Argh. I've been wanting to write the perfect entry about my lameness at keeping up this blog but the being lame part still gets in the way. Part of it is my inability to find balance in my life, how to carve up the twenty four hours between two kids, a husband, and myself, plus basic home keeping (which I am proud to report my husband does at least half of and still it is such a struggle!), plus writing, my web business, and then having quality family time and husband/wife time! Does anybody have any tips? Maybe if we pool our hard earned lessons then it will amount to something! I would love to hear.

I am still working on my longer writing projects though, with progress. Last year I took a serious turn into non-fiction and it was greatly humbling to my fiction-lauding, high minded self. These are some hard to hone skills. But I have inspiration, works I keep by my desk and in case anyone is curious or maybe has these same books - they are Joan Didion's We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (the entirety of her writing!), Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth, Junot Diaz' Drown, and Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies.

If you'll notice, two are non-fiction and two are fiction. This is because I am most interested in the area of writing where these two overlap - both Joan Didion and Jo Ann Beard use fiction techniques to write non-fiction, where Junot Diaz and Jumpha Lahiri write fiction which can only be read as truer than life. Also, Diaz and Lahiri write ethnic stories but have managed to escape the clutches of the ethnic sub-sections of the bookstore. A topic I am most interested in - when Asian-American lit. or other 'ethnic' lit. is/or becomes American Literature. One I believe creates an experience that only similar-cultured folks can relate to while the other creates a universal experience. How do they do that? This is what I think about when not writing.

Anyway I am so glad at least some of you forgot to take me off your RSS feed. The comments make the writing-about-very-specific-things-in-the-Internet-void feel like discourse, and it gives me a nudge when things get slow.

posted at 09:03 AM by jenn

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