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Right, so I had my workshop-resistant story workshopped yesterday and, guess what? It went over like a lead balloon. So at least I got that part right.

Those who got the Borgesian drift of it liked it, or at least gave it a favorable read. The majority however felt manipulated, irritated, and didn’t ever get to the point that it’s a story that pokes fun at fiction writing, writers, and academic workshops. Maybe these folks who didn’t like it just didn’t think it was funny, but more to the point I think many of them didn’t know that it was supposed to be funny. For example, there’s a line towards the end that says if you (the reader) didn’t like the story, then you should reconfigure the story to suit your personal tastes and start over. Someone underlined that sentence and wrote in the margin, “Is the writer is blaming the reader here?” Um, yes? There’s another section where the story claims to be perfectly suited for a graduate fiction workshop and someone else wrote, “This would never work for publication,” missing the fact that I would switch that line to “X magazine” each time I submit it.

A more cutting critique is simply saying, “That didn’t work” or worse “That wasn’t funny.” However, “This is not allowed” is the very point of the metafiction, so yeah. I do accept the fact that this story has a long way to go before I can ever send it out, though. Even if the story works on the level I want it to (and I’m reasonably sure it does) the overall comments about the language needing to improve were understood. But, as my buddy said, “You’re not going to nail a Borges-style story in the first draft.”

Truer words were never spoken.

In better news, I rocked my review of scholarship. I was a little nervous having never done one before (basically you dig up as much recent scholarship on a given topic as you can then present it in a paper—it’s like an annotated bibliography only organized by topic and read as a continuous narrative) but the professor said it was well-done and he learned something having read it. So yay.

Current Mood: Okay |
Currently Listening To – Blind Lemon Jefferson – “Blind Lemon Jefferson”