Hard Work

Well, so the first seventy pages make no sense, except for the possibility that two stories about two different people are competing and thus dividing my energies and thus rendering both flat and watered down.

The bright side: there are words, and also I am getting to know Rachel and Lacey, my two main characters a little better after a few weeks of leaving them on the sidelines like cardboard cut outs while I sweated over tense and paragraph arrangement.

Patricia Powell, who I had the honor of learning from at '06 Bread Loaf School of English, said at the start of one of our one on ones: "it's hard. it's hard, hard, work."
(Read The Pagoda.)
I was trying to write about my father, and she insisted that I tell her everything I needed my pages to say, out loud.
I worried about her taking on the energy drain of hearing each of us pour our hearts out like I was doing. I worried, probably, about the risk I took in doing the pouring.
"Isn't it a bit like being a therapist?" I asked.
"I'm just listening. This is my job. It's ok."
Maybe I worry about psychic energies of teachers who take the time to listen because I have put my own self in danger when I listen too closely to others. Yikes. That's a messed up statement.

And The Pagoda is 60 cents used online. I mean, talk about money not measuring work.