Writing: easy. Revising, on the other hand....

I'm calling a halt to the writing earlier than I planned today. I worked on two essays, and I got both to the place where I need to let them simmer unattended for a while before I go back to revise.

And revision is a bitch.

One of the things that's great about this blog is that I stopped revising my posts eons ago, so I can simply blather unchecked, fling the result up online, and saunter off into the night. Anything I intend to publish, however--even "self" publishing on Medium, which is my, ahem, medium of choice for my essays these days--needs more careful consideration and reworking.

Both the essays I'm working on are tending to wander off focus (one more than the other). I know what I want to say, but I'm not sure what I want to say about it, if that makes sense. In other words, I suppose, topic: clear; thesis: not.

The one that wanders off focus was prompted by the suggested readings in the digest I get from Medium each week. It's been a long while since I've found an article that I think is worth reading, in part because so many of the articles are profound insights and worldly wisdom proffered by kids in diapers, metaphorically speaking. I'm sorry, Toots, but if you're only 40, you still don't know enough for me to feel like you've got wisdom worth my time to read.

I grant (and I say in the draft of my essay) that some young people are inordinately wise, and some older people are noticeably lacking in anything that could be called "wisdom": age is not the clear defining attribute of a person capable of wisdom or insight. But when someone has been in a relationship for five years and writes about how to keep a relationship going for "the long term," or has been working as a counselor for ten years and professes to know all about the human condition, I snort in derision. Talk to me when you've been in your relationship for 40 years, or you've been a therapist for 30--and when you  yourself have a few more miles on your internal odometer.

It's a strange corollary to our youth-oriented culture. We simultaneously get offered pearls of wisdom from youngsters who just haven't been slapped around enough by the world to know much and we're told that "age is just a number"--which on the surface means "you don't have to stop doing awesome and amazing things just because of the number of years you've been on the planet" but which really means "Isn't it astonishing that old people still do things?"

And of course, the people who are lauded for doing things that prove that "age is just a number" are doing things that would be rather remarkable at almost any age--or who simply keep their bodies in good enough shape that they can perform like younger bodies.

What I really want to write about is the fact that just by existing and being alert and open to the world for more decades, we actually acquire something worth acquiring. It may not be wisdom, but it's a kind of perspective that has merit. I'd like those young whippersnappers to acknowledge that fact.

I suspect I was every bit as insufferable about things when I was younger, believing that I was the first person in the history of the species to discover love, or heartache, or humiliation, or what have you. But I remember watching a video of Jay Leno's "Fruitcake Lady" (a prickly woman of a certain age) being asked questions about sex, theoretically to hilarious results--because an old woman talking frankly about sex! How completely side-splittingly funny! And I was furious about her being held up as an object of fun. She's been through more than you young idiots laughing at her can imagine. And I bet you anything you like that sex isn't something from her dusty, ancient past but a present part of her life.

I also was furious with a friend who saw an older couple who clearly very much loved each other and referred to them as "cute." She said I wouldn't be angry if I knew what she meant by it, but the word "cute" has a specific meaning, dammit, and it is not respectful. It's entirely possible those two people were newly together, too: theirs may not have been a relationship that began in their youth. But either way--fiftieth anniversary or first--the fact that they love each other when they are old and grey and wrinkled is not "cute."

Growf, rowr, bazz-fazz.

But you see, I can riff and rant about it here because here I can just riff and rant: I don't have to make a point, or come to a conclusion, or even say anything clearly or persuasively. That blather above is not publishable as anything other than a blog rant. And turning the rant into a shaped, formed, focused, compelling essay is a whole different ball of wax.

Shifting gears.

I have also once again dipped my toes into the water of trying to get some of my stories published. My mother, god love her, shares with me all sorts of things that are more interesting to her than they are to me, but she inadvertently includes the occasional gem, and recently she let me know about a seasonal story contest held by The Masters Review, and in looking into that, I saw that they also have rolling, open submissions. (The contests have an entry fee; the rolling submissions do not.) They're based in Portland, Oregon, and are a self-described "platform for emerging writers"--which (despite my age) I am, as I've published so little. (That applies to my scholarship too, relatively speaking, but I'm talking specifically about my creative works: so far, one poem and one short story. Bring on the confetti canons.) I essentially threw a dart and sent one story to their fall contest, one to their open submissions, and now I get to wait until February or so to hear their decision.

But I also have a list of other literary journals (which I raided from one of my former colleagues), and one of my plans for the forthcoming days/weeks is to select another story or two, and a journal or two (randomly selected) to which I will submit them.

I've decided I won't predetermine what writing I'll do each day; I think it's sufficient that I'm going to do something each day (with the possible exception of the weekends, but who knows: when I was working on the student guide over my sabbatical, I often found myself working on the weekends as well as during the week--just because something would be on my mind and needed to be externalized in written language somewhere).

So, that's today's news. Tomorrow I have a late afternoon date with my sister, so I may not get a moment in which to post to the blog, but I'll do my dangdest. If I write nothing else, at least I can squeeze words out onto this platform.