“You know if you’re boring or not,” Vodo.

“The word panties was in there and I was like man, I’m so there,” The Sexist.

“Truth without time is the work of holy men,” Vodo.

“It’s not going to help us with the debt ceiling but it might help us make a little sense out of our lives,” Vodo on fiction.

“We were born dying. Yeah, that’s heavy. I’m busting it out here,” Vodo.

“What I say is right in this class,” Vodo.

“A lot of beginning writers almost always take too long to get going and end too soon in this formless word vomit into the abyss,” Vodo.

“How come you didn’t ask us to read Tim O’Brien?” The Sexist.
“Honestly? He owes me money,” Vodo.

“We’re just going deeper and deeper into the well, down into the page,” Vodo.

“That’s where perverts end up. They’re just lonely ghosts,” Vodo.

“Why do her nipples get painfully hard?” The Sexist.
“Because that’s what actually happens to wet, cold nipples,” Me.
“Really?” The Sexist.
“Yes,” Me.
“Dude, Google it,” Vodo.

“We’re actually workshopping a story that hasn’t even been written yet,” Vodo.

The post For Peabo: The best of Vodo, Summer 2011 appeared first on I Will Dare.

“It was overwritten, boring, and I didn’t like it.”

“I just didn’t care for any of it.”

“Well, I’m not a woman so maybe women like that kind of thing. You know love and that.”

[while workshopping a short story written by a female classmate] “Your writing is soft, and so I didn’t understand a lot of it. If you want male readers it has to be harder.” [to which I responded in my head, “that’s what she said.”]

“Don’t you know anything about Vietnam? If you’d have been in Vietnam you’d have understood the significance of that line.” [He said this to me because he had some questions about the feedback I had written on his story]

Poor Vodo. I swear the outspoken, unbalanced, and offensive are drawn to his classes.

The post Actual quotes uttered by the old sexist in my writing class appeared first on I Will Dare.

But back to the Googling. A lot of the people I know think it’s weird that I Google every new person I meet. They think it’s creepy and kind of stalkerish. I think it’s weird not to be curious about the new people in your life. I fully expect every single person to Google me the moment they remember my name. Why? Because that’s what I do and what I do is perfectly normal and so other people must do it, right?

Plus, it’s weird when people don’t have a Google footprint. Hell, that’s creepier to me than someone who would randomly Google my name. While I can understand that some people are just private, I think the complete absence of a digital footprint is suspect. It makes me think you are hiding something or are deeply uncomfortable with yourself.

Besides, you can learn a lot from a Google search. Like how that one mean woman in class from a few years ago (I don’t remember her name, but I remember she wrote a strange story about a lesbian who comes back from the war in Iraq) had a really bad website with a ridiculous pun on writing for its title (I don’t remember the title of it either, which is why I’m a failure at stalking anyone for more than 23 seconds. Also I have that rule where I refuse to stalk anyone who doesn’t live on my way home from work, which is even funnier now because I work from home. However, one of the Nerds from The Nerdery is moving nearby and I want to tell him I’m amending the rule to include stalking people who live on my way home from the grocery store but I’m afraid that might actually creep him out).

Googling in Minnesota is often a lesson in futility. There’s a whole heap of Olsons, Hansons, Andersons, and Johnsons here, and I hate them all for making things so difficult on the nosy and curious.

My Googling tonight has not turned up much, a few abandoned blogs and sporadically updated Twitter feeds. Boring. I’m not sure what would be unboring, but I’m pretty sure it would involve naked photos and/or porn. Though I am hardly one to talk. If you Google me you just end up here (Hi, Googling classmates. You rule!) or at my much-neglected portfolio. However, the best part of Googling me is the related searches:
jodi chromey twitter
jodi chromey supergenius
jodi chromey amazon

I’m going to pretend that the amazon has more to do with my height than it does to do with my penchant for book-buying from online megastores.

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I’m struggling because I’m still not sure about what makes something a short short story (aside from length). About 50% of the things we read feel like complete stories. They’re satisfying and don’t leave me thinking what the fuck. The other half of the stories leave me crying “what the fuck?” in the middle of class.

I keep pestering Eric, our teacher, for the answers. Like there’s some sort of formula X-(3)+ny⁵x66= short short. I need rules. I need guidelines. His answer does not satisfy me. It’s a short short because it works.

All this sort of writing anarchy leaves me feeling kind of queasy and makes me think I’m back in poetry.

Because of my unease, I’m not sure what to do with the feedback from the workshop. It really was a good workshop. People had a lot of nice things to say, and the not nice things they said I agreed with. Their comments made sense in the context they were given for a standalone story. What I wrote was a 500-word story that works as summation of my bowling alley collection.

Tonight, I was going through the handwritten comments. They cracked me up. First, because over half of my classmates reiterated what Eric had said in class. In case I didn’t hear him, they all wrote it on their pages. I know they wrote it after he said it because all the comments were two-tone, written in two different pens.

What made me chuckle the most was the classmate who went through and underlined the gerunds in my first two paragraphs and wrote “too many adjectives.” For good measure, he/she also did the same for a few paragraphs on the second page, again with the “too many adjectives” admonishment.

Yeah.

Sadly, that still only comes in as #2 on Top 10 list of Least Helpful Advice.

The top spot still belongs to (and probably always will) belong to Johnny the Greek who wrote “this story would be better if you were funnier” on my story.

The post From the advice-I-won’t-be-heeding file appeared first on I Will Dare.

But this summer neither Dale or Vodo are teaching, so I had to take my chances. I hemmed and hawed for a long time debating between an Intermediate Fiction Workshop on Monday nights and a Short Short Fiction class on Tuesday nights. Since I was unable to make up my mind, I let Snickers make the decision.

Snickers is a MN Reads reviewer and a friend of Christa’s. He had mentioned in an e-mail that he was taking the Short Short Fiction class. What followed was an impressive campaign that included a lot of words in all caps and the words ‘come on.’

Meeting him for the first time did nothing for my first class anxiety. Meeting new people makes my stomach hurt.

Of course all of the anxiety was for naught. Snickers was perfectly delightful, the class was full of talkers, and the teacher seems pretty awesome. So awesome, in fact, that I’m all Vodo what? Dale who?

He made us all fill out an index card about ourselves. And since I’m a sharer, I will share with you what I wrote on mine.

Name: Jodi Chromey
E-mail: jodi@iwilldare.com
Reason for taking this class: Because I don’t get short short fiction and because Snickers conned me into it.
Influences: coffee, books, the Internet, Lorrie Moore, bowling alleys, Mary Gaitskill, small towns, gin, my sisters, blogs, John Irving, peanut butter, the color orange, Amy Bloom & Aimee Bender, reruns of Dawson’s Creek, pens with blue ink, and the serial comma.
Writing advice that stuck with me: Show don’t tell.
Under-rated food: Brownies.

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