Choose Your Own Adventure

You are reading this because...

A. You are a close friend/relative, and you feel obligated.

B. You thought to yourself, “Life coaching, narrative therapy, and a creative writing class, all rolled into one glitzy, bespangled, ultra mega dazzling three-ring media circus? All that, and more, for FREE?!? Hey, I recognize value when I see it – sign me up!”

C. You typed “peach melba toejam poisoning symptoms” into a search engine, and this is what came up.

I am writing this because...

A. I am a poseur and a hack who has thus far failed to get her brilliant essays and her nuanced, carefully-crafted poetry into The Anytown Review or Bones: A Literary Exhumation.

B. Having devoted my entire adult life to taking writing workshops, editing the writing of others, and teaching composition classes, I have finally fallen down the recursive rabbit hole: writing about writing.

C. I'm at such loose ends that I, a dyed-in-the-wool “Stars Are for Sheep” astrological atheist, have resorted to reading Rob Brezsny's Free Will Astrology column. It appears on Wednesdays in the Willamette Weekly, and this is the advice I got for the week of July 21, 2011: “Fill in the blanks, Taurus....Just fill in the freaking blanks with whatever you've got to fill them with – with your best guesses, with borrowed mojo, with any miscellaneous material you have at hand.” Y'know how there's that song, Walking in Memphis, where the guy sings, “She said, Tell me are you a Christian, child? And I said, Ma'am I am tonight”? Well, that's kind of how it was.

This blog...

A. Is part of a top-secret experiment currently being conducted on everyone. You haven't realized it yet, but a steady diet of other people's search-engine-optimized navel fluff is going to make your head explode. We – that is, an elite corps of specially trained textual analysts – will then carefully examine the spatters you have 'written' on the wall.

B. May contain (in no particular order): writing exercises designed to clear up longstanding confusions, revivify your creative spirits, and motivate you to get moving on what really matters to you; blatant cribbing from other self-help gurus, writing experts (both certified and certifiable), and as-yet-unnamed sources I will attempt to give some kind of cursory nod to; lots of three-item lists and occasional disregard for sacred grammatical rules; self-conscious, possibly inept attempts to shake things up a little by varying the expected pattern; moments of Zen-like calm in which you stare at the silence and wait patiently for me to come up with my next brilliant tidbit – without, of course, any attachment to outcome on your part; grandiose claims, sweeping generalizations, and cliches wearing lychee-flavored underwear; unsolicited advice; a lot of potentially embarrassing information about the author and her imperfect process; pits.

C. Will make you laugh. Will make you cry. Will be better than Cats.

D. All of the above.