Moving

For the few of you who randomly check in here, I've started a new blog: http://baggageclaimed.tumblr.com/

It's not much different from this one, just less about my day-to-day goings on.

See for yourself.

(You may even recognize these fools in my first post.)

(And please, please keep reading. It's very much appreciated.)

Revamp

It's been a while since I updated, but it's not entirely due to the winter slog or general slack. I'm actually working on a new blog, not much different from this one, just slightly more focused. Or as focused as I can be. As you can see, I'm having a hard enough time trying to be concise with this explanation, which can probably best be summarized by saying: Stay tuned.

Whitened

I've been staring at snow all day.

Why? Because I have a lot of work that needs to get done. And I don't get to stare at snow very often.

What a hammock looks like covered in snow (far right).

Gumption

New York is the land of overachievers.

Case in point: If a New Yorker wants to indulge in mindless entertainment, she'll watch The Daily Show, listen to NPR's "This American Life" and read, well, The New Yorker.

Last night, I caught the finale of Jersey Shore. Then after contemplating picking up a book, I decided instead to watch old episodes of The Real World: Hollywood online. Which prompted me think of my time in LaLaLand (and therefore, make judgmental comparisons between my new home and my former home).

When I lived in LA and used to eavesdrop on coffee shop conversations, I'd usually hear people talk about wanting to produce something, or the possibility of writing a script, or the search for searching for an agent. Sometimes, I'd hear friends compliment each other's headshots.

In New York, I've sat next to a woman who produced Def Poetry Jam, a playwright who's working on her third off-Broadway show, and an editor for a fashion magazine who just got back from France.

In other words, in New York, if you make time (note: not "have" time) to go to a coffee shop in the middle of the day, you're conducting business, not writing blog entries with the hope that a publisher will stumble across said blog entries and give said blogger a book deal.

Bureaucracy

Turns out that writing, recovering, editing and defending a thesis is not enough to earn you the right to say "I turned in my thesis." There is a process, a very specific process, one that involves formatting guidelines and $80 worth of paper, just so three copies of this document will sit in a basement unread for eternity.

While I sloughed through the graduate office's bureaucratic rigmarole, I did manage to find a few "little joys." For example:

1.) I had to come up with a title and abstract for my thesis. I took this to mean I should come up with a catchy title for my memoir and a snappy synopsis for my imaginary book jacket, clever little hooks that will get my non-existent hardcovers to fly off the shelves and on to the NYT Best Seller List. But there was just one problem: Somehow in the four years I thought about writing a memoir, I never gave much thought to what I would call it.

So strapped for time, I went the cheesy route.

In the vain of all the current memoirs on the shelves--Leaving Dirty Jersey: A Crystal Meth Memoir; Same Kind of Different As Me: A Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together; and Going Rogue: An American Life--I was very inclined to use a colon.

Failed ideas:

- Project Runaway: One Woman's Determined Journey to Escape Paradise for the Recklessness of Hollywood

- How to Regret Your Twenties: A Guide to Excessive Drinking and Avoiding Your Mother

- Wah!: A Twentysomething's Refusal to Grow Up

The Winner:

- Under the Covers: A Memoir of Reluctance

(Sadly, this really was the best I could come up within a week.)

2.) In a thesis, anything copyrighted that's quoted or described in detail needs to be cited. I had two things listed on the "Works Cited" page of the most important paper of my academic career:

- Motely Crue. “Girls, Girls, Girls.” Girls, Girls, Girls. Elektra, 1987. MTV. 11 May 1987. Music Video.

- Crane, David, and Marta Kauffman. "The One with the Jam." Friends. NBC. 3 Oct. 1996. Television.

3.) When you turn in your thesis, you get a mug that reads "I just turned in my thesis." No joke. I filled it with beer and took four aspirin.

Catharsis

Yesterday was my mother's birthday. She would have been 65. Yesterday was also the day that I turned in my thesis, much of which is about my mother's death. The day I will defend this thesis is Nov. 3, the day before my mother died seven years ago.

I don't write much about my mom except for the pages upon pages that I write about her nearly every day. That sounds like I'm being smug, but the truth is the more I write about her, the more I feel disconnected to her. My mother has been a character, or more so, an anomaly, for so long, and I, the narrator trying to figure herself out in relation to her mother, that I forget that the real Jessica and the real Sarah weren't some dramedy being played out on the page. I have to write from such a distance that days like yesterday come and go, and for a split second I stop to think "Do I miss her?" and then I shut off. My memory is full of scenes I've written, descriptions that make up my mother's profile--words which serve the greater good of the story I'm trying to tell--that I'm no longer sure what other memories I have of her.

So on this day after her birth, this afterthought of an afterthought, here's something my mother told me over and over again at age 9, age 15 and age 22, something that I didn't include in my thesis. She told me, "All I want for you is to be happy."

I've written lofty statements like "my mother made loneliness seem inevitable" or "to live with her reclusive side, I quickly realized I had to do my own thing," all attempts to explain away my own feelings at a given time. But it's my mother's valued "happiness," the way she cured things with laughter, that has been the real motivator is my life--whether it has taken the form of instant gratification or years of struggle to reach a single moment of pride. I've made mistakes, been slow to learn, acted selfishly, but I've never dwelled in misery. My mother's simple cliche is the greatest influence she's had on me.

Thank you, Mom.

I am.

Smoked

July 4, 2009: The Day The Thesis Died

What followed this somber Fourth of July were a few weeks of hope (some may call it denial) that my 100 pages of well-revised work could be recovered. No such luck. Instead of falling into a self pity stooper, a month later, I had a 134 pages of a very, very rough thesis recreated mostly from memory. Remarkable, you might say, but that initial recreation was nothing compared to the next 16 days of polishing. 

At one point last week, I realized the only words I uttered within a 48-hour period were "coffee refill, please." I became a hermit. I couldn't see straight. My only breaks were to go on runs or to play on the swings at the top of Washington Park. (For anyone who wants their brain to shut off momentarily, I recommend swinging high above a forest of pine trees to Yeah Yeah Yeah's "Maps" blasting in your ears.)

For intermittent mini-releases, I'd go to the bathroom, wash my water glass or walk to the fridge for a slice of cheese. I started to go through a pack and half of gum a day. 

Then I realized the best relief was a no-brainer: cigarettes. Now, I'm not a smoker (although I did dabble in college - I was goth; I smoked cloves at 80s nights). And I didn't walk into the gas station and buy a pack of Marlboro Lights (I told you I wasn't a smoker; I wasn't even cool enough to get American Spirits or Parliaments) thinking it'd be a stress reliever. Honestly. I'm the gal who waits in the bar by herself while everyone goes outside to light up. My theory was that a cigarette provided the perfect 5 to 7 minute break, or "little joy" that I needed to step outside and grab some air, or some polluted air I suppose. Hell, it worked. And it did kinda "feel" good too. Okay, it felt pretty damn good. 

So good I didn't even step outside for this one.

But in the end, I had 150 pages of thesis to turn into my advisor. Tada! 

One draft down, another revision due (and another thesis binge to occur) in the next month. Hooray. 

Update

As much as I love the distraction of blogging, I will be on posting hiatus until mid September. Until then my ass will in be stuck to my chair, or some chair at some coffee shop around Portland, recreating my thesis. Trust me, you wouldn't want to read about anything I'm doing right now. I was excited about a fire alarm the other day. 

Seated

I read a few weeks ago that romance novelist Nora Roberts had just one rule when it came to writing: 

Ass in the chair. 

I completely agree. That is why not much writing gets done in my apartment. 

I cannot sit still. My right hand and the fridge door are like magnets, my bladder seems to pester me constantly, I step out for impromptu jogs and I take hour-long phone calls. The other day, I even hand-washed some winter clothes. 

However, now that I have to rewrite the 100 pages of thesis I lost in the epic hard drive catastrophe (R.I.P. thousands of Word docs, music files and photos), plus the 60 or so more pages I was planning to add, all by mid-September, I have no choice. Ass. Needs. To. Be. In. Chair. 

So today I was up bright and early (5:30 to be exact) and I ran, showered and arrived at the neighborhood coffee shop by 9. (Public spaces guarantee a better Ass In Chair success rate. I'm too self conscious to peruse the cafe's fridge and frequent their bathroom.)

By 11 a.m., so far I have: 

Eaten: 1 bran muffin (could give me an excuse to get up and use the bathroom later)

Drank: 1 pot of green tea 

Chewed: 4 pieces of gum

Emailed: 2 people

Texted: 2 people

Commented on: 3 photos and 2 walls on Facebook

Searched for: 2 story ideas and the PSU fall class schedule to see if I really can graduate next term, because if not, why am putting myself through this torture

Written: 2 pages of thesis and one blog post

Updates to come.

UPDATE: 1:47 p.m.

Eaten: 1 weird, package of tofu crab cake thingies

Drank: 1/2 a large iced coffee

Commented on: 1 FB post

Emailed: 1 story idea to editor

Texted: 3 people (apparently everyone likes distraction on Fridays)

Breaked for bathroom: 2 times (and no, it has nothing to do with the bran muffin, in case your wondering)

Written: 5 pages of thesis (lots of blanks to fill in, but hey, pages are pages) 

UPDATE: 4 p.m.

Eaten: 1 peanut butter chocolate chip cookie with sea salt (sweet + salty = bliss)

Drank: last 1/2 of large iced coffee

Written: 7 pages of thesis (I do best at deadlines; I wrote five of those jibberish-filled pages in the last hour, knowing I gotta leave for work at 5)

Effed off on: 1 laptop application - Photo booth 

What too much caffeine looks like. 

What the best tasting cookie in the world looks like.

Perspective

Perspective is what I'm trying to get after the crashing of my physical, emotional, and dare I say, spiritual world (and after writing that highly dramatic statement).

Three days ago, my hard drive went kaput. It took with it 100 pages of thesis and whatever other pages upon pages of writing I've never thought to back up or email to anyone. (The wound is too fresh to get past this first thing to start doing a head count.)

I could bitch about this for an entire post, like I have to friends and family, but the truth is, I can't do anything about it. (Plus I'm numb and still in shock. I'm sure I'll eventually hit some uglier stage of grief.)

But what I did notice while sulking around the city the other day was a bevy of good deeds going on all around me, things I never see (not just never notice) on regular basis here in New York. For instance,

* A woman who offered to, not was asked to, help another woman carry her baby stroller up the crowded subway stairs. The mother couldn't speak English, so the woman just picked up one end of the stroller and began walking.

* Passengers digging in their purses and their pockets as a bone-thin blind woman pushed her walker and held out a knitted hat as she sang a gospel song. I have never seen more than one person per train car give a handout before. Five did that day.

I can't say witnessing others worse off than me or seeing humans take care of each other has abolished all remnants of self pity, but it has made me rethink how I could wrap up my entire identity and sense of usefulness in one compact machine.

Peep

Yesterday, I was sitting at my computer, actually getting some work done on my thesis (no joke) when one of my best friends in LA sent me a text:

"Crazy!!! Did you hear Michael Jackson died!"

I screamed out to my roommate, "Holy shit Michael Jackson's dead!"

Gasps and utterances about Billie Jean and needing to get a drink ensued, while we texted friends like chain mail and scrambled back to our computers to Google for more details. Oddly, only one source said Jacko was a dead man: TMZ. It'd be another 45 minutes before LA Times would confirm his death.

Although the celeb gossip site is no CNN or the New York Times, I knew I could trust it, much like I knew I could trust my friend. Why? They are both based out of LA; they are both linked to Twitter. (Side note: I used to work for a newswire service in LA that got most of their best tips from TMZ.)

No longer do the paparazzi have to bribe paramedic insiders and ER nurses. Now, thanks to Twitter, hospital staff can be news-bearing glory hogs themselves! At first I thought it was weird that tens of thousands of obsessive Twittering phone junkies and faceless cubicle heads can know when tragedy strikes strangers (I can think of three plane crashes earlier this year) before these strangers' loved ones do. But then in the case of MJ I realized: Do his parents, or his plastic siblings, or his nephews named Jermajesty, count as loved ones? I think it was more fitting that fans were the first to find out.

Newspapers are caving, magazines are shrinking. No one wants to print words anymore and no one wants to pay anyone to report and relay them either. (Trust me. I know.) So I joined the town crier of the 21st century last night. (Okay, I joined Twitter months ago but didn't do a damn thing with it. I thought of it as another distractionary extension of Facebook but for the worst type of narcissist and compulsive status updater. But then I realized most of those over-updating moms still haven't caught on to tweeting yet. And even if they do, I don't have to feel bad about not following them.) I even added a link to the left of the blog. (Warning: I'm still standing on the outside of the playground waiting to jump in.)

Oh well, there goes all that thesis momentum I was building.

Studs

The other night I went to a reading by two of my favorite writers.  Although I didn't recognize Nick Flynn at first, I should've. Not just because I study bios on the back of book jackets (and then Google authors to find out juicy personal information like said author dating Lili Taylor), but because of the obvious self-deprecating swagger of a lit star. This is not to be confused with the bravado of a rock star or the good looking cockiness of a movie star, but instead, the insecurity worn on the sleeve of every writer, that coupled with some sort of acclaim or success, can be used as a means to get laid.  

Nick Flynn and Chuck Klosterman (the other aforementioned writer/reader of the night) are talented writers; they have a way with words. The self they write about in their poem/essay/memoirs--the Flynn/Klosterman character--is often a fuckup. He's bumbling through life like the rest of us and he isn't too sure of himself. But the man who is telling this story--the writer--delivers his flaws with an honest, complicated self-awareness. Striking a delicate balance between the character's struggle to arrive at some sort of insight and the smooth writing that gets the reader to arrive there with them. 

Again, this is talent, and therefore to a writer like myself, this is hot. But I think most women over the age of thirty would find self discovery in general attractive. (He's in touch with himself but he isn't a sap! He's a mess but I don't have to fix him!) Flynn is more this type of writer. Although Klosterman isn't as skilled with language (Flynn is a poet first; Klosterman a journalist), he is better with persuasion. You'll follow Klosterman's arguments and exploratories because he appeals to your common sense and common generational experience. (Is Bono for real of full of shit? People like bad television because it's reassuring; no one cares if it's interesting.) 

The subtle discrepancies between these two lit stars were exemplified in how they entered and where they sat at the bar Wednesday night. Klosterman looked like the caricature on his book jacket (a blond male version of Velma from Scooby Doo). He was parked on the first bar stool closest to the entrance--the place where you had to order your drinks. By the time I did a double take, a petite brunette was in his face praising all of his books. A steady stream of above average looking, modestly-built brunettes continued to come up to him until the reading started. (A friend who once went to a Tin House writers conference said all the established writers there had brunette girlfriends who were in their late twenties/early thirties. I suppose smart girls, or lit groupies,  have dark hair and a few years on them, and why I was here instead of say, backstage at a Bret Michaels concert.)

Flynn on the other hand, showed up five minutes before the show started, which was technically ten minutes late, and headed for the corner of the stage, actually my bar stool while I was in the bathroom. (I felt like a douchebag when I realized this after he took the stage, but not before shooting him a contemptuous smirk when he made some comment about my friend letting him keep my seat warm or whatnot.) Flynn had a more stereotypical I'm-of-the-new-generation-of-irreverent-but-acclaimed-literati look about him. Mid forties, casual buttoned-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Wavy hair, a little too long and greasy. A loner, who'd probably really would prefer to talk to absolutely no one, but has learned how to turn snark into wit over years.

I could go on to describe the reading itself. But it was what it was: self conscious disclaimers, followed by verbalized prose and a plug for their work that'll be coming out in the fall. 

Instead, I'll skip to the part after the show, when girls continued to come up and ask them to sign their books. The writers stayed and chitchatted for a bit but then they disappeared before a band closed out the evening. Which was surprising to me because I thought a seasoned writer didn't know when to leave a bar. Hmph. 

Noise

Noise comes up a lot in my writing. I seek loud, musical, buzzing distraction when I want to escape my own head; I absorb sensational disturbances to mask internal ones. For instance, I often put on my iPod to walk three blocks to a boisterous bar because I've been sitting at my desk all day, struggling to admit on the page that I've turned into my mother.

One of the things that's always attracted me to New York is, in fact, noise. But unlike the pretentious noise I succumbed to when I lived in LA--paparazzi flash, celebrity buzz, the jingle of keys given to the valet--NY noise has always seemed more authentic. I romanticized the notion that because one was surrounded by Manhattan's constant chaos--umbrellas clashing down Lexington, the stress of honking cabs, men muttering various languages in front of bodegas--one couldn't help but be aware, alive even, especially as a newcomer. In the only U.S. city that matters, every moment would be The Moment. 

Now that I'm here (okay, I'm only one week in), I have yet to concede my romantic delusions of NY, but now I believe that sometimes noise is just that. Noise.

There's one place I've grown accustomed to quiet--my home. It's my refuge. Currently, I'm staying in a loft where the JMZ trains run one story above me and the tracks block the view of my living room window. 

My view

Alright, so the cheesy part of me loves the sound of trains rushing by every four minutes. ("I am so in NY!" this cheesy part of me boasts.) But I'm also right at a train stop, convenient for traveling, but inconvenient for sleeping. Screeching tires and the recorded voice of "You are on the westbound J train. The next stop is Marcy Avenue. Watch for the closing doors, please," are constants. Although I do admit, it does get a little meditative after awhile.

In a converted loft (under the train in Brooklyn), conversions are made cheaply. I'm convinced that not only the walls in my apartment are made of plywood but so are the walls in the entire building. Apparently one neighbor has a drum set and the another just likes to play Rock Band. On one side of my bedroom wall, my neighbors always seem to either be chatting or cooking bacon, and on the other, I can hear my roommate punching the buttons on her Blackberry, which means that I can also hear every sigh she breathes into the phone and vice versa. Last night, as I lay in bed trying to read (yup, I was home and actually reading), my two roommates had a rant session about their exes after one walked through the door at midnight. "I hate her so much. If she comes back here, I will beat her," one says of the other's ex-girlfriend. About her own failed relationship she adds, "I'm realizing I can be without him. I'm working on my support system. [Phone rings.] Oh wait, I gotta take this. So-and-so just sent me this link on Facebook and maybe I can get into such-and-such for free on Friday."

Nothing against my temporary roommates; they are actually very sweet and accommodating. And living with them here in this apartment is very New York, or very young New York--in a large building with affordable rent in a hip area, surrounded by the sounds of all night partying and trains letting people off at 5 a.m. But my current living situation also serves as a reminder that I'm glad I'm no longer 25. 

Me at 25. Yikes.

Block

Someone once told me that if you want to be a writer then do what writers do: Writers write. Sound, simple advice. And a complete utter lie. 

Tell a writer that he has the entire day free to write, and he'll spend most of his day finding a way not to. There's a guy here at VSC who purposely packed 50 unsharpened pencils and no pencil sharpener to give himself some mundane, non-writing chore (like seeking out a pencil sharpener). Surely, there are regimented, devoted writers out there who wake up, make themselves a cup of Earl Grey and churn out 20 pages from their their antique mahogany desk and ergonomic chair, but most writers I know agonize and torture themselves about why they aren't writing AT THIS VERY MOMENT. Which makes them not only not write at this very moment, but also the next moment because the agonizing has now perpetuated. We are an anxious, neurotic breed.  

In the last few weeks I've had to adapt my "writing process" to my new studio. These are my five favorite activities to do when I stumble:

1. Chew a lot of gum. Someone came into my studio and commented that it smelled minty. That's because there's 45 pieces of wadded spearmint gum in my trash can.

Not staged.

2. Click on Facebook. I'm too anxious to do any full blown stalking, like hunting down an old coworker I had a dream about last night. I usually just run through the updates and read what the same three people are doing every hour, three people I barely cared about in high school and care even less about now. Because I don't want to appear to be one of these people with too much time on my hands,  I rarely post any of my own updates. Well, with the exception of my last post: 

Jessica Machado is blocked. And needs to be blocked from FB so this block has a chance of being overcome. 

3. Consume multiple beverages. This is the way my mind correlates my thirst to my productivity: I can't start writing without an 16-ounce americano to the right of my computer. (See trash can pic.) But I also need water to hydrate. Hydration is important to balancing my physical and mental state. Okay, my americano is now gone but I still can't concentrate. I need more caffeine. Maybe I should take a walk to the dining hall and get a soda. (This usually leads to me running into someone and the both of us making a 10 minute conversation out of "Procrastinating too? I wonder what's for lunch? Smells like curry.")

4. Take naps. I feel sort of guilty about premeditated nap-taking so instead I sit in my chair and "read." 

After the first time I did this and dozed, I decided to prepare a little better.  

Creative footrest.

Today, I stopped fooling myself and threw the seat cushion on the carpet. 

My senile writer neighbor, thinking my studio was his, opened my door by accident today while I was "reading." Lord knows what he thought when he saw my feet on the floor through the cracked door. 

5. Blog. Blog about being blocked. Keep typing so minutes will go by. Keep my fingers moving so it will feel like I'm doing something productive and more minutes will pass and this block will disappear, or it will seem like a decent enough hour to retire for the night. Like 10:36 p.m. Hit "publish post."

Identity

Bare with me as I take a moment to reveal myself as a pretentious MFA student.

I went to a craft talk this morning with our visiting poet, Rosanna Warren. Although I know nothing about an iamb or a couplet, she said some pretty interesting things about art in general. One of them being how we now live in this confessional culture, where we believe people should care about everything we think or say, but how these rants and ramblings (and ahem, blogs) don't necessarily make Art. And while I'm sure there are bloggers and YouTubers out there who could rattle off numerous arguments about what constitutes art (and have done so many, many times because this argument is not new), this one point is indisputable: Not everything we say or do is worth reading or listening to. 

To paraphrase Warren, art has to start with truthfulness, but we don't know why those truths should matter until we create a story. 

Here's a few lines from the poem "Symptoms" by Robert Lowell. While I'm no poetry scholar, I'm convinced that the man can turn confession into art by using honesty and imagery (the physical contradictions of dolphins) to describe his struggle with manic depression:

I feel my old infection, it comes once yearly:

lowered good humor, then an ominous 

rise of irritable enthusiasm....

Three dolphins bear our little toilet-stand,

the grin of the eyes rebukes the scowl of the lips,

they are crazy with the thirst. I soak,

examining and then examining

what I really have against myself. 

Writing careful, poignant lines like these is a lifetime aspiration and a daily challenge. It's the reason why I write. 

So to defend what I'm doing at this very moment, all I can say is I'm not sure what I'm doing. Right now, the blog's serving as a travel log, my test run at this whole blogging thing. While I'd like to focus it on words, beautiful words, meaningful words, other people's words, humorous words, relatable words, not-taking-myself-too-seriously words, for now, it's the gray area between a journal entry, or maybe a conversation, and something slightly more composed, or just edited more closely. But it's definitely not Art. You can't rush discovery. 

** (Rereading this last paragraph now, nothing sounds more confessional, or skitzophrenic,  than all that rambling. Sorry.)

Affirmations

What I've learned in the last 24 hours (i.e. universal truths)...

Writers are: 

1. Spacey. Standing outside of a locked building in 30-degree weather, only one in 12 writers remembers that each of us has a key to get inside. 

2. Self defeatists. During introductions, sentiments include, "My genre is poetry, but really, I write emails" and "I stopped keeping a journal because I realized I've consistently learned nothing since 1983."

3. Drunks. After self-defeating statements are uttered, someone mentions that we'll probably all be seeing each other at the town bar by night two. At breakfast the next morning, this is mentioned again.

4. Procrastinators. In a residency of 38 visual artists and 12 writers, the only table left once breakfast is over is a four-top of writers brainstorming ways to remember writing down ideas. 

5. Defiant. During orientation, the tour guide tells us that the nearby hiking trails are muddy and pretty much off limits until about June. Another writer and I question what "off limits" means and what shoes would be appropriate if these trails were hypothetically not off limits. 

6. Indiscreet shit talkers. As soon as this other writer and I walk away from orientation, we moan about forbidden hiking and plot how we will not write, but instead, head up to the mountain later. Only just before noticing the orientation guide is right beside us.  

Why

I've contemplated this blogging thing for a while. Friends say, "You're a writer, why don't you blog?" or better yet, "Why don't you blog, pull some ads and make some money?" I hesitated. I had internal discourses about lacking a niche and creating something of literary value, or running out of clever things to say, or sounding too contrived, or being even more narcissistic than I already am. Then I arrived in Vermont.

It is here on my first day of my writer's residency in the woods of Johnson, Vermont, that I decided to give this blogging thing a go. Here, where I am supposed to focus on writing my thesis for the next month, frantically examining, reexamining, writing and rewriting about myself, yes here, in the most pretentious of literary settings (a writer's colony in my own private studio named after Jane Austin), this is where I decided I will write about myself some more and then I will post it for the reading pleasure of everyone I think loves me or is interested. Better yet, I'll write about how I'll be doing nothing but writing. No niche, pure narcissism. 

Enjoy. Or rip on me. I like banter.