The next three days are going to be trying. Like I said yesterday, I will have three exams, one per day, for three days. Plus that story for my Creative Writing class.

Luckily, after that, things let up, and at the end of it all, there will be a prize : VancouFur.

That’s the local furry convention, and I always go. I can’t even imagine missing it. I always have a great time, and I get to see some of the local furries from Back In The Day that I never see otherwise. And it’s lovely to spend four days (this one starts on Thursday) in a place where all us wacky and adorable furry types get to be ourselves and form a little temporary community of our own.

Speaking of furry communities, I am wishing I had some form of recognition for having founded the local furry community way back in the early 2000s. I was the one who started it all by starting the mailing list that formed the social hub for us local fuzzies to communicate with one another and via which I could organize events.

From there, I lead the group, got the monthly furmeets going, then later added the monthly furry dinnermeets where we could all go out to eat together. I ran that community for about five years before the events got too big and crowded for my anxieties, and I had to bow out and let someone else take over.

And that’s the reason there is a local furry community to support the foundation and running of convention in the first place, he insisted grumpily.

I didn’t worry about recognition for all the years since then because I was not mentally healthy enough to care. But now I do care because I am trying to build a stable core of self-worth and upon that some kind of deep and positive sense of self, and I need all the bricks and mortar I can get in order to do so.

And I don’t exactly have a lot of accomplishments to draw on for that, ya know?

Oh well. I guess founders are often forgotten. The local community has had a lot of turnover since I left it, and there’s barely anyone who has even heard of me left. As far as they know, the local community has always been there. They weren’t in it when it was founded and we were all just getting to know each other. When it was me and like six other local furs. They weren’t there for that first furmeet at the Cactus Club across the street from Metrotown, when I was so anxious about the whole thing that it was like a highly unpleasant drug trip.

I wonder if I should warn my lawyer about the bats.

I have to admit, I am a little nostalgic for those days. Not for the desperate financial situation, but for the community when it was small and manageable and I could go to a furmeet and have a grand old time without my background anxiety rising like the mercury in a thermometer until all I could do was hide out on the balcony until it was over.

I feel anxious just thinking about it. Sad face.

My leadership style was quite laissez-faire, as befits my laid back personality. I firmly believe that communities will grow organically and healthfully if you just provide the framework of organization and leadership for it to grow on, and then tend it carefully and lovingly.

So I only intervened to solve disputes and to decide things that needed deciding. My biggest concern was to make sure that the community stayed open and accepting. When a new person joined the community, my policy was to welcome them into the community at their first furmeet, then leave them alone to find their own space. I had great faith in the community’s ability to draw people in with its happy and accepting vibe, and watched as it worked its magic over and over again.

Someone would come in very shy, defensive, and anxious, and they would be pretty freaked out at first. Maybe their social skills were a tad underdeveloped. I could relate. But over time, they would come to realized they were safe here, and free to join in with the other kids on the playground without fear of bullying or rejection.

And the next thing you know, they are socially blossoming right before my eyes, going from shy and anxious to happy and free and relaxed.

Words cannot possibly describe how proud and pleased I am to have been able to provide that for people. Sometimes, the only way to get what you want is to make it happen yourself, and what I made was the exact kind of community that I had always longer for myself.

And in doing so, rescued a lot of other people in the same situation. Isn’t that amazing? That’s how the world should work, in my honest opinion. Positives building on positives, growing full and strong, until it can make it on its own in the world and doesn’t need you any more.

It’s a lot like raising a child, really. And I am proud of my baby, I really am.

I just wish he’d call home now and then.

All this is going to lead to me rejoining the local community, I think. I will have to choose my events carefully based on social density, so there probably won’t be a lot of regular furmeets in my future unless someone who has a really big place has decided to host.

But if there are smaller events, I could do those. William told me there are furry movie nights, and that might work if the space to attendance ratio is acceptable. And of course, meeting at a restaurant for a chat n’ dine type meeting is fine by my.

Of course, that doesn’t deal with one other problem :

Everyone will be so young!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Thanks to faithful reader and all around groovy guy William “spuug” Graham, I now understand syntax diagramming.

Turns out, it actually is linear. You just have to identify the smallest elements of a sentence first (the words and their part of speech, or ‘word class”) then from there look for the smallest phrases that follow the phrase rules for English, then those elements form bigger elements, and eventually, you get to the basic formula for any English sentence, and then you’re done.

Why my professor couldn’t explain it like that I will never know. Perhaps our cognitive styles are just too disparate. And there’s an enormous emotional issue to deal with. As much as I like her, she’s still the authority figure, and I am still the sometimes too smart for his own good student who does not have a history of reacting well to frustration, and I went to crazytown over this business pretty much immediately, which makes it kind of hard to learn.

So she may have explained it to us in exactly that way and I was too messed up emotionally to understand or absorb it. I am relaxed with William, and he had the time and patience to explain it to me in a way that I could understand.

That means the world to me, dear. More than you can ever know. In my life, very few people have been willing to hang in there with me and teach me things I don’t understand and, most importantly, to stick with me till I get it.

So now I stand a fairly good chance of passing that Linguistics exam I have been dreading. Tuesday night, I shall walk into that room and give it my all and, hopefully, pass.

I might even get a C!

This upcoming week is really gonna be a bitch. I have three exams in as many days, plus a short story due on Tuesday (you saw the rough draft here) which needs a major overhaul if it is to be any good at all.

I mean, it’s a rough draft, and as such, it accomplished what it was supposed to do, which was to allow me to get all my ideas about the story out of my head and into text so I can think about the larger issues. I am not at all happy with the pacing of the story as it is right now, and the Ancient Caterpillar’s anger at the Crooked Giant feels like it comes out of nowhere, and overall, the whole thing seems lumpy and unbalanced.

So it’s time to polish that prose! I am actually looking forward to it. Unlike every other time, I was thinking about the editing stage before I even finished the rough draft. I would slap stuff into the rough draft thinking “that’s not great… I will have to fix that when I edit. ” and after that, I started thinking about how I was going to improve the thing for the next draft.

So perhaps the key to keeping me motivated enough to hang in there and edit the damned thing is to simply deny myself the feeling that the thing is done when I stop typing. It sounds quite simple when I put it like that, but trust me, it isn’t from my point of view. If I can get myself to the point where, on a deep emotional level, I know that my first stab at it is likely terrible and will need a lot of editing to be presentable, I will be able to view finishing the first draft as only being the beginning of a long process.

Well, maybe not THAT long. Baby steps and all. At this point, even producing a second draft would be major progress. I have decided that I am through with putting substandard product out into the world. I am a way, way better writer than that. Just getting my thoughts out of my head isn’t enough any more.

Funny as it might sound, I want to make stuff that’s actually good.

In saying this, I am committing to pushing myself to a higher level. I have coasted on my talents for a long time and it’s gotten me nowhere. If I want to even enter the game, I am going to have to put some effort into getting better at my craft.

Raw ability (of which I have loads) is not talent. Raw ability plus acquired skill is talent. Otherwise, you are nothing but unrefined ore, and worth about as much on the open market.

And by you, I of course, as always, mean me.

I think my story has real potential for greatness. It is, admittedly, a very odd and quirky little piece, but I am sure there must be a market for that sort of thing out there somewhere. The important thing is, I feel good about it. It’s something I am proud to have written, even in its current form, and that feels great. It’s certainly one of the most literary things I have ever written, underneath all the quirkiness. Levels of meaning and all that.

So I look forward to digging in and refining the thing till it’s the smooth, crisp, easy prose I want it to be. My goal is nothing less than the sort of deceptively simple seeming prose that gets the hell out of the way of the story and therefore goes down easy and settles deep.

In keeping with that ideal, I should reread “A Stitch In Time” in order to take notes. I am not sure I want my prose to be quite as breathlessly exciting as Madeline L’Engle’s, but that book never fails to draw me in and hook me hard. I just have to know what happens next, and next, and next, and so on.

And I really want to know the secret of that kind of lean, energetic, engrossing prose.

If I could write like that, I would make a million dollars.

Until then, I will keep writing to you nice people.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.