(It appears that this year, instead of freaking out about finals and getting really stressed, I'm just making excessive amounts of relatively calm LJ posts instead. Is that really an improvement? Who knows. If you guys want to take me off your default view until next week when I'm less caffeinated, I'd understand. I'd be sad, but I'd understand.)

I'm starting to revise my short story for my Fiction portfolio. (I was going to write my Latin paper tonight, but I was sick of not getting anywhere. I'll finish this tonight and then do Latin tomorrow.)

Anyway, I'm looking through my stuff from the workshop (if you're not familiar with the workshop format, basically everybody got a copy of my story, read it, and--theoretically--wrote me a letter and handed it back along a corrected copy of the story), and there's this one copy I got back that both cracks me up and makes me wince. It's from one of the girls in the class I actually like a lot, so I'm not irritated, just amused. And, okay, a little indignant, but only on behalf of my love of grammar--it had no effect on my love of this person, or even my respect for her as a writer.

She crossed out half of my commas (literally, she tried to nuke five or six commas on every page). Commas are one of those tricky things that can be stylistic a lot of the time. Some people love them, and some people hate them, and a lot of the time there's no actual rule to back either opinion up. But my prose would be very, very different if you took out all of those commas. (If I'm ever a published writer, I hope I don't end up with a comma-hating editor, because there would be fights. Which I would probably lose.)

But the commas are a matter of opinion, not a Crime against Literature. But, on the last page, right before the most soaringly poetic passage of the entire story . . . well:

The original passage: "They are driving through the aspen groves as the sun clears the mountains, and its rays cut the thin mountain air . . ."

Her emendation: "They are driving through the aspen groves as the sun clears the mountains, its rays cutting the thin mountain air . . ."

HELL NO. I am NOT going to replace a perfectly good conjugated verb with a freaking participle! (This isn't Greek, after all.) This is the one passage in the story that truly can't survive a single linguistic slip-up, and there's no way I'm going to substitute a weaker form for a stronger one! Just . . . no!

(Let me just reiterate, I really like this girl. And technically, this is really another matter of opinion, not really a Crime . . . but seriously? A participle??)

Justice for whoever figured out that the meter Emily Dickinson wrote in perfectly fits "The Yellow Rose of Texas"--and then thought fit to share the discovery--should be swift and merciless.

Why is it so hard for the morons in my creative writing class to remember to put freaking page numbers on their stories? It's a workshop class, guys. We NEED page numbers in order to efficiently discuss your stories.

I have the strangest relationship with that class. It's got some of my favorite people in it, and some of my least favorite, and it's kind of a jarring contrast. It's my favorite class out of everything I'm taking this semester, but I always leave in a state frustration and righteous indignation.

I've never been around a group of people so composed of people who totally get literature, and people who are so far from getting literature that you wonder how they even made it through middle school, who are so incapable of grasping emotional complexity that you begin to contemplate whether they're even human. People who daily commit crimes against literature.

My particular problem is one girl who categorically condemns any character who ever acts at all like a jerk, regardless of how complex the situation that led to that jerky act is, when in fact the point of the entire story is to tell you that things are more complicated than they seem. She simply seems to be incapable of grasping the fact that some people read and write fiction because fiction is able to address issues that don't have easy, black and white solutions.

Look. If you're not willing to suspend your stupid, closed-minded, judgmental attitude for an hour and fifteen minutes, why the hell are you taking Creative Writing?

(On the other hand, I hesitate to admit it, but some people are actually fun to hate. I'm a bad, bad person.)