I’ve got this fancy new software
Feb 18, 2005 Adoption, Writing
It lets me update offline and do all kinds of wacky formatting and picture insert and then renders the html for me, all nice and pretty. It also allows me to input whatever I’m listening to in iTunes, which is totally useless but still something that tickles my fancy.
Thanks to those of you who wrote to support me in my stupid writing angst. It’s slightly — only slightly — better today. Tomorrow I’ll have a big chunk of time to work on it and hopefully I’ll get something back when I sit down to write.
What I realized after all of the scribbling I’ve already done (typing, really, but scribbling has a nicer flow there) is that my original plan to do this as an essay is still the best way to do it. But first I had to do tons of research and interviewing and more research to find that out. See, there’s a lot to this antiadoption thing, way more than it seems. You’ve got your adoption history, your adoption reform, your compelling personal stories, etc. Just tons of stuff. I wasn’t sure (still am not quite sure) what’s relevant and important and necessary and what’s better left on the curb. I am also struggling with how to make the narrative compelling to those of you who haven’t adopted. That’s the piece I figured out on the drive and forgot when I got home but I think I see a glimmer of it again.
When my muse is playing hide and seek, it always makes me think of this passage about Snufkin trying to capture a song he wants to write and getting disturbed by an inquisitive little creep. There is no avoiding life, darnit. Unless I wanted to live in a garret with a single sputtering candle although then likely I wouldn’t be able to write because I would be thinking about how good a nice, buttered piece of toast would taste if only I had the money to buy it. Garret-living for art’s sake is over-rated.
There are other things making this hard to write and they are the following:
1. It’s emotionally challenging because you may not realize this, but I’m an adoptive mother so you know, reading lines like these — and considering their merit — it not exactly fun: “Adoption is the only kidnapping in the law books where the perpetrators actually get to keep the ransom.” from The Perpetrators of Adoption Crime by Joss Shawyer
2. My writerly confidence was shaken by the Brain Child article that was not meant to be this past summer. Still not quite over that.
3. I really want this clip, which of course makes me afraid to write it because if I don’t write it, they can’t say no. Clever, eh?
I’ll get over it. I whine because whining gives me the ability to get over myself.
Now playing on iTunes: “Silence” from the album Salt by Lizz Wright
February 18th, 2005 at 11:18 am
Ouch. You’re pretty damned strong to be able to read that stuff.