So, I was pretty late to the party when it comes to this whole Goodreads deal, having just signed up about seven months ago, and OHMYGOD I'm in heaven. Seriously. A social networking site that revolves entirely around books; who in their right mind wouldn't love that? There are so many things that I love about this site. I love that it gives me a convenient way of tracking what I've read and when I've read it. I love the yearly reading goal you can set for yourself (mine is 52 books this year, which I'm currently three books ahead of schedule on. *fistpump*). I love that it gives me a sense of accountability about actually finishing every book I start - like, if I were going to read Gravity's Rainbow* privately, there's an excellent chance that I'd wimp out about 200 pages in, but if I announce that I'm doing it on the internet then I'll kind of feel obligated to finish. I love that you can easily see what your friends are reading, which makes my perpetual seeking of book recommendations so much easier. I love those book giveaways that I never ever win but which are oh-so-much-fun to enter. I love that never-ending book quiz thingy, even though more often than not it only serves to highlight the massive gaps in my past reading (yes, I probably should have been able to name the fairy king from A Midsummer Night's Dream but I haven't quite gotten around to that play yet, okay?).
Oddly enough, the one thing I don't really care about is the whole ratings and reviews feature, which are pretty much the biggest part of the whole site. It's interesting to see my friends' ratings of certain books so we can compare and contrast our views, but as a whole I just really don't care about it. Even setting aside the whole author-bullying scandals that have been plaguing them over the last few years, I've just never been a big fan of using reviews as a means to decide if I'm going to read/watch/listen to a certain product. I know my own tastes pretty well by now to decide on my own what I want to consume. And honestly, over the years I've enjoyed enough things that were critically decimated (yeah, I own a copy of the Johnny Depp Lone Ranger movie, you gonna judge me?!) and disliked enough things that were revered as masterpieces (lookin' at you, The English Patient) to figure out that, for me at least, the whole thing is just a waste of time. My tastes are never going to line up completely with what popular opinion says, so why even bother?
Lately I've figured out another reason why I don't fully trust reviews I see on user-based sites like Amazon and Goodreads. I don't know if this is true for the majority of Goodreads users or if I'm in the minority, but adding the whole social network aspect to reading has caused me to become a little compulsive about it. When I start reading a book I feel the need to log on RIGHT NOW and enter it in so I can keep up with my progress (and yes, so I can show it to the world as well). Similarly, when I finish a book I feel the need to log on RIGHT NOW and declare that I've finished it and give it a star rating, so I won't have that little unfinished, unrated book sitting in my profile taunting my OCD. Doing things that way provides me with instant gratification, but if I want to really give my truest opinion on a book, it's probably not the best way to go about it.
I started thinking about this a few days ago, while I was rereading The Road. If you ask me about The Road after my having read it a second time, I will probably talk your ear off about how it's one of the most perfect pieces of literature ever produced and everyone in the universe should read it. But that's most definitely not what I thought of it the first time I read it.
When I started my Goodreads account, I gave ratings to some of the books I'd read recently (i.e., the last year or so). The Road clocked in at four stars (after my most recent reading it's been upgraded to five, natch). At the time, though, I distinctly remember thinking that it didn't really deserve four stars. My most honest rating for it at the time would have probably been about a three; I think I convinced myself to upgrade it to four based on the fact that I knew it was considered to be a Very Important Book. I gave away my copy of the book to Goodwill shortly after I read it that first time. Usually when I give away a book, it's because I finish it and think to myself "Meh, that wasn't bad but I probably won't ever read it again." With The Road, though, my giving it away was more of an emotional decision. My thought process at the time was less "Well, that was okay but now I'm done with it" and more "Holy shit, I need to get this book away from me and never think about it again."
After my recent rereading and star upgrading, I perused some of the book's reviews on Goodreads. Most of the one and two star reviews mention several of the same issues I had with the book when I first read it, namely:
1) There's not really a plot to speak of and nothing much happens
2) Wtf is up with the punctuation?
3) The portrayal of other humans besides the man and the boy is sparse and dull
4) The dialogue is confusing/banal/etc
5) There are too many obscure antiquated words in use
6) No really, wtf is up with the punctuation?!
All complaints that I had after my first reading. Yet I didn't fully slip into negativity, and chose to grant it my four-star-that-was-really-a-three-star-rating, because I distinctly remember coming out of that first reading thinking that I'd definitely just experienced something, but I wasn't quite sure what it was or how I felt about it.
When I had first read The Road, it was the first book of Cormac McCarthy's that I'd ever read. Although I did have a passing knowledge of his style and punctuation issues** this was the first time I'd ever made an effort to make it through a whole book of his, and initially it was a struggle. Quite some time after my first reading of The Road, I decided to give McCarthy another shot and consumed No Country For Old Men and Child of God within a relatively short timeframe of each other. This bit of immersion into McCarthy helped bring me around to his bleak worldview and his punctuation in equal measure, and by the time I decided it was time to revisit The Road, I had a much better idea of what I was getting into.
Shortly before I started my recent reread I'd been discussing the book with a couple of my friends, and one of them told me that he viewed The Road more as a poem than a novel. I kept this in the back of my mind as I read it for the second time, and to my surprise I found myself agreeing. Instead of worrying about plot and secondary characters and dialogue, I let the book just sort of wash over me as a more abstract experience, and within this experience I finally found the depth of feeling that I'd only glimpsed the first time I read it. After my first reading I thought "Well that was...something." After my second reading I thought "This was the most powerful reading experience of my life."
I don't presume to know how many of the negative reviewers on Goodreads would have a similar experience to me. I don't know how many of them are familiar with Cormac McCarthy's other work*** or how many of them would ever feel the need to revisit The Road or if their opinion of it might change for the better if they chose to do so. But I do wonder about it. And, as this entire Road-based digression has all been a very roundabout way of saying, I find myself wondering that for every Goodreads rating and review I see. Have these opinions been formed after deliberation and consideration, or are they being made on the spur of a moment after just having finished a book, when emotions are still running high and articulate opinions may still be miles away. Yesterday I took a trip through my read shelf on Goodreads, and I found myself tinkering with some of my star ratings. There were books that, upon careful reflection, had more merit to them than I had originally thought when I rated them (Romeo & Juliet, I still don't particularly like you, but I have a begrudging respect for you). Conversely, there were books that I'd thought were the Coolest Book Ever when I'd first read them, which after my initial fangirl fires had cooled no longer seemed to shine quite as brightly in my eyes (Stephen King, I love you to death but in hindsight The Dead Zone really didn't deserve the five stars I'd initially lavished it with).
Like I said, I adore Goodreads. I think it's an awesome way to bring book lovers together and help them keep track of their reading, and possibly find new titles to read. But when you break it down, it ultimately is somewhat of a social networking site. And the whole "instant gratification" vibe that social sites carry with them probably isn't conducive to forming a solid opinion about a piece of literature. If others who use Goodreads find that the ratings and reviews help them find new things to read, that's cool with me, but you'll forgive me if I continue to put little stock in them.
*That particular challenge hasn't actually happened...yet. Stay tuned, though.
**My first experience with Cormac McCarthy was having picked up a used copy of All the Pretty Horses with every intention of reading it, then promptly flinging it aside with an "Oh, fuck this shit!" within a few pages when I realized that yes, this quotation mark business was going to be the norm for the entire book. That copy is still sitting in my library, incidentally, and now that I've developed a taste for McCarthy it will actually get read one of these days.
***Although based on how many of them were bringing up the lack of quotation marks in a surprised manner, I'd venture that for quite a few of them this was the first McCarthy book they'd read. Seriously, that's like being surprised when someone dies in a George R.R. Martin book. It's kind of their thing.
Sunday, March 15, 2015
Monday, March 2, 2015
The Reinvention of Norma Bates
(Contains spoilers for the first two seasons of Bates Motel)
(Also technically contains spoilers for Psycho, but seriously if you don't know Psycho by now, what is wrong with you?)
A couple of weeks ago I finally rewatched the movie Psycho for the first time in ten years. As we reached the final scene in the police station, the one where the psychiatrist describes in agonizing detail Exactly What Is Wrong With Norman*, I realized there were a couple of very important things I'd forgotten.
(*I understand that this was a necessity of the times; audiences in the 1960s had really never seen a movie twist like this before and weren't as familiar with the basic tenets of psychiatry, or at least Hollywood's version of it, as we are now. But seriously, watching this five-minute chunk of exposition as a modern viewer is painful. You see, Norman had a bad mother, and then he got extremely jealous of her boyfriend, and then he killed them. and then he felt guilty, and then he created a split personality to compensate for the guilt, and then the split personality would get angry whenever he felt attracted to a woman, and then HOLY CRAP MAN WE GET IT, WILL YOU JUST MOVE IT ALONG?...Ahem. Sorry.)
I had forgotten the haste with which Norma Bates' character is explained and promptly set aside. Considering the major role she plays in the story (even if she is dead and stuffed for all of it), not to mention the force with which her name and figure have entered pop culture as a shorthand for 'bad mother', the exploration of her history and personality is limited to two lines in the psychiatrist's long-winded treatise on Norman.
"His mother was a clinging, demanding woman, and for years the two of them lived as if there was no one else in the world. Then she met a man, and it seemed to Norman as if she threw him over for this man."
That's it. That's all you get. Norma Bates was a clingy mother who dumped her son for some dude and got killed for it. Oh, well. Bitches be crazy, amirite?
Secondly, I'd forgotten that the death of Norman Bates' father, which seems to be a pretty damn important event in his life, is given no explanation whatsoever. Having not seen the film in a long time, I'd gotten the idea in my head that there was an implication that Norma had killed him, but I was incorrect. He just died. No explanation warranted.*
(*Okay, if we want to get really technical here, Wikipedia tells me that the made for TV sequel Psycho IV explains that he was stung to death by bees, but you'll excuse me if I really can't be bothered to sit through Psycho IV to confirm this for myself)
These two issues got me thinking about Bates Motel, whose third season will be premiering on A&E one week from today. I love Bates Motel, but honestly until now I could never really tell you why I love it so much. As far as the horror-based series that I watch, I still place it at a distant third behind Hannibal (which has the most beautifully cinematic ambition I've ever seen on a network show) and American Horror Story (which survives solely on the sheer strength of its "okay, what kind of crazy shit can we pull this week?!" mentality). Because honestly, it's got a lot of issues. It spends entirely too much time setting up love triangles for Norman, it's mired in subplots that never really seem to go anywhere or do anything, and Freddie Highmore took about one full season to really figure out what he was doing with his performance as Norman (and to get his British accent to stop leaking out all over the place). And yet, I still find the show addictive enough that I keep coming back with bated breath week after week. I could never adequately explain why, until I rewatched Psycho, and then it hit me:
Bates Motel is enthralling because it realizes, unlike the original novel and movie, that in order for Norman Bates' story to work to its full potential, Norma needs to be as much of a protagonist as he is.
It of course goes without saying that in a weekly series, Norma's character gets to be much more fleshed out than she was in the film. We learn about her abusive home life with her brother, and her neglected older son, and her unhappy home life with Norman's father. All of this goes a long way towards making her more sympathetic and relatable. But what ultimately makes the whole story gel is one key change that the writers made to Norman's past.
We see in the pilot episode that Norman's father has been killed, and the show practically hits us over the head with the implication that Norma has killed him. Coming into the show fresh with what we know of her from Psycho, it's easy to accept this implication, because hey, Norma's already a crazy bitch who screwed up her own son so badly that he became a murderer, so why wouldn't she kill a guy? For about the first half of season one, the show strung us along with the idea that it would be about Norman's gradual descent into madness at the hands of his mother, before finally dropping a bombshell on the audience: Norman has already gone crazy, having killed his father during a blackout state where his split personality took over. Furthermore, Norma is already aware of Norman's blackouts, and in her desperate need to protect her son is determined to keep the truth hidden from everyone, including Norman himself.
With this one simple change, the entire mythos of Psycho as we know it is turned on its head. It's no longer a story about a smothered son being driven to madness at the hands of his selfish mother; it's the story of a painfully misguided mother who's realized that her son has descended into insanity, and is determined to protect him at any cost.
The real brilliance is that Norma still acts much like we'd expect Norma Bates to act. She clings to Norman incessantly, she insists on spending time with him above all else, she is mistrustful and paranoid of any new people who attempt to come into their lives, and fills his head with the notion that no one can ever be there for him like she will. But instead of being a manifestation of her own selfishness, it's instead the result of her misguided belief that she can fix whatever is wrong with her son. Norman, being completely unaware of his own dark side, interprets her actions as the sort of simple clinging and selfishness that Psycho had presented, and rather than helping him, her behavior only serves to exacerbate his mental illness and causes the "Mother" personality to start forming inside his head.
The new third-season promos for Bates Motel have been steeped in Psycho-related imagery, which only serves to heighten the tragedy of Norma Bates' predicament. Because it reminds us that no matter how hard she tries to save Norman, no matter how much she loves him and how much she sacrifices for his safety, ultimately she will wind up stuffed and preserved in that rocking chair.
And honestly, for a basic cable show based on a fifty year old movie, that is some serious depth.
(Also technically contains spoilers for Psycho, but seriously if you don't know Psycho by now, what is wrong with you?)
A couple of weeks ago I finally rewatched the movie Psycho for the first time in ten years. As we reached the final scene in the police station, the one where the psychiatrist describes in agonizing detail Exactly What Is Wrong With Norman*, I realized there were a couple of very important things I'd forgotten.
(*I understand that this was a necessity of the times; audiences in the 1960s had really never seen a movie twist like this before and weren't as familiar with the basic tenets of psychiatry, or at least Hollywood's version of it, as we are now. But seriously, watching this five-minute chunk of exposition as a modern viewer is painful. You see, Norman had a bad mother, and then he got extremely jealous of her boyfriend, and then he killed them. and then he felt guilty, and then he created a split personality to compensate for the guilt, and then the split personality would get angry whenever he felt attracted to a woman, and then HOLY CRAP MAN WE GET IT, WILL YOU JUST MOVE IT ALONG?...Ahem. Sorry.)
I had forgotten the haste with which Norma Bates' character is explained and promptly set aside. Considering the major role she plays in the story (even if she is dead and stuffed for all of it), not to mention the force with which her name and figure have entered pop culture as a shorthand for 'bad mother', the exploration of her history and personality is limited to two lines in the psychiatrist's long-winded treatise on Norman.
"His mother was a clinging, demanding woman, and for years the two of them lived as if there was no one else in the world. Then she met a man, and it seemed to Norman as if she threw him over for this man."
That's it. That's all you get. Norma Bates was a clingy mother who dumped her son for some dude and got killed for it. Oh, well. Bitches be crazy, amirite?
Secondly, I'd forgotten that the death of Norman Bates' father, which seems to be a pretty damn important event in his life, is given no explanation whatsoever. Having not seen the film in a long time, I'd gotten the idea in my head that there was an implication that Norma had killed him, but I was incorrect. He just died. No explanation warranted.*
(*Okay, if we want to get really technical here, Wikipedia tells me that the made for TV sequel Psycho IV explains that he was stung to death by bees, but you'll excuse me if I really can't be bothered to sit through Psycho IV to confirm this for myself)
These two issues got me thinking about Bates Motel, whose third season will be premiering on A&E one week from today. I love Bates Motel, but honestly until now I could never really tell you why I love it so much. As far as the horror-based series that I watch, I still place it at a distant third behind Hannibal (which has the most beautifully cinematic ambition I've ever seen on a network show) and American Horror Story (which survives solely on the sheer strength of its "okay, what kind of crazy shit can we pull this week?!" mentality). Because honestly, it's got a lot of issues. It spends entirely too much time setting up love triangles for Norman, it's mired in subplots that never really seem to go anywhere or do anything, and Freddie Highmore took about one full season to really figure out what he was doing with his performance as Norman (and to get his British accent to stop leaking out all over the place). And yet, I still find the show addictive enough that I keep coming back with bated breath week after week. I could never adequately explain why, until I rewatched Psycho, and then it hit me:
Bates Motel is enthralling because it realizes, unlike the original novel and movie, that in order for Norman Bates' story to work to its full potential, Norma needs to be as much of a protagonist as he is.
It of course goes without saying that in a weekly series, Norma's character gets to be much more fleshed out than she was in the film. We learn about her abusive home life with her brother, and her neglected older son, and her unhappy home life with Norman's father. All of this goes a long way towards making her more sympathetic and relatable. But what ultimately makes the whole story gel is one key change that the writers made to Norman's past.
We see in the pilot episode that Norman's father has been killed, and the show practically hits us over the head with the implication that Norma has killed him. Coming into the show fresh with what we know of her from Psycho, it's easy to accept this implication, because hey, Norma's already a crazy bitch who screwed up her own son so badly that he became a murderer, so why wouldn't she kill a guy? For about the first half of season one, the show strung us along with the idea that it would be about Norman's gradual descent into madness at the hands of his mother, before finally dropping a bombshell on the audience: Norman has already gone crazy, having killed his father during a blackout state where his split personality took over. Furthermore, Norma is already aware of Norman's blackouts, and in her desperate need to protect her son is determined to keep the truth hidden from everyone, including Norman himself.
With this one simple change, the entire mythos of Psycho as we know it is turned on its head. It's no longer a story about a smothered son being driven to madness at the hands of his selfish mother; it's the story of a painfully misguided mother who's realized that her son has descended into insanity, and is determined to protect him at any cost.
The real brilliance is that Norma still acts much like we'd expect Norma Bates to act. She clings to Norman incessantly, she insists on spending time with him above all else, she is mistrustful and paranoid of any new people who attempt to come into their lives, and fills his head with the notion that no one can ever be there for him like she will. But instead of being a manifestation of her own selfishness, it's instead the result of her misguided belief that she can fix whatever is wrong with her son. Norman, being completely unaware of his own dark side, interprets her actions as the sort of simple clinging and selfishness that Psycho had presented, and rather than helping him, her behavior only serves to exacerbate his mental illness and causes the "Mother" personality to start forming inside his head.
The new third-season promos for Bates Motel have been steeped in Psycho-related imagery, which only serves to heighten the tragedy of Norma Bates' predicament. Because it reminds us that no matter how hard she tries to save Norman, no matter how much she loves him and how much she sacrifices for his safety, ultimately she will wind up stuffed and preserved in that rocking chair.
And honestly, for a basic cable show based on a fifty year old movie, that is some serious depth.
Sunday, March 1, 2015
I Am A Woman Who Writes What Used To Be Called "Penny Dreadfuls"
I write horror.
You have no idea how long it's taken me to type this sentence.
It seems like a no-brainer. My last few writing projects have been about a family of vampires, a fallen angel, a cannibal killer, and the reanimation of a dead person (spoiler alert: it doesn't work out very well). Yet for the longest time I've been hesitant to label myself a horror writer. I always found some way to weasel around it. Oh, I write dark fiction, I'd say. Or literary fiction with a gothic bent. Or (when I was reaching the end of my rope) psychological horror. Yeah. Psychological. It's all deep and shit.
The problem, I have found, is this: horror is simply not viewed as a respectable genre. It's a view that's well-rooted in tradition. Horror writers of the past were generally viewed as workhorses, who got paid by the word to write silly little tales of mayhem for mass consumption. They don't get paid by the word anymore, for the most part, but the rest of this image has proven difficult to shake, especially if one wants to be taken seriously in the literary world. When Stephen King won a National Book Award in 2003, the sound of the country's literary elite having a collective stroke could be heard from coast to coast. A literary award? B-b-but, he makes money! By writing horror, no less! Harold Bloom (that elderly crotchety literary critic who would like you to know that you are little more than a slack-jawed drooling monkey if you've ever enjoyed a popular book) said about King at the time "He is a man who writes what used to be called penny dreadfuls. That [the awards committee] could believe that there is any literary value there or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy."
Ow.
Even one of the board members of the committee who'd helped choose King for the award publicly said that she'd only started appreciating his work after seeing the film version of The Shawshank Redemption, the furthest think from horror King has ever written.
I was eleven when the King book award debacle happened, and only vaguely remember hearing about it, being at the age where I had just started to devour every bit of King-related news I could find. I'd started writing when I was a preteen, and most of my stories at the time were related to vampires or monsters or ghosts or more vampires. As I grew older, I became subconsciously aware of the anti-horror bias in the literary world, of which the King award was only one example. As I began to take myself and my writing more seriously and started researching the business, the writing world's messages about horror were coming through loud and clear.
Real writers don't write horror.
Horror is for hacks.
There is nothing of literary importance about horror.
By the time I was a sophomore in high school, I had effectively disregarded my previous love of horror as nothing more than a childish phase. Okay, I thought, I've had my fun. Now it's time to be a Serious Writer. And so I started trying to write more literary pieces.
And guys, they were bad.
No really, they were baaaaaaaaaad.
I was too young and green to understand the importance of not breaking one of the most important rules of writing: write what you love, not what you think other people will love. As my ambitions of being published soon fell by the wayside, I found myself drifting back into writing what I'd originally loved, horror. But even after that I think I still held some subconscious belief that this was a phase that I would grow out of. Or, if I didn't grow out of it, that it must be carefully cloaked with the proper terms to make it sound more respectable. Today I dug up a Facebook comment from just this last June where I pulled out the "dark literary fiction" chestnut.
And to be perfectly honest, I'm tired. I'm tired of trying to dodge labels and make myself sound respectable enough to be taken seriously. Although I may one day grow more cynical as I start to seriously pursue publication, I'm at the stage now where I prefer to let my writing live and die based on its own merit, not based on the associations some people will give a certain genre.
So, fuck it all. I don't write literary fiction, or dark fiction, or dark literary fiction.
I write horror. Deal with it.
You have no idea how long it's taken me to type this sentence.
It seems like a no-brainer. My last few writing projects have been about a family of vampires, a fallen angel, a cannibal killer, and the reanimation of a dead person (spoiler alert: it doesn't work out very well). Yet for the longest time I've been hesitant to label myself a horror writer. I always found some way to weasel around it. Oh, I write dark fiction, I'd say. Or literary fiction with a gothic bent. Or (when I was reaching the end of my rope) psychological horror. Yeah. Psychological. It's all deep and shit.
The problem, I have found, is this: horror is simply not viewed as a respectable genre. It's a view that's well-rooted in tradition. Horror writers of the past were generally viewed as workhorses, who got paid by the word to write silly little tales of mayhem for mass consumption. They don't get paid by the word anymore, for the most part, but the rest of this image has proven difficult to shake, especially if one wants to be taken seriously in the literary world. When Stephen King won a National Book Award in 2003, the sound of the country's literary elite having a collective stroke could be heard from coast to coast. A literary award? B-b-but, he makes money! By writing horror, no less! Harold Bloom (that elderly crotchety literary critic who would like you to know that you are little more than a slack-jawed drooling monkey if you've ever enjoyed a popular book) said about King at the time "He is a man who writes what used to be called penny dreadfuls. That [the awards committee] could believe that there is any literary value there or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy."
Ow.
Even one of the board members of the committee who'd helped choose King for the award publicly said that she'd only started appreciating his work after seeing the film version of The Shawshank Redemption, the furthest think from horror King has ever written.
I was eleven when the King book award debacle happened, and only vaguely remember hearing about it, being at the age where I had just started to devour every bit of King-related news I could find. I'd started writing when I was a preteen, and most of my stories at the time were related to vampires or monsters or ghosts or more vampires. As I grew older, I became subconsciously aware of the anti-horror bias in the literary world, of which the King award was only one example. As I began to take myself and my writing more seriously and started researching the business, the writing world's messages about horror were coming through loud and clear.
Real writers don't write horror.
Horror is for hacks.
There is nothing of literary importance about horror.
By the time I was a sophomore in high school, I had effectively disregarded my previous love of horror as nothing more than a childish phase. Okay, I thought, I've had my fun. Now it's time to be a Serious Writer. And so I started trying to write more literary pieces.
And guys, they were bad.
No really, they were baaaaaaaaaad.
I was too young and green to understand the importance of not breaking one of the most important rules of writing: write what you love, not what you think other people will love. As my ambitions of being published soon fell by the wayside, I found myself drifting back into writing what I'd originally loved, horror. But even after that I think I still held some subconscious belief that this was a phase that I would grow out of. Or, if I didn't grow out of it, that it must be carefully cloaked with the proper terms to make it sound more respectable. Today I dug up a Facebook comment from just this last June where I pulled out the "dark literary fiction" chestnut.
And to be perfectly honest, I'm tired. I'm tired of trying to dodge labels and make myself sound respectable enough to be taken seriously. Although I may one day grow more cynical as I start to seriously pursue publication, I'm at the stage now where I prefer to let my writing live and die based on its own merit, not based on the associations some people will give a certain genre.
So, fuck it all. I don't write literary fiction, or dark fiction, or dark literary fiction.
I write horror. Deal with it.
The First Thing
I should be proofreading my final paper for a university class right now. Instead I started a blog.
I'm the type of person that tends to have really long, elaborate, one-sided conversations in my head when I get bored. So in essence that's exactly what this will be. Except I'll be actually typing it out now instead of just sitting somewhere off to the side perfectly quiet and occasionally making odd facial expressions to match my internal dialogue. Hopefully the typing will get me fewer odd looks.
Onward.
I'm the type of person that tends to have really long, elaborate, one-sided conversations in my head when I get bored. So in essence that's exactly what this will be. Except I'll be actually typing it out now instead of just sitting somewhere off to the side perfectly quiet and occasionally making odd facial expressions to match my internal dialogue. Hopefully the typing will get me fewer odd looks.
Onward.
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