Life in the Slow Lane

I seem to have temporarily (let’s hope) lost my writing mojo.

I was messaging my sister today and I mused how funny it is that we go through some things with our blinkers on.

“Blinkers?”

“Like the horsies,” I wrote.

Blinders is what I meant, even though, until she called me on it, I would have sworn that horses wear blinkers. (It makes it so much easier for the old-order Mennonite traffic.)

So that’s what I’ve been up to lately—moving slowly through Word docs, cooking dinner at half speed, vainly trying in vain to make a memorable Inauguration Day for Caleb and his crew—blinkers on, trying to find the mojo.

I Did It

I ordered my family Snuggies.

Proof of Minor Ways in Which I Am Optimistic

1. Part of me believes that, sometime in the future, Ann Coulter will announce that she’s been acting for years as a rogue scholar of Constitutional law, testing the limits of free speech.

2. I keep playing Scramble even though it’s physically impossible for me to beat Erin’s score of 274.

3. Raw oysters.

Getting Schooled

We had a pretty groovy holiday. My big news is that I’m taking a fiction writing workshop with Jincy Willett, she who wrote some of my very favorite books. (Have you read The Writing Class yet? Crazy good, yes?)

I haven’t taken a workshop since I was but a lass, in college and then a couple years later at an ill-fated two-week stint at Warren Wilson College (from which I came home and immediately got pregnant, conveniently answering the question of what I would be doing in the near future). I’ve become significantly bossier since then, and I was worried that I’d be very bad at being a student. Sort of the Dwight Shrute of the class.

But I enjoyed myself—I’d almost forgotten what a workshop is like. This one is online and uses discussion boards and chat rooms to happen, which is a little weird because you can’t see the reaction of the person whose work you’re critiquing. (On the other hand, I suppose the writer on the other end can roll his or her eyes and flick off the screen and mock you if he or she wants to.) And did I mention the instructor is Jincy Willett?

I’m trying not to be all gushy and ass-kissy, but there was this moment when she asked us to introduce ourselves and say a little something about what we’re working on and about our favorite writers. You know who I wanted to say. But I didn’t.

More Soon

We are sick-ish, and I must work.

But I must also go on record as saying that if that someone permanently destroyed the master copy of that goddamned Bender Ball commercial—you know the one, with that woman who has too much saliva in her mouth, saying, "I love my abdominals. I love my belly"—I would feel better.

Thanks.