Man Tit, I mean, Lit.

I have been saving up my blogging folks!  I didn’t have much to talk about for a while.  I was just editing, editing, nothing very interesting.   Now, however, I have headache initiated poor decision making which lead to interesting new characters, the completion of the first 25%, and a mess of emotional upheaval to chat about!  I am going to pretend that I never learned how to write a five paragraph essay and talk about the completion of the first 25%, thus leave the headaches and emotional upheaval for the future, or tomorrow, or whatever.  I am still mentally collating the feelings, events, and literary references I want to use when discussing my feelings and how I am going to use them to bare my soul on the pages of a $7.99 paperback.

So, I finished the first quarter of my book a couple of weeks ago.  I didn’t immediately jump on the blog and tell everyone because I was afraid that I would stagnate if I made a big hoopla over finishing something that I haven’t actually well, finished.  What I mean is, I have gotten the first bit in to a state that I would not be embarrassed to let a random stranger or harshly critical professor read.  It is a romance novel, so I am figuring that most critics account for generic rules and style.  If they don’t THEN I am in trouble.   As it is, though, I feel pretty good about accomplishing a base layer to the whole.  I feel like I have made something solid on which to build.  That is, of course, the definition of “base layer.”

I have also noticed that having attained this non-accomplishment I may have acquired a bit of snobbery, or perhaps it is merited disdain.  The other night at dinner with a friend in order to discuss the hinted at life drama, said friend and I met a wandering Irishman with intentions of writing “Man Lit.”  What is “Man Lit” you ask?  Well, I don’t really know.  I thought it was Nick Hornby and his ilk (see previous blog post) but apparently, since he approaches feelings through a medium (such as music, you really should check out that blog post) then he really isn’t actually exploring his feelings and it isn’t an honest expression of how men emote.  Which I think means this wandering Irishman doesn’t have a great grasp on metaphor, or sobriety.  Well, the sobriety is immaterial to the subject, but he was seriously drunk.   I thought about maybe inviting him to my place to talk about whatever his writing intentions were but the wandering put me off.   I say “wandering” because he was one of those dudes who just decided to move to America without a job or money and his first weeks were marked by couch surfing on strangers couches that he found through an internet forum actually for couch surfing.   I just ended a relationship with a 30 something man-child, so I decided I didn’t need to start hanging out with a 30 something wandering Irish man-child. 

Ageism is not actually what I am referring to when I say I have perhaps become snotty about the writing thing.  I am talking about my dismissal of this “Man Lit” person as a writer.  Granted, I asked him if he had anything written and his response was something along the lines of “nothing cohesive” (my words, he was drunk, remember, I am paraphrasing) which I took to mean he is doing a lot of journaling.  So my second question was “So, are you just doing a lot of journaling or do you actually have some notion of an overarching storytelling device?”  Which is when he said he didn’t consider himself a “writer” yet, but he really wants to express how men have feelings.  Either my snobbery is getting in the way of me being fair to this guy and not making him sound like a drunken wandering Irishman without a job, or perhaps my snobbery is just merited disdain for deluded 30 something man-children.  I have to go, the deep well of bitterness is overflowing in to my prose, and it depresses me.

Kisses!  Soon I will bring you all a manifesto about teen murder, lying cheaters, mid-Century British Female writers who retell fairytales using the word “cunt,” familial discord, and exorbitantly priced shirt-dresses.  Because really, it is a shirt…dress.