I just thought I’d give a quick update.

I originally started this blog to write about writing, and TV, and disability issues, and science, and music but I also struggle with blogging. Sometimes it feels more like a duty than something I enjoy doing. That’s especially true when I’m so busy with school and my job, and just trying to find time to write is a real challenge.

This year, I set a goal to write at least 4 days a week for at least an hour. That doesn’t add up to a lot, just 4 hours a week, and yet it’s still been difficult to find that time. Most weeks, I’ve met that goal, but there’ve been a few weeks I didn’t. There have been lots of weeks, like this last one, where I spent as much time writing as I would on a full-time job.

Mostly I’ve been working on an essay that loosely relates to the O.J. Simpson trial, or more accurately, someone I knew at the time who was obsessed with the trial. It all started last March when I was watching The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story and couldn’t stop thinking about that time in my life, the person I knew who was obsessed with it.

So after a few days of that, I started writing for the first time in awhile. Then I got busy again. Once I got to the climax of the story, the emotional crux of the essay, I wasn’t sure where it was going to go. In August, I started writing again, and worked on it a lot throughout the month. I picked it up again in December and have pretty much worked on it exclusively since then.

It has changed so much. I revised it so, so, so many times. I worked with a professor, Susan Reese, who I adore, in an independent study, and revised the essay again and again and again. Sometimes it was tinkering with and sharpening the intricate word choices and language; other times it was rearranging, killing many darlings (may of them parenthetical pop culture references, I really had to reign myself in with that), rethinking and reframing what it was about.

All in all, I feel proud of the work I did on the essay, and also ready to give it a rest. I submitted it to Tin House yesterday, for their True Crime theme issue. They had an open reading period for this theme in September, and I saw and knew that then, but I knew the essay was in no way ready then. Then, this March, the reading period for True Crime opened again, and I was thrilled. The essay still focuses somewhat on O.J. and also on the pop culture series focused on the trial that came out recently, and other true crime in pop culture, and at least one other true crime that isn’t as well known.

And now, I’m ready to focus on other writing projects! I’m taking a writing class during my final term (which starts on Monday) on Personal Essay Writing with Sallie Tisdale, and really looking forward to that. I’ve got a few other ideas rolling around that I’d like to put into words, and a few other essays I wrote in the past that I want to revise.

Sometimes, I just wish I had more time to dedicate to writing. There is so much I want to write and edit. There’s a real big project I pretty much (but not completely) wrote a few years ago that’s a huge, long piece that’s technically a hybrid between fiction and nonfiction with different POVs (I posted about this piece here and here). There are so many essays I’ve written that need serious, dedicated revising. I have two full-length screenplays I’d love to edit thoroughly, and two more I want to write.

So much writing and working on writing, so little time!

~EJ