Still fighting the good fight, as someone said.  I thought at this point that I'd be in two writing groups but one of them has entirely failed to materialize.  I think that was to be expected because the other person involved has actually got a lot on his plate: he's highly productive in print, on stage, and on radio, so... why would he condescend to small potatoes like me?  Very well.

The other group, despite itself, is causing some substantial material to come into being.  We've been having difficulty getting together as a group, people turning up and dropping out from week to week (personally, I think weekly would be too often to meet, except people aren't meeting every week so it works out), and I think we lost a writer, but the rest of us are actually writing.  One is focusing on her travel stories, another is generating really excellent poetry--and I'm not usually a fan of poetry--and I even have a short story about ready to be sent out.

That sounds anemic in my ears: everyone else is throwing out their work with wanton abandon, submitting weekly, several times weekly, and I'm orchestrating this tremendous effort to refine one short story before submission.  Fear of success, or just laziness?

But I'm still writing plenty.  I started a blog (which I won't advertise here) in which I have committed to writing one short story every day.  I've pretty much plumbed the dregs of my notebooks and hacked out every half-baked idea I've ever had, and now I force myself to come up with one new, original story every single day (except weekends, which usually go to family concerns).  I'm very happy with a lot of the material that's come of this, and I really feel like this is a useful practice and I'm actually growing from it, just as anyone else would develop a frame of musculature from regular visits to the gym.

I have the short story blog, I write daily in a blog dedicated to stationery and pen pals, and I write twice daily in a blog where I complain about traffic incidents, complete with photos.  That's just a vent for my spleen, but it is still a writing exercise.  So the quantity is certainly there, and the quality is improving, but what needs to happen next is that I start turning these freeform exercises into actual manuscripts that I formally submit to publishers.

I also need to research the legality of online publishing as it pertains to print publishing--many places will not accept a manuscript if it appeared online first, like, say, a blog, considering that the first publication--so if anyone happening to read this knows anything about that, please point me to some useful links, thanks.

The writing has been very slow-going.  I dicked around with a couple short stories for a while, then dropped them.  I haven't touched my novel since early May.  As for the two writing groups, only one has actually met, but external events have caused me to miss all meetings since the second get-together.  I touched base with a guy for the second group and we still have to work out a mutually beneficial schedule.

But the fact is that I haven't sat down and dedicated myself to writing.  I'm maintaining my blogs, which are spiking in attention fortunately.  The blog in which I complain about traffic has received considerable attention from the local community and is starting to turn up in New York's radar; my regular blog continues to get inexplicable international attention so I've decided to capitalize upon that and expound upon global issues.

I terminated my Open Salon account, due to the high school politics of its citizens.  Worthy writers were being passed by while sensationalist, talentless ****s were jockeying for visibility through pressure.  I terminated my Twitter account, as I prefer the flexibility of Tumblr.  I eliminated a couple other satellite blogs because there wasn't enough kickback in them, my energy was better diverted elsewhere.

I don't even post here much because I'm tired of all the solicitations: "Hi!  I don't read any of your stuff, but how would you love to read my latest brilliant work!" No one can be faulted for self-promotion, that's for sure.  I just thought this arena would be more of an exchange of ideas, rather than free advertisement and self-aggrandization.  Don't ask me where I got that crazy idea, though.

The six months we budgeted for my writing career didn't yield any breakthroughs.  I was not published anywhere, and I realized how hard it is to stare into the face of Abundant Free Time and still sit down and write seriously.  Other people have said as much but there are some lessons, unfortunately, one must experience for oneself.

On the other hand, I have been published twice in my university's literary magazine, which can still go on a resume.  I found a job as a proofreader at an advertising firm, and they've asked me if I'm interested in copywriting at all.  (One case in which "yes" is not a strong enough word.)  And a week and a half ago, I concluded a gruelling, sporadic 16-year undergraduate battle and walked across the stage to receive my Bachelor's Degree in Creative Writing.

So I've tacked on some achievements and I'm in a good place.  Now that I'm out of school (for now), I have to work on my self-discipline and start churning out bodies of work.  In reading Gene Wolfe's retrospective on his own career and technique, he cited a story about Harlan Ellison, instructing his writing classes to write one short story a day for a year.

It was not hyperbole.  One short story per day, for 365 days.  Can you imagine?  If you could keep up with that, at the end of that year you would have a wealth, a plethora, no dearth of rich material with which to work and ramp up your career!  I tried it for two weeks--my interest in new projects usually flares up and dies down in two weeks--and it was hard, but I did it.  I surprised myself with what I could produce at 11:30 PM with absolutely no ideas, when I'd just start typing random words and those words would coalesce into a reasonable idea--springboard.  I invite anyone to try this exercise to prove their dedication.

So rather than being overwhelmed by a limitless horizon of options, I'm emboldened.  I talked with a couple of my favorite classmates and we will form a writer's group.  My professor has expressed interest in coaching me in writing even after I've left the school.  I'm exploring a couple literary contests--Minneapolis is an intensively literate city.  Things are looking very good: all I have to do is bother to reach up and pluck those apples off the tree.

Depression's nothing new to writers--sometimes it's the paradoxical motivating force that pulls the pen across the page.  Some of the best humor comes from depressive roots, and certainly it's close acquaintances with introspection and examination.

It's also a stunting effect.  My own depression is cyclical and when it erupts, zit-like, I question the whole writing process.  Should I bother?  Who would read my crap?  Do I even have anything that needs to be said?  What makes me so great?

My depression has been entertaining a tawdry, incestuous relationship with my inner critic.

Sometimes only certain types of writing are affected.  I can crank out flash fiction but my blogging is disabled.  I can blog but I have nothing to write in correspondence with personal friends.  I can write letters but my pen-and-paper journal is neglected.

Other times, writing as a function is suspended, and along with this everything else I enjoy suffers: World of Warcraft, cooking, stamp making, playing with the cats, &c.  It's hard to read a book at all, but currently I've got a stack of books by my favorite author and each one is an admonition of my weakness.  "Look at how much I wrote," they say to me, "and you can't even plonk away at your fancy-dancy laptop?  Look at these novels!  Look at these collections of short stories!  Imagine what doesn't appear in here!  Imagine all the writing submitted and had rejected!  And you can't muster a single sentence?  For shame."

I can't even plunge into drinking.  My 12-year-old Speyside is for writers, my harsh Czech absinth is for writers, and I clearly am not one.  At best I can ask for a filtered water.

It's at times like these when every author of note and influence insists, "You've got to just sit down and write something.  Write about how you can't write anything.  Write 'I hate life' over and over and over and see where it goes."  It's like an Olympic cyclist who doesn't have access to his bike, his stationary bike is broken, and he's told to lie back on his bed and make pedaling motions in the air at the very least.

Is that right?  Is that it?

More adventures as a writer: one job, one refusal.

I received a solicitation from someone who found me on Monster.com, asking if I were interested in applying for a position as editor with a marketing company.  Excited, I leapt through all the hoops, tuned up my resume, contacted my references, and gave three strong interviews.  It wound up in success and I was hired!  I went in to work last Friday, a slow day for the office, and practiced my chops on a couple proofs.  It felt good.

But my boss kept referring to me as a contractor, which confused me.  No one at any point of the interview or application processes suggested this was anything but a permanent hire.  I'm meeting with HR on Monday so I'll have to get the definitive answer then.  I may have to research what it means to  be my own business.

And I submitted a short story to three periodicals I found on this site.  I set up markers in my online calendar as to the earliest dates I could expect to hear from each of them.  There's been no word so far from two; as for the third, they returned my unopened manuscript back, heavily stamped REFUSED.

I don't know what that means.  Did I do something wrong?  Was I ineligible to submit, being out-of-state?  Was my envelope not pretty or professional enough?  Am I too fat?  The only feedback I have is some angry Sharpie.  I came here to look the publication up again, find out if I missed anything in their requirements, but the search function is down and apparently the directory is too.  It will be some time before I can investigate this mystery further.

In the meantime, I wrote a successful blog post on Open Salon.  Unlike other material I post there, it was popularly received and still garners some attention.  It's been a very positive experience, but a concerned friend of mine e-mailed me to suggest I not throw my best material away like that.  She said it could have easily been published (and I could have been paid for it), and that's true but how was I to know?  I think I've written much better stuff and posted it, and it's been completely ignored: I have no idea how people are going to respond to my material.  And I could have written it and sent it out for publication in a local magazine or newspaper, and after it was systematically shot down or ignored I could have posted it online, and it would no longer have been timely.  It wouldn't have gotten the attention it did when it was fresh.

I really don't want to argue in defense of my weaknesses.  Maybe I should have dressed it up and sent it out, but the thought really didn't occur to me.  I wouldn't know where to send it around here, and I couldn't imagine that it would survive the slush pile to actually be scanned by human eyes, and if it got that far there's no freakin' way someone would've said, "Yes, we need to print this."

On the other hand, I ran it online and a couple dozen people have been highly complimentary.  I feel better as a writer after this experience.  What would I have gotten if I'd run it in a print publication, ten bucks?  Less?  I'd rather have 24 hours of feeling good about myself.

Wish me luck: I'm submitting a short story to three publications.  They buy first time serial rights, they accept multiple submissions, and they seem amenable to the kind of absurdist fiction I like to write.

Never done this before.  I researched four Web sites on how to compose a cover letter for short fiction--they didn't agree with each other, so I assimilated the core information and estimated a reasonable margin for personal interpretation.  One congratulatory lunch (pasta and a large glass of wine) later, I'm geared up for the frigid weather and am about to bus to the Loop Station post office, which is unparalleled for speed and efficacy in delivering material.  I'm sure this will be the first of many such trips, but it's my first so I'm making a Thing about it.

In other news: I highly recommend Carlo Rossi sangria, for writers.  It comes in a huge jug with a handle (that's responsible) and it has a sterner, thicker taste--real sangria reminds me of anti-freeze.  Plus... the dog bites, if you know what I mean.

Well, there was a flare-up of activity for my Open Salon post about the plagiarism episode.  Now I'm back to regular blogging and... what I write about regularly isn't as note-worthy.  It doesn't get as much  notice, most people don't comment and few rate it at all.  I need to find something more compelling than my life to write about.

My Blogger account, I think,  is going to see more activity.  From me, anyway.  I have a lot more energy and am having a screwy day today, so I'll probably update it a few times with stuff and nonsense as it occurs to me.

This is a kind of writer's block.  One of my friends would experience depressive episodes where he had to go down to the gym and burn off energy at the expense of a punching bag.  He had more energy when he was depressed.  That's like me with writer's block: I want to chitter away about anything else in the world other than what I should be focusing on.

I just wrote a blog entry about foreign online radio, and I'm about to write one about how to make yams palatable.  I hate yams, but I know they're nutritious so I'm trying to learn to eat them.  I found a way to disguise their flavor entirely: sautee them with onions and carrots, then bury them in curry!  If I ever formalize a recipe, you bet it'll go online.

But I should be applying for jobs.  I should be looking for freelance gigs.  I should be sending out manuscripts and doing research for Helium.com articles.  I should at least be doing tonight's homework!  But I'm doing none of these things, I'm being a flake and looking for ways to expend all this directionless energy.  I may fire up Wii Fit and work out to exhaust my body and then sit down and get some decent writing done.  Maybe.

It's interesting to me that tonight's homework is to write up a short- and long-term writing schedule for myself.  What I'm going to do on a daily basis, and what I hope to achieve in the next few weeks and months.  Irony!

You know?  I'm just some rinky-dink little writer, starting out on the beginning of my career.  Blogging, knocking out short stories, sending out queries for articles (and being ignored).  Who am I?  I'm nobody special, just an earnest writer, better and worse than thousands of others.

So imagine my surprise when I found out someone had attempted to rip off my writing.

I posted this blog entry on Open Salon.  I was digging through old photos (on my hard drive, not in an album--how the times change) and found it, remembered the humorous circumstances around it and then recalled everything that happened afterward.  I thought it would make a good essay so I hashed it out and posted it.  A few people enjoyed it and I was satisfied.

Then I got a private message from a user who said she enjoyed my article the first time she read it.  But she didn't think it sounded like the other articles in the blog--it turned out that she had read my article in someone else's blog.  She did a quick Google search for a line of text and found the original source, my Open Salon post, and that's when she notified me.

I ran back to the plagiarist's blog.  There it was, a near-complete cut-n-paste job, with "Marilyn" substituted everywhere I'd written "Christian," my own name.  References to the photo I'd included had been deleted, and the length of the post was truncated due to her blog's restrictions.  She had started to receive some compliments over her thoughtful post.

My heart began beating hard and my hands trembled.  I was shocked.  Someone actually plagiarized my writing.  Why would someone steal my writing?  Who was I, that someone would want to steal my writing?

I notified the plagiarist and the admin of the Web site--Match Doctor, a singles Web site with a blog forum.  In order to do that, though, I had to create an account there.  It was free, but it required a lot of information: it would not let me take action until I'd reported my hair and eye color and what I thought constituted a good first date.  For the love of St. Catherine...  That done, I wrote up a blog post, introduced myself, and stated my case with an electronic paper trail.  Here was my original post, and twelve hours later there was her word-for-word ripoff of my post.  I replicated the story on Open Salon, as well.

A few people on Match Doctor were skeptical.  One woman wondered what made the original post about the cantankerous neighbor mine any more than it was the other user's.  A couple others suggested the plagiarist wasn't intentionally malicious but wanted to share a good story (they overlooked the removal of my name in the essay).

But everyone else?  I received a tremendous wave of support from dozens of strangers.  All these writers stepped up and expressed their rage over plagiarism.  It didn't matter if I wasn't earning money on my post, and that the usurper wasn't earning money on the ripoff: plagiarism is inviolate to any degree.  Writers shared their own stories: bloggers ripping off other bloggers, journalists ripping off bloggers, professors claiming students' work as their own.  Everyone came together in sympathy and community.

I was touched and overwhelmed at this show of support.  I felt guilty that I'd been writing in a vacuum, chucking my posts out into the void, rarely reading others' works.  That's going to change: I'm going to support my writing communities and encourage other writers.  I really feel like a part of a cohesive whole and I'm going to act on that.

The plagiarist deleted the post in question (and another, in which it had been proven she'd stolen from another Open Salon writer) and deleted her own account.  The forum moderator of Match Doctor told me that normally they don't permit posts to stand that identify and attack one particular user... except everything I'd said was demonstrably true, and since the user had terminated her account, she technically was not a user any longer.

In the end, no real damage was done, and I came away with some important lessons.

- As a writer, your thoughts and ideas are valuable.  Whatever you think of your own writing, there is always someone who admires you... and someone else who envies you.

- It's worthwhile to indulge in a little "ego surfing:" select a line of your text and run it through a Google search.  You might discover where it has been "borrowed" without your knowledge.

- Your writer's voice may be the very thing that saves you.

I know a good writer is supposed to take whatever assignment s/he can grab, build on that, use it as a challenge to grow from, &c.  I know a good writer can grab the ball and run with it and shouldn't be too proud to undertake a job.

Gods know I haven't had any assignments lately.  I'm looking for work through various channels and am excited about some of the opportunities, but at the risk of sounding princessy, there is one job I will never accept.

Marketing.  I see a lot of writing positions in the realm of marketing, and as much as I need the experience and would like the money, I can't bring myself to work in marketing.  I see it as a force of evil.  It uses increasingly manipulative messaging and semiotics to exploit an undereducated population while exploring how closely it can skirt technical legal offense.

I see these jobs that start to sound okay, like a blogger wanted for a company-wide intranet blog, but then they mention planning e-mail and mobile phone campaigns.  I'm against spamming (however they want to call it) and I'm particularly defensive against marketing through text messaging.  Marketing sees no boundary, no inviolate personal realm, no inappropriate breach.  There is nowhere you can suggest that Marketing will say, "That's going too far."  All they want to do is sell you stuff that you don't need and, once you've bought it, sell you more of it.

I don't want to use my powers for evil.  It would be a personal failure for me to design an unsuccessful Yo-J or Sunny D campaign, but it would be a larger moral failure for me to write a successful one.  I don't want a legacy in the form of unsolicited and invasive text messages on millions of cell phones, and I don't want all the anger generated from that directed at me.

At the same time... I need a job.

My '1000 Words or Less' class has ended.  Last night was the final night, and we wrapped up with a potluck and reading some past exercises.  (No one touched my corn chips and salsa, not sure why, but now I've got expensive organic chips and salsa sitting in the kitchen.)

One piece I read was an exercise I'd undertaken in writing in 2nd-person POV.  When I dwelled on how it might sound, it seemed obvious to make it into a restaurant review where the narrator guides the reader through the dining experience.  I had a lot of fun with making it an extremely challenging and surreal experience, and my classmates seemed to enjoy it.

My second piece was a challenge.  We designed challenges for each other last week, the entire class collaborating on difficult writing topics for each other.  I knew one woman hated the 'flawed narrator' concept, so I suggested her main character was covering up a significant lie.  Another student liked satire and irony, so he was ordered to produce a non-ironic children's story with Conservative moral overtones.

My challenge wasn't tailor-made for me at all.  It was decreed that I write a 'missed connection' Personals ad written by a man suffering from phantom limb syndrome (but who had all of his limbs), and I could only use two-syllable words and was forbidden from using the letter S.  Yeah, that's difficult, but no part of that is a response to my personal writing style, favored topics, strengths or weaknesses.  I was a little hurt that it was so impersonal, or paranoid that my writing voice is so weak and indefinite that no one could come up with a challenge to meet it.  My wife was indignant on my behalf, calling the exercise "pointless."

Nonetheless, I did write a 374-word Personals ad of duo-syllabic words that never used the letter S.  The solution was to use a narrator for whom English is a second language, and that gave me liberty to play with grammatical structure.  The class seemed very pleased: one writer, whom I admire, did a spit-take on the woman sitting next to him.  I take that as a sign of success.

At the same time, I would have liked someone to key into some signature trait of mine and challenge me pertaining to it.  I think anyone at all could have been given my exercise.