those anecdotes and if I could have got away with them and only them I would have. But I needed, or felt I needed, to justify them by giving them a framework - which of course was also a drain on the word limit. In short I tried to do too much in too short an allocated space. Now like everyone else I have to sit back and wait to see whether I'm on the right track or not. By that I mean, am I on the right course - not journey, actual course.
Anyway TMA02 went off about 19th December I think it was. I'd written it obscenely early - some time during early November and although I tweaked it quite a bit, most recent changes were connected to the awkward (for me at least) word limit. I never really did change it for the better, just continually recast sentences, erased lines, blended or obliterated paragraphs, converted everything I could into a contraction, trimmed acres of flab from the edges and forsook some of my darlings. Buffed, polished, groomed and dressed in its best clothes it went off, and I've basked in several shades of idleness since.
And it's poetry next. What the Hell? I've had a tentative look at the Chapter, which looks fine and makes poetry seem unbelievably accessible. I'm sure it's not though otherwise we'd all be poets already, right? I'm sort of looking forward to it, but there's a little dread attached to that excitement too. Probably because of the word 'form.' As a word it can freak out the nascent writer in one don't you think? A kind of anathema to the creative creature the word 'form.' Poetry seems to start off with an implication that you should be as creative as you want to be, 'go on just splurge all your feeling out and what the hell eh?' Then whilst you're at it in a volte face of terrifying magnitude, 'make sure that it's 5 stressed feet from 10 syllables per line within a tight set of quatrains or cantos. Or if mood and tone suggested it forsake the iambic pentameter for, say, the trochaic quatrometer and group together in 3 lines...I'm paraphrasing here of course because I hardly have a clue, but this is it, the fact that we have to start considering form I think is frightening the 'bejesus' out of everyone. Well me anyway.
