Guilty.
I wrote bad poetry until my poetry was published by a publisher of bad poetry. Then I was too humiliated that my heart-wrenching poems were enclosed in the same volume as this stellar work:
There once was a mouse.
He saw some cheese.
He went for the cheese.
But it was a trap.
There is no longer a mouse.
In college, when I was president of the English honor society, I organized Bad Poetry Readings. If you showed up with none of your own bad poetry, I would hand out that collection and have each person find an equally bad poem to read for the group. I haven’t written poetry (too) seriously since.
A few years ago, when I was gainfully and woefully underemployed, I too participated in a “write a novel in a month” program. My novel remains unfinished–like much of my life–as I do actually concentrate on finishing the Ph.D.
Perhaps Dr. Skajlab will revisit that writing project at a later date, perhaps when tenure is not looming quite so large overhead. Perhaps retirement. Perhaps when Wendy Faris reads the last sentence of À la recherche du temps perdu I’ll be walking to the post office with my manuscript in a brown paper envelope to send it to a respected and reputable publisher of fine letters. Perhaps.
Until then I have much work to do on my dissertation. And all those writing assignments for my last semester of coursework. And articles to submit for publication in peer-reviewed journals. So it looks like I’ll be able to delay and postpone the fear that I’m really a shitty novelist for years.
Until then, I’ll just focus on the fact that I’m a pretty shitty blog writer.