Adjustment Phase

So: in almost exactly a month, I have gone from living very much together with my boyfriend / having a job / not having a car / having bunches of money to writerdom, which is pretty much the opposite of all of that. It is absolutely amazing how much things change.

Here I sit in my brand new apartment (which honestly really looks brand new - I was amazed when I walked in and saw the butter-colored walls and the perfectly-washed hardwood floors and the bathroom that looks like a hotel bathroom, albeit is handicapped accessible and has this strange walk-in shower with a tile floor and three showerheads - it's like being at the gym, I keep expecting someone else to be showering awkwardly next to me), and I have nothing to do today but just write.

Seriously. That was my assignment. I was originally supposed to have a meeting, but then Anders the TA guy said, "You'd better have a day to yourself to just write," so the meeting was switched to Wednesday, and now Thursday is my day in which to be completely alone and do exactly what I want to do, nothing else.

I actually, surprisingly, have not yet squandered this day. I have written. I just wrote a story and it is heartfelt and lovely and involves otters. (Thank you, Chelsea Collins, for your otter and your hospitality - it has made its way into a tale several years later, on another continent. I will show you sometime if you want to see it). But now I feel like writing twenty pages has been all too much, and I deserve a kickback, so I sit, wondering what to do next. Do I unfreeze some frozen chili? Do I unload the dishwasher? Do I dare to eat a peach?

 I just... is this how Neil Gaiman feels all the time? The startling sense of possibility? The realization that it is just you, alone with a laptop, who has been assigned to create worlds and make things happen? It is both empowering and isolating.

I think my writer friends feel the same way. They are lovely, funny people, easy to bond with over food and drink, with a similar propensity towards storytelling and silly hand gestures. I occasionally describe them as "Muppetish", and it is accurate. Everyone at the Workshop is bizarrely easy to talk to, even the semi-famous ones, even my teacher, who is at the moment 'evaluating stories for a certain semi-famous prize. Not the Pulitzer, but... you know. Something like that.' he said vaguely in class on Tuesday, and we all thrilled with guessing which, omg which??

I find it strange, how easy it is to sit next to people who are relating their tales of publication, how the New Yorker sometimes calls them and asks them to cut lines out of their stories and they go 'NO I AM AN ARTIST' and the New Yorker goes 'Well, yes, but could you trim fifty words?' and they acquiesce and then find that it's a better story for their caving-in. At the same time that you are marvelling at their words you are also thinking how easy it all seems when they say it, how human they look to you. (With the exception of Marilynne Robinson, who still seems like an angel. I mean for real the woman has, like, an aura. It comes up at least once in any conversation here.)

Even if after this I don't become some prizewinning fiction writer I will not regret it, these two years where the impossible seems real, where someone will pay me to sit at home and think and write stupid stories about otters. This place is oddly magical and I am so excited to have been accepted here, and I think everyone else is too.

In fact, the only thing that could make it better is a certain super-hot Persian. But there's something to that delayed gratification: to knowing that somewhere out across the Atlantic, there's a beautiful man who is busily working his way through a terrible thesis and into my fickle constantly-typing arms.