So that was a thing that happened

I should really stop daydreaming. Time may pass by faster, but my brain tends to create schemes where the entire Problem Child committee sits down to read my story, gets guffawed expressions on their faces, and says, "why this is the most insightful piece of art I have ever read in my life! Whoever wrote this must be a literary genius!" and then I slyly slip in that it was me, but no big deal, I just threw some words onto paper in between classes. Then all the writers of the universe would live happily ever after, the end.

But actually. That happened in the lovely world that is my mind. What really went down was we read my short story, and I, hearing it for the first time out loud, realized just how disturbing it really was. The number of cliches hit me over the head like a ton of bricks (heh heh...), and not only did I sound like a terrible writer, but I was also introducing myself as that girl who writes about cutters. Wonderful. Why don't I just go stick my social standing in a bucket of hornets next time?

  Apparently you can't just pull an Ellen Hopkins and smush all the depressing parts of high school into angsty sounding prose and be the next great American novelist. You can, however, feel like a fool when you realize it's not a great idea to base a story off of a fortune cookie. Duly noted.

So this whole submitting my work for the entire world to judge didn't exactly go as planned. But hey, it was another "first"...I've certainly been critiqued before, but never anonymously, and this was the only time my writing hadn't been sugar coated by "this is good, but..." After the initial hurt, however, it was strangely liberating to be judged. The kind of happiness you feel after eating too much chocolate cake. Guilty, but glad it happened. Maybe this is exactly the kind of thing that I need to go through to get a thicker skin. Or something.

So hardly anyone has appreciation for my intellect and skill...or, *gasp* I still need to learn how to be intellectual and skilled. Imagine, coming into college not having learned and accomplished everything! This club certainly isn't an ego massager, but I don't want it to be.

Next week, I'm going smaller with an angry poem about peer reviewers (which may or may not have been written after the initial incident), but I shant daydream about raving reviews or book offers. I'm happy to gain insight from writers who have done more than sat in a stifled classroom for the past four years. And I hope that with each submission, I can get more skilled as an author, and, more importantly, a receiver of critique.

Namaste.