WHY ARE YOU WRITING A BLOG ABOUT THIS SHIT. OTHER PEOPLE JUST WRITE.

INTRODUCTIONSSSSS

I am a 22-year-old who took a year off of her life and decided to write a novel. If you care, I won a bunch of writing awards and and have a bunch of writing experience that doesn't translate into writing a novel, but yes--I've included a mini-resume after this rant.

So why this blog. Blogs are lame. Blog Blog Blog. Bloviate.

The explanation: My personality type is closer to Hildi's in "His Girl Friday" than to Anne Hathaway's in that shitty adaptation of Persuasion. I visited Emily Dickinson's attic hideaway in North Mass. and I almost cried--what a crappy life!

My background as a writer is in journalism. I fear--oh, how I fear it!--that all of my tendencies toward writing nonfiction stem from a desire for acceptance, made palpable in the narcissistic truth that I like to get published. When I write, I am never writing for myself, but instead for the entertainment of others. I imagine invisible sets of eyes--scary editors, judgmental mothers, ex-boyfriends, that guy with pale, slender hands, like gloves of cream over the bone, sitting over there in the lobby of the Kempinski hotel where I'm currently typing.

Spending a year writing a novel, holed up in the candled nooks of Beijing's cafes, it's too easy to forget these future readers. On several attempts to undertake this massive project I've given up with plaintive sighs of, "But no one's going to read it anyway!"

The internet changes all that. Which is not to say that anyone is necessarily reading my rants and hollers, but that it is now PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE that someone is, which allows me to create a very useful delusion that fuels my writing process, so that someday someone is more likely to read this--as they pick a volume up off the shelf with my name on the spine, open the first page, and become absorbed. This ghost of a reader is perhaps the self-deception at the heart of all blogs; this shitshow is no exception.

Thanks for reading.
Adriane



Mini Writing Resume--

Freelance Journalist:
I've been based in DC, NY, Hong Kong, and Beijing, where I have written for the Washington Post, Time Magazine, The New York Observer, Paste Magazine, The Grapevine, That's Beijing, Urbane, City Weekend, and Paper Magazine.

My work has won the following awards:
FICTION
The Yale Daily News Wallace Prize, First Place in Fiction 2007.
The Yale Literary Magazine, Francis Bergen Prize for Fiction 2006,
Willets Prize for Fiction 2007, 2006.

NONFICTION
The Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Contest, Nonfiction Second Place 2006.
The Yale Daily News Wallace Prize, Second Place in Nonfiction
Yale University John Hersey Prize for Journalism First Place 2007, Second Place 2006; Henry P. Wright Prize for Journalism 2005, 2006.
J. Meeker Prize for Composition 2004.
Lloyd Mifflin Prize for Seniors—Outstanding Work in English 2007.