lost

Earlier this afternoon I opened up a blogger window and, with a few minutes to kill before my first class, started writing a blog about the first day of the new quarter--feeling nervous. why? excited. good. loving my syllabi, good, good. Wondering how I'll get through another ten weeks of class before summer.

Somehow the blog shifted, though, into a meditation on the end of the school year and what that had been like as an undergrad at byu, and before I knew it I had written a kind of cool meditation on mormon marriage, temples, and May weddings. I had to go teach, so I tried to save it as a draft, but blogger was experiencing a system problem and so I lost it.

While I'm sad that I lost it, and think I might try to go back and recapture what I wrote (though now I have to prepare for my afternoon class) I'm stuck in a kind of meta-moment, thinking not so much about what I wrote as about the process of writing. I feel like I have novels and novels and novels inside of me--I can feel the texture of my writing voice, can feel how a novel of mine would be paced, what its sentences and breaths and paragraph spaces would look and sound like. But, like most people, I guess, I have a lot of anxiety, or dread, around the scene of writing. I'm constantly narrativizing and planning what I'd write, but can't imagine having the gumption to actually sit down and write it. So an hour like my lost one today, where I sit down to write something relatively straightforward, even newsy, and end up unrolling a story, surprises me.

Okay. Gotta eat my lunch and plan for class. Gotta get out of the way while the window washers take over my office.