Bad Words
Cocoon Kids
Errors. I feel like I made millions of them in my book. My fingernails are still raw from chomping, and my eyes have suffered in hours of sapping laptop light. My mistakes are out there in the world ("the world" meaning the dozen or so humans who know my book exists) and I have to live with them. Which is cool.
I love failure. It's like coffee for me, although I also like coffee. Lattes, which I can get in my apartment for free (well, the cost of my rent, which is high). Failure makes me smile and reflect for a second or two on my long train to a shabby gravestone, whose last stop I can only hope is sometime past 2060.
My book is called "Cocoon Kids" (should I italicize this? who knows) and was totally unexpected to me. I've been writing a book set in Okinawa for the last 6 months, and then these short stories came to me out of nowhere. Or, more truthfully, I'd been whittling them in my spare time over the course of years, and then finally got around to clumping them together one day. Mostly due to the prodding of my girlfriend.
I was obsessed with making the stories perfect. Literary and worthy and memorable and all that jazz. But at some point I had to accept that I am an error-ful young human with a scatterbrained disposition. It will be many years before I am memorable, if I ever become so lucky.
So errors. I'm thankful for them, because they teach my brain useful stuff. Mistakes in plot, pacing, tone, character development, or (gasp) grammar abound in my collection, but that's part of what makes it sort of valuable to me. I'd much rather make a million mistakes in this collection than be writing a PhD dissertation right now (no disrespect to grad students, that is one hell of a hard job).
Anyway, I enjoy making mistakes, and you can too! Slogan.
P.S. Let me know how many mistakes are in this article.
Joe Grammer
Errors. I feel like I made millions of them in my book. My fingernails are still raw from chomping, and my eyes have suffered in hours of sapping laptop light. My mistakes are out there in the world ("the world" meaning the dozen or so humans who know my book exists) and I have to live with them. Which is cool.
I love failure. It's like coffee for me, although I also like coffee. Lattes, which I can get in my apartment for free (well, the cost of my rent, which is high). Failure makes me smile and reflect for a second or two on my long train to a shabby gravestone, whose last stop I can only hope is sometime past 2060.
My book is called "Cocoon Kids" (should I italicize this? who knows) and was totally unexpected to me. I've been writing a book set in Okinawa for the last 6 months, and then these short stories came to me out of nowhere. Or, more truthfully, I'd been whittling them in my spare time over the course of years, and then finally got around to clumping them together one day. Mostly due to the prodding of my girlfriend.
I was obsessed with making the stories perfect. Literary and worthy and memorable and all that jazz. But at some point I had to accept that I am an error-ful young human with a scatterbrained disposition. It will be many years before I am memorable, if I ever become so lucky.
So errors. I'm thankful for them, because they teach my brain useful stuff. Mistakes in plot, pacing, tone, character development, or (gasp) grammar abound in my collection, but that's part of what makes it sort of valuable to me. I'd much rather make a million mistakes in this collection than be writing a PhD dissertation right now (no disrespect to grad students, that is one hell of a hard job).
Anyway, I enjoy making mistakes, and you can too! Slogan.
P.S. Let me know how many mistakes are in this article.
Joe Grammer
No comments have been added yet.
