Dear Reader (and Listener), I’m getting sloppy!  In my haste to extricate myself from the insanity of social media, I’ve neglected to provide proper care and feeding of my blog.  You know, posting without setting the appropriate categories and tags.   Such is the distracted mind.  Next I’ll be forgetting to cross my t’s and dot my i’s.

Adding to my distraction is this song that I had not heard in decades until last week when it aired on a local radio station.  Definitely a good song to calm my usual commute anxiety.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QexOuH8GS-Y

Interestingly (or not), a few weeks ago my husband purchased a greatest hits CD of The Kinks.  One of the cuts:  Victoria, the opening of which we thought sounded a lot like Canned Heat‘s On the Road Again.  Have a listen, and let me know if our aging brains were just conflating old musical memories.

As always, thank you for reading and listening.  I’m still feeling a bit adrift with my writing, hence all the music.  Recently, I had an odd experience with a short story I wrote about 23 years ago.  It’s one that I’m particularly fond of which I suppose is dangerous.  The experience was this:  I found a scanned copy of the story, printed it out and read with an eye to revising and submitting it to some journal.  With that almost pristine read (it having been 20-some years since I last read it), I found myself moved almost to tears by my own writing.  A few weeks go by and I finally get around to typing up the story so I can revise and polish it.  As I typed, my stomach flipped and my heart sunk further with every paragraph.  “What a piece of sh_t” was the steady refrain in my brain.

Now I know we writers can be our own worst critics.  If I had listened to my inner critic, I would not have this blog, I would not be making any claim to being a writer.  But how disappointing to go from feeling really good about a story written so long ago all the way to feeling disgusted by it.  I wonder if it’s more the intention to publish that makes me so critical.  Meaning, if I had only wanted to keep the story for my own personal reading pleasure, a memento of my floundering graduate student days, then I would continue to love it.

This has nothing to do with Canned Heat or The Kinks, but if you’ve read this far, please share your take on this experience.  Have you gone through the same flip-flop with your own writing?  What did you do, if anything?  I won’t give up on this particular story.  But I’d like to be able to stomach the revision process.