Signs

My mom just emailed me telling me she can't wait for my first novel after reading my last post (which, JJ, why after that last post? It was, like the middle of most novels, angst-y and self righteous) so I guess this is an opportune moment as any to discuss my writing in Rome.

I've known I've wanted to be a writer for a while, but I pinpoint the moment when I realized I was made for writing at sometime between the ages of 0 and 3 when I first though I was the dog Pongo from 101 Dalmatians (side note, someone on my block has a pet Dalmatian and I get all excited when I see it hen I'm walking to class). If you're reading this then you know the story but looking back on my formative years when I though I was a dog a few years ago I realized than if I could build this entire fantasy world for myself to inhabit when I was hardly forming complete sentences maybe I could somehow make other people believe in worlds I made with words.

Plus I really just enjoy words. "Perhaps" is my favorite, followed closely by "lovely". Then "Rhizome" (read A Thousand Plateaus for information on the last one then you'll love it too).

I write all the time. I scribble down bits of conversations I hear on the streets (bring in Rome makes this part more difficult as everything is in Italian, but sometimes the English I do hear makes for wonderful banter), quotes on the walls at museumes, sometimes just words I like the feel of.

But mostly I write to keep myself sane. Running is the other way I keep my brain from going too crazy but running here is harder than it is at home so writing is all I have.

Besides this blog I have a class journal I keep, my handwritten stuff, letters, email, facebook correspondences along with my usual bits of whatever I'm working in my folder labeled "Stuff that needs to be made better" which is not to be confused with my "Stuff that's been made better but still kinda sucks" and "Someone actually decided to published stuff that should have never seen the light of day" folder.

But really, I don't feel like I much writing here. Which is weird because I also feel like I spend more time chronicling this experience than any other time in my life besides NaNoWriMo of 2009. And when I do write it's specifically designed for someone, for my professor, for all of my ardent readers here, for the AmLit people. Which is unfortunate, because this city has so much to offer in the realm of storytelling. Rome is just incredibly interesting.

One of my personal exercises, especially when I have "The Block", is to make up back-stories for random people I see. People on the metro, professors scurrying to class, my cab driver, the guy playing first violin at the Kennedy Center, no one is safe from my tendency to play god and give who are probably decent, good people some sort of horrible and tragic life story that inevitably either begins or ends with someone close to them dying in some tragic way.

Tonight my upstairs neighbors got into what I presume was a fight involving several other people and several dining room chairs that were thrown at the floor. At least that's what it sounded like. Lots of yelling. And what sounded like wood splintering. Which is usually such great fiction fodder but, alas, I am writing this because I don't want to work on my two presentations for International Business tomorrow and I don't want to write in my class journal. Writing to procrastinate writing. Talk about meta.

Moral of the story is if I don't get at least a dozen good plots out of this trip it will have been a total waste.

ALSO I think I'm going to make bagels on Friday. Then off to Assisi this on Saturday with Abby to go really make my Ancestors Proud.