Doubt

What a bastardly force. It creeps in everywhere, every moment, to the point where I am convinced I am not and never will be good enough.

I am Patrick Eckhardt. Tests taken as a child put me in the top 1% of the nation in intellect. I was a high school valedictorian, a state-qualifying athlete, and a National Merit Scholar (top 1.5% I think). I was the life of the party in college. I was Prince Harry, sitting in the pub brimming with promise. I was loved and respected and admired. I am.

I am as bold as a lion.

Monday evening freewrite

Tomorrow is December first, meaning as of midnight tonight I have exactly one month to finish grad school applications. In the range of the 140 American MFA programs in Creative Writing, I will apply for one school in the top 15, four in the top 50, possibly another in the top 100, and one in the bottom 16. If I can't get into one of them, I will be in a very tough place.

And this is the problem with writing: its only value is in the public forum. The naive purist, I suppose, will point to the value of personal enrichment and growth, but truth be told, every piece of writing is ultimately written for public consumption. The risks of seeking a public forum are, of course, both success and failure. It would be nice to say failure is not an option, but frankly, it is. Not even just an option, but a mathematical probability.

Giving up, on the other hand, doesn't have to be an option and won't be. But persevering in the face of failure is enough to cause any person to question every step that led to the point of failure, and every step to come.

Success, I am sure, breeds its own perils. But that is a bridge I am more willing to cross when I come to it.

Making moves and enjoying words

Today was a good writing day. Between last night and this morning, I re-wrote and refined the first six pages of what I plan on being my writing sample for grad schools. I scouted out the very initial threads of a personal statement, and it is something I think can be good, once it is refined.

I don't know what I can do about a statement on teaching writing, although I think it is just a matter of time until it comes together. These things are coming together. Just need to find a way to nail the GRE, and things will be ready to roll. After that, it's a waiting game.

The good we try to do

I read a friend's blog tonight, a friend who I love dearly and talk to sparsely. I really wish I were better about things like that, but for whatever reason I am not. Perhaps all it takes is effort, and I know I have effort in me, but my brain does not remember to do what my heart wants.

He is a dear friend, one of the dearest, who I think for a season in life understood me better than anyone else, and probably still understands me better some days than I understand myself, because we are so much the same. There was a trying time in his life a few years back that he talked about, a time in his life where I tried to help him. It was romance, of course, but then the Bible uses romance as an archetype of our relationship with God, so romance is never just romance. It becomes, quite literally, supernatural--bigger than life.

I thought I knew what was best, and I'll be damned if i didn't try my hardest to make sense of his relationship, I knew her and him very well, and maybe it was just selfish of me, to try to help work out a relationship that was out of my fantasy as much as anyone else's.

In the end, they broke up, and are still both broken. In different ways, but there is brokenness there. And there is brokenness with God then, a shattering, a cracking that let in doubt, bitterness, pain, disillusionment--and I wonder, what could I have done to make things better?

I tried, I really did. I tried and I loved and I gave of myself to them and it didn't just fail, it supernova-ed. It exploded and destroyed entire solar systems. The good I tried to do--how much of it is my fault, years later?

"ditto"

Really?

A lesson in math

A 400 page word would contain approximately 100,000 words. Given a pace of 1000 words a day, hard to stick to as evidenced by my lack of consistency, that would take 100 days, or 14 1/4 weeks. Add in a weekly day off, and that adds another 14 days, or two weeks. That makes it about a 4 month project, assuming consistency, determination, etc, etc, to complete a 400 page work.

Which says nothing of shaping the lumpy manuscript from something worth writing to something worth reading.

Wing Commander, reporting in.

It's early in the morning, and I didn't sleep much last night.

But what I did do is start writing again. I wrote about 5 pages--1500 words--a re-birthed my dedication to the novel. Poor Sammy has been living in stasis (and in the midst of a crisis, I might add) for a month now. But the guy's getting along now. Home to visit dad and bro, then off to discover America, I suppose.

My temptation this morning as I'm sitting here is for a titanium spoon. Yes, a titanium spoon: 16 ounces, extra long handle (good for cooking while camping), durable, etc, etc. Also probably for all the use it'd get, a waste of $7.95. I think metals like that (titanium, tungsten, and so forth) always remind me of Privateer. Perhaps that why I want to buy them: I'm buying a memory, a piece of childhood. I'm buying summers playing video games with the Jordans, who introduced us to the joy of Privateer, Civilization...and later (in a way) Jesus.

Perhaps I'm buying back innocence.

The introduction to Privateer (don't know how to embed video...that would be something good to learn. [And...learned!]