I have led a day of outwardly-directed, list-clearing virtue: I exercised, ran my first tutorial (orientation) for a webmistress to replace me on our synod Presbyterian Women website, lunched at a new restaurant with my TWO lovely daughters—A is spending her vacation/long weekend with us—got acupunctured, spent more-but-fruitful time chasing the difficulties my file restoration is having. (No, it’s not finished yet. Yes, even though the face of the application implies it’s stalled, it’s actually bringing down files like the dickens… and now I know how to secretly track that.)

I’m about to run off again, too. It’s not a day for reflection. But exigencies must, and I ate supper alone to accommodate them. Which meant I got to begin Steering the Craft!

I lovelovelove LeGuin’s writing. I mean,

“I offered the course because I’d been meeting a good many workshop writers who were afraid of semicolons and didn’t know a Point of View from a Scenic Vista.” (p.ix)

<snicker, snicker>

So instead of my thoughts tonight, I’ll leave you with a few more of hers.

“But I’d like to say here that one can attend many writing workshops and be a member of many peer groups and yet get no closer to finding one’s own voice as a writer than one might do working alone in silence.

[…] Ultimately you write alone. And ultimately you and you alone can judge your work. The judgement that a work is complete—this is what I meant to do, and I stand by it—can come only from the writer, and it can be made rightly only by a writer who’s learned to read her own work.” (p. x)

In that, there are no shortcuts.