The Importance of Being Ernesto

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I've been looking at summer classes that I'd like to take. I want to find something that will force me to write, the only courses are available are for non-majors and I used to teach classes like that at Penn State, so it's weird to sit in on one. I am uber snotty about it which isn't fair to the other students who have most likely never attempted to write short stories ever. But I did take a class last summer and it made me write two stories that both got published and that I would never have worked on otherwise, due to my laziness. I think of ideas for stories often, but never write them or if I do, I only manage a couple of pages before running out of steam. Sometimes, it's just a first line that I like. This one keeps running through my head: "Somewhere along the line, she had gotten fat." I wrote part of this one--it's about the 9-5 cubicle life and how this girl is surrounded by thin women with good hair who sip Diet Cokes all day and complain about their weight. I thought of a title for another one "Crushing on Jesus" which would be about a 13 year old who develops a serious crush on God's son and spends her days imagining what it would be like to kiss him and doodling hearts with "Jesus H. Christ" on the back of her folders during math class (my mom would not approve of this idea). I've been fooling around with an organ donation story--the narrator is a transplant coordinator--but that is a difficult story to write because it's inherently very dramatic and has the potential to become an "and the moral of the story" story: DONATE LIFE! I was also thinking about some story centering around a theater group. I took so many acting classes in college and several outside of college for fun and used to do community and children's theater and so it would be easy to write a story about that--most people interested in acting (myself included) are melodramatic and run around singing songs from musicals and competing for attention. Then lastly, I feel like I should be figuring out a way to get all of the Evie stories into a book of some sort--I just can't find a through line. So much time, so little writing getting done.

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