Tuesday night I had a dream where I tearfully confessed to a high school acquaintance, "I'm a fake," just before I woke up. She was sort of disguised as Deanna Troi, but it was obviously S.V., whom I haven't seen since 1983. The only reason I can think of for dreaming about her was that I'd been reminded about being associate treasurer of my high school student body the previous evening.
Based on the assault of rejection notes I got that day, I'm going to assume that it was my writing--and not my whole life--that my dream-self was traumatized by.
There are some days when I look at the stories that I'm shopping around, and I feel like I'm doing something wrong: I haven't connected with my voice, or I haven't connected my voice to the right markets. Or I'm in the wrong narrative tradition, except that narrative is too old fashioned. It very much feels like "smart kid goes to college and suddenly things aren't so easy anymore."
There are some days when I wish I had a writing mentor. And some days I get angry at the whole mentoring fairy-tale because it seems like it's arbitrarily for other people who are older, smarter, younger, queerer, etc. So I have have to mentor myself. Which is less than ideal, because it means that I have conversations with myself in the dark that start out, "an interesting character is confronted with a problem and responds by...blogging."
And on that note, time to get back to work.
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