Ten

Well the writing's been going good and not so good. I've pretty much completed a short memoir-style piece for a class, and I'm happy with that (though not sure if it's any good), but the book project has floundered again, lost in the struggle to find the right format, the right voice, and the right place to start. I've rewritten some old journal entries, and like the diary style, but I'm having a hard time getting the beginning the way I want it. And the beginning is important...

Originally I had the beginning as a chapter describing my arrival in New York. I thought that was okay, if a little pedestrian. Now I'm thinking maybe I should just plunge straight into the action, and start it at some point in the weeks before I left Charlottesville to begin my hitch-hiking odyssey, in the middle of my mad little depression. It was a good time for thinking, and revisiting the past, and I did do a lot of writing then, which would help the authenticity of it...but actually getting down to it, and getting it all straight in my head is where I flounder. I just don't know. This is starting to feel like a very difficult thing.

In other news, though, I turned thirty with the minimum of fuss, and it hasn't really made any difference to my life, or to the way I feel. Maybe because I don't have any regrets about things I didn't do or feel any particular sorrow at saying goodbye to my youth (I mean, it was interesting and all, but not exactly easy, or happy, or settled). No, the only thing I've noticed is a slightly odd sensation inside when someone asks how old I am and the number comes out, and I realise that I can never be twenty-something again. So many things you get a second chance at, but that has gone, gone, gone.