27 Jan. Unexpected fun.
My Sunday plans did not include sitting on the floor sorting 200+ scrambled loose-leaf notebook pages, but that's how I spent 6 hours. Yay, hyperfocus.
A writing prompt reminded me I'd found a box of jumbled college journals back during the Fall Renovation Cleanup. So of course nothing else could happen until I got the pages organized & read a bunch of them.
It might not have taken so long if Past Me had done anything organized like numbered the pages, or dated entries, but it wasn’t that kind of a journal. It was, much like this blog but with less structure, a Random Thoughts/ Lists/ Idea Processing repository.
To complicate matters, I ran out of pages partway through each semester and dealt with that problem by flipping over the whole page block and writing on the backs. Then I took both stacks out of the notebook at the end of the year and crammed them in a box where some of them got mixed up over the decades.
At least I did made jokes to myself in the journal when I flipped the pages over, so I did have some reference points to work with. The other thing that took so long was getting caught up in reading the old entries.. Which wasn’t always easy, because my handwriting always sucked.
Sometimes I look at things I’ve written and think, “Wow, who wrote that?” but all the entries I wrote back then were comfortably familiar. Surprisingly so. My style of expressing myself in words really hasn't changed much in 40 years. Some short pithy stuff, but lots more meandering, pondering, and stress processing. I never would’ve been good at Twitter-length shit, even if it had existed when I was that age.
Nice bonus: the prof's remarks were even more inspiring than I recalled. My one regret is that I didn’t appreciate Dr. Moran as much as I I should’ve at the time. I was too inexperienced with life to know know how unusual his approach was, how seriously he took his job. He did right by all his stressed-out, high-strung overachieving perfectionist students.
He is the only professor I ever went back to visit after college, so there’s that.
Anyway. The main thing that’s changed about my writing is its legibility. Pixels are more readable than colored pen scrawls. (I used a lot of different color pens.) And the blogs keep track of the dates for me.
One random thing I flipped past was a remark I made about being intolerant of intolerance. Which is mainly entertaining because I didn’t learn about the Paradox of Tolerance for another 20 years.
Proof of journal existence. Dr. Moran’s remarks, now preserved in pixel form.
What’s on your bookshelf?
This is the part where I talk about my books.
Relics From A Traveling Show
The newest of the new! A collection of all my short fictions in one handy volume, available now from your favorite booksite or local shop.
Or! OR! if you like your local library, you could request a purchase. Free for you, sale for me, everyone wins.
Most libraries need the following info for ordering print books:
Title: Relics From A Traveling Show
Author: K. M. Herkes
ISBN: 9781945745201 (paperback)
Every library system does things a little differently, but most want their collections to serve their communities, so most of them are very responsive to patron requests.
If you like novels more than short stories, I recommend my series The Rollover Files for hopepunk tales of about an alternate world where moms with midlife crisis superpowers have been saving the world and making the military nervous since 1943.
I also have a completed, quirky slow-burn science fiction thriller duology with a romance chaser: The Stories Of The Restoration.
All my titles are available from Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Hoopla, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Overdrive and many other fine booksellers.
Support your favorite independent bookseller! Find a local shop via Indiebound
Be a potato.
" Fear is strange soil. Mainly it grows obedience like corn, which grows in rows and makes weeding easy. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground."
Terry Pratchett (Small Gods)