A while ago I submitted a paper on what it’s like to be taught transgressive literature as a creative writing student to an external creative writing resource pool  I got it back from peer review today, and it turns out that academics can be incredibly cutting when they want to be and it’s totally anonymous.  I got warned that they didn’t pull their punches, but this guy seemed out to destroy me.  ‘Fuck off’ doesn’t really strike me as constructive criticism anyway, but hey ho.  We live and learn.  In a few months I’ll have the stones to read it all through properly and start redrafting it.  Then, I’ll send it again.  If and when it gets accepted, it’ll be a damn huge accomplishment that I’ll know I’ve earned.

It’s just been a couple of really bad weeks, and though I was anticipating a rejection, this was an awful lot worse than I was expecting, which has sort of been the icing on the cake. My card got cloned and my money spent in Dubai, so I’ve had no access to my account for over a week, which has been awkward.  More information has come out about just how badly my cousin bullid my brother when they were working together (who takes the piss out of an autistic guy in front of his workmates, really?).  Worst, though, was the box that I’d been containing my grandfather’s illness in cracked apart somewhere.

I’ve had it comfortably boxed for the last year that the Alzheimer’s was making him a bit forgetful and repetitve.  He shaved eight or nine times a morning and didn’t know who we all were sometimes.  It was shitty but I could deal with it.  Recently though, he’s begun doing things that are just undeniably ‘mad’, and this is only the beginning.  It’s going to get worse, and there’s nothing any of the family can do about it aside from support eachother.

Hurt like this is ultimately good for the soul, though.  Everyone creative who was any good got their hearts broken at least once.  When you’re happy, you tend to take everything with an aura off frivolity.  When you’re somber, you see things in a sharp, cool light.

Hey ho, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and part of writing is getting hefty criticism.  So, nevermind.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 1:20 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.