Class

I burn out in creative writing classes really easily. There is just so much crap that we have to read that it is misery on my poor writing sensibilities (though my fanfiction tendencies probably would do the same to all the good writers I know) to endure weeks and weeks of it. But this term has been pretty good. I have two friends and a new acquaintance in this class and yeah. The four pieces we've had to read so far haven't been awful and we just got a fifth today. Well. No. Three of the four so far were decent, the last of which being actually sort of awesome. The first story we read was tripe.


I'm a terrible person but it was tripe, and it was such nasty tripe that my grandma wouldn't put it in her posole just so you all know. That kind of tripe. It was the kind of tripe that I was writing when I was 12 and she had been going on about being a published author and maybe that was what the problem was. I was expecting out of her what I got out of her friend whose story we workshopped today. I was expecting something laden with detail, something sweet and ominous at the same time, I was expecting a good pacing of well-thought out and natural dialogue and a believable setting.

That's what I got in the good ones (which have been getting better by the week, let me add. First week: tripe, second week: shmaltz, third week: sort of awesome, fourth week: pretty darn cool I'd read it again.). Hopefully the story we got for the weekend will be a good one, I haven't touched it yet.

This brings me to the other thing I'm puzzling on for this class: what do I write about for my workshopped paper? I draw a lot of my original fiction from my own life because I'm a terrible person that way (I'm too afraid to ask what the general consensus is for drawing from one's own life, so I draw from it anyway and tell no one except right now I'm telling the whole internet). But since I'm drawing from my own life, there are a lot of stories I'd like to maybe tell with my own spin on them.

There is my great-great-grandmother Canuta and her general badassery and mother-smothering of Billy the Kid (whose main hang-out was like a day and a half ride away from where she and her family lived). There are Canuta's daughters Silberia and Alicia Maria (who I'm named after), who had to take care of an ancient mean billy goat--one day Silberia got so mad at the billy goat that she pushed him down a ravine and killed him and then made my great-grandmother swear an oath to never tell a soul. Mary Alice told someone this story a good ten years after Silberia was buried.

There is the time when Silberia set something on fire in a restaurant kitchen and ran out to the dining room and screamed, "Everyone out, there's gonna be a splode!" in the strange "fake" Tex-Mex accent that everyone in New Mexico speaks with. The accent sounds vaguely Texan, but isn't, it also sounds vaguely Spanish but just isn't. It has an odd whine to it, especially in anyone over thirty who has lived there for more than ten years.

There's the story of when Alicia Maria tearfully told her sister Silberia that a pushy insurance man was bothering her, and so Silberia camped out at Alicia Maria's house and basically threatened the man's life if he were to ever show his "gringo face near my seester's door agaa-ii-n."

Silberia once threatened to burn my uncle's beard off with a torch, when my grandmother told her about it.

I don't know. There are a lot of things my family has said and done (only Silberia is coming to mind at the moment but that's because some of the most awesome stories revolve around her). I just want to find one and write it out properly the way I think it happened. Something like that. Yeah.