More Dr. Horrible

Just when you think it went away it's back!

I had watched act one of Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog but missed out on act two and three before it went off of the free website for pay per download. But! You can still watch it for free at hulu.com - whahaha!

Great video.

Whoops! I'm Live But Half Dressed

So I was going to take my personal-professional-writerly-whatever website live yesterday (Sunday) and I was gonna make big splash announcements, etc. ... except I didn't finish everything I wanted to so I decided it would be best to hold off on all that loud splashing until there was something more on the site.

And then fate intervened.

The editors's bios of the literary magazine I edit went live over the weekend. And in there is the link to my website. Oops! It's only half dressed!

The template is up, looking good, functioning but pretty much just taking up space and waiting for me to plug in all the content. The likelihood that someone would find my site through this roundabout webpage (and trust me, it takes a bit of investigation to get to it even through the literary magazine page) seems slim, and yet I know someone's already clicked through and found it! (Don't worry, it's okay that you did.)

So today, Monday, is all about getting something worthwhile actually in that site!

Party to follow.

[P.S. I know the style guid of Strunk and White says that editors's is the proper way to make a plural possessive in this situation but I think it looks stupid. *grumbles* just writing editors' looks so much more streamline to me. Stupid rule one.]

Ad of the Week

This is what happens when you play golf with Darth Vader.

Low Residency MFAs

Once upon a time I was asked a question on this blog about low res MFA programs. And I honestly had very little to say that you can't find elsewhere. Not that this helps overmuch, but you can read this blog post over on the emerging writers website written as the day account of a resent panelist at a low residency MFA and his take on what he saw there.

Basically (and this is the take that you can find anywhere else on the web) the low residency MFA is for people who want to get an MFA but cannot relocate to a new city because of job or family obligations. It is also a good program for people who do not want to use their MFA to write not to gain a college teaching position. It's great for writers who have a day job, want to keep the day job and enrich their lives through further study of writing.

In no way would I say that low-residency MFAs are lesser programs. Some of them are harder to get into than regular residency programs. It's not like going to "night school." It's an intense process and you have to be dedicated to it or you'll never get better. But it is a nod to the fact that many writers never earn a living off of their writing. And because of that you'll hear many people tell you not to apply to campus based full-time MFA programs unless you want to teach.

Can't Live Without It

The man won a Nobel Peace Prize. I think that's worth five minutes of your time.

Business Cards

The new business cards arrived recently from moo.com. All the way from England straight over the big blue ocean to me! Maybe I should feel jealous of my cards as I've never been to England and they have. Maybe I should just give them out instead of taking pictures of them.

I've now got 100 cards all the size of a stick of gum bearing about 49 different designs on them. I'm crazy happy about these cards. They've even got the address of the yet to be unveiled website on them!

Card No.101 tells me "Yay! You're our new best friend." I love this company's asthetic and ethic. Considering that I asked for 100 custom made pieces of paper the price and turn around time (even across an ocean) was very reasonable.

These are my favorites:just incase you cared to know.

No, they're not traditional (thank god) and no, I'd most likely never get an accounting job with one of these. But lets face it: I'm no accountant. I couldn't give a shit about fitting into a suit. I don't look good in suits.

I learned about moo.com from my Kenyon suite-mate (find her poetry here) when she handed me her contact information on a thin little card with a crow. Actually, I chose the crow out of her stack of images. I thought it appropriate given my relationship with all the crows at Kenyon (namely that they were everywhere I looked!). She's an elementary school librarian and she said she wanted something where she could pull out one professionally but could also give them to guys and not feel stuffy. I certainly think she managed the combination (although her choices of designs were more subduded than mine). In general, I thought the cards were wonderful and memorable -- whenever she gave them out it sparked conversation -- so by the end of June I was lurking all over moo.com deciding what I liked and what was "me". By the beginning of July I'd aquired my URL and hosting space so it was off to the printer.

Oh and I almost forgot this little bit that they sent me and I pass on to you:

And, because any friend of yours is a friend of ours, we're also giving you a special code to pass on to someone who's never bought from MOO before. [Through July 27] the code 5QB66Q will entitle a brand new MOO customer to 15% off their first order. Help us spread the Summer love, and pass it on!

I've yet to give out a card. But I'm working on that. I've stashed a couple in various places that seem logical, like I'll be carrying that object and need to give out a card. If I'd had half a brain I would have had a card and a website before I went to Kenyon. But hindsight is 20/20 and the website is well on it's way!

Photo Tour: Ann Arbor Art Fair

It's over! All summer Ann Arbor ramps up for the art fair. Tasks are completed in terms of "that needs to be done before Art Fair" or "it's on the week before Art Fair," etc. Now we can all just take a big long breath and go back inside our air conditioning because woahbaby there's some all out humidity out there.

Now we're just waiting for the humidity to go away so we can start defining things in terms of home football games.

I'm sad to say that I don't think the little Blogger previews do many of these pictures justice. However if y ou see something interesting or can't quite make out an image you can always click on the picture to go to a big BIG version of the image.

I took this picture from the side so that you can see the three panes of glass this guy uses, but from the front you just get a great depth of field feeling.This guy is great. I see him every year I've been to Art Fair. He does cast paper mache and then paints it. Gives it really great texture.

You'll have to pardon the angle and cropping of many of these shots. I was shooting from the hip as it were. In order not to make people antsy or suspicious or behave in any other strange fashion, I took my camera (old school lense with a digital back) and wore it on a strap over my shoulder. Keeping on hand on the camera that way just made it look like I didn't want it stolen or bumping into anything. Thing was that I had the lense cap off and the camera on almost the entire time and was taking pictures from waist level. The first few were awful and I cropped the daylights out of the actual shot that I wanted. But I got better at it as I went along, working with not just the angle but the zoom as well. I love my camera. These dragons were among the early attmpts at shooting in stealth mode. They're metal and enamel.

The non-profit booths included the hottest man at art fair: the robot in the lampshade,

and the Southeast Michigan Naturists who were, strangely enough, fully clothed. Although there was much hubbub over the "naked photo shoot" as planned, annouced, and patrolled by the police. Oh Ann Arbor.Signature Art Fair product: art on a stick. These supposedly glow in the dark. Why do they need to glow in the dark? I have no idea.Waterfalls I didn't talk to the artist, but I'm kind of hoping these paintings come with a free Corona. Add a bottle with a lime to the foreground of either of these paintings and you've got a beer commercial!Now there's iconic East Liberty with the Michigan Theater and the State Theater and the Bell Tower in the back ground.This looks like a wall fresco but I'm not sure what it actually is -- still I love the texture.

Pig pottery - yes! shot from the hip! I'm getting better!Booth lurkingAwesome sculpturesWhirleygigsFish keychaings, The money shot -- yes I took that without looking The creatures that lurk in the dark This really great "house of glass": More booths more people milling, this time on S. University ... and, ohthankgod, the bus that will carry me back to my car.

And I'm out.

Ad of the Week

Seriously. [This will be quick so Rochelle doesn't roll her eyes and pat me on the shoulder like I'm an overexcited puppy.] But seriously, $4.25 a gallon?

Gas had not been under $4.09 in Michigan since early June. And to be honest, we may moan but none of us expect it to get back down there again.

Drilling is not the answer. Drilling is a band aid. A sort term fix. Drilling may get our parents through their lifetimes without major crisis (if this is minor crisis) but it won't help me. I want to have kids someday (shock! gasp! I know) but how am I supposed to drive them to soccer practice if A) I can't afford the gas on my English professor's salary or B) there isn't any gas to be bought?

We need cleaner, more efficient fuels that cost less.

Even if you think it's all crap. That global warming is crap, that climate change is crap, that clean energy is crap -- you have to understand the power of the dollar. Let's find ways to make that dollar buy more and buy more for longer. Cheap fuel in the present doesn't make for cheap fuel when I'm driving those theoretical children to soccer practice.

Although I'd prefer the girls play field hockey 'cause mama was a real star at that.

We could take on Normandy. We could take on the moon. Why can't we take on this?

Things to Entertain You ...

while I'm working on the website (and not really blogging for a couple of days) there's always this for entertainment

Prepare Yourselves!

Prepare yourselves: there will soon be a website!

Yes, I know, just what you always wanted, more internet content completely based on me! A band new and spiffy means of killing time on the internet -- because there aren't enough ways to do that now.

Speak Coffee to Me the blog will remain -- and remain right here -- I'll just be linking back and forth between the two once I'm done building the site.

There are many reasons why I'm excited about this, the professionalism of having a website with a short URL is one of them, but logistically I'm excited because this will allow me to post work. Right now it is awkward to post fiction in Blogger. If it's too long, I need to serialize it -- but then you walk into it backwards if you don't check everyday (perish the thought). If I don't blatantly label it as fiction, fiction, FICTION YOU IDIOT! I get some idiot telling me I shouldn't obsess or asking me if I need a therapist. (Sigh.) Which makes an interesting statement about how we like neurotic characters but not neurotic people. And lastly, I will now be able to keep things up as long (or not) as I want. I know right now that I can take down my own writing from Blogger but it's not as simple for showcasing it.

All these problems -- and more! -- will be solved with OxiClean!

I mean -- my own website!

Do you think I could get Billy Mays to do a promo for me? He's lending that gravely shouting voice of his to every other as seen on TV product in America so why not mine?

BTW it is sooooo unbelievably cool -- in an utterly geeky way -- to see your name one the URL line with a ".com" behind it.

*giggles and goes back to site building*

The Latest Must See Video

Another great little video I feel the need to share.


www.wherethehellismatt.com

Finally!

Notes on Craft

Finally! A constructive critique on what is wrong with contemporary literary fiction. So much of the bitching and moaning about lit fic is that it's dead. It's dying. No one's buying it and fewer people are liking it. Well, if this is the case lit fic has been pulling a Hamlet for the past 40+ years in that it keeps coming back from the brink to deliver another little jewel to all of us.

This is a two part blog by contemporary lit fic (gasp) Darin Strauss. Part 1 and Part 2 have been extremely thought provoking. Not in the I see the light! Save me Jesus! sort of way, but in it got me to rewrite the opening to a novel I'd been toying with for a while but I thought was too much like a movie and not enough like "literary fiction" for me to write. (And I think it's a pretty hot little beginning now, too.)

What got me going was the PTA laundry list that he describes. Seriously, it's an atrocious opening to a novel -- who wants to listen to PTA minutes ever? even if you're on the board you want to be someplace else when that happens -- but for some reason I probably would have just patiently swallowed it. I would have likely put down the book in the first thirty pages, but never would I have that God what an awful opening! Why isn't literary fiction giving me drama! And it might be because I'm (sadly) growing acclimated.

Strauss makes reference to

Dreiser — who understood the advantages of thrill-ride storylines — was also the first post–Civil War writer really to show poverty and the everyday defeat of American morals. He was a social novelist. And he wanted to get at the full spectacle of our native life with blood-and-thunder plots. ... Henry James, on the other hand, didn't write much about what his contemporaries feared, but what they actually lived through — the great trailblazer of psychological and artistic intricacy ... lyrically, and without relying on complex plot machinations or gauche devices.

and he refers to all this as the split that occurred after Melville. But more important than the split is the fact that Melville had it all. The implication being that contemporary writers should give it a go and try for that "all" thing.

I, sadly, read some other blog (where the commenters obviously skimmed the article and didn't latch on to the key points) and someone cried out salvation lies in genre fiction! All hail the pulp novel, it is our promise land! While I've got nothing against a good genre novel now and again, the way to make literary fiction go from boring to intriguing isn't to scrap it altogether.

Obviously, Strauss doesn't go far enough with his train of thought for the flock to understand where the promised land is. I don't think I've found it, but my guide through the desert is something from Robert Olen Butler's From Where You Dream. He states that the one thing genre writers have in heaps, the one thing they never forget to give their characters and share with their readers is yearning. The girl wants to fall in love, the boy wants to slay the dragon, the agent wants to stop the IRA terrorists and save his pregnant wife. So often literary writers forget to let their characters yearn and to let that come through the page. Instead they walk around entire novels just seeing faces and touching objects.

There's more to writing stories well than just writing well.

Wordle Warning

So there's the website called wordle.net and it's completely pointless. You plug in words and it makes a word picture. What good is this? I don't know. It scrambled the order of the words so there's no coherency. But it is occasionally pretty.

Here's the last 300 words of my story Three Days in the Desert

Entertaining.

And my ABC story

Fascinating!

And my favorite wordle picture: my bus story


Wow. What an incredibly useful website.

...

How am I possibly addicted to this thing? I have no idea.

So I plugged in an old poem of mine instead of doing anything else productive.

Look. An entire poem!

I'm ... I'm ... oh something shiny! Bye!

Ad of the Week

Would you want to know?

Nathan Bransford is his neverending way of winning readers and sparking controversy asked the following hypothetical on Wednesday:

Question #1: Let's say there was a seer who could tell you definitively whether or not you have the talent to be a published writer. Absolute 100% accuracy. But. If the seer person said no, that's that. Final answer. Would you want to know?

Question #2: If the seer person said no, you don't have the talent to be a published writer, would you still write?

#1: Jesus, yes I'd want to know! Do you know how much time and effort, and trees I could save right now if I knew the answer was no?

#2: Duh! Of course I would still write! I might stratch my head at the logic of entering an MFA at the moment, but I would keep writing.

I'd keep doing NaNoWriMo and like most of the other participants I would never in a million years expect anything more out of the experience than my entertainment and perhaps the entertainment of a few friends. My father plays guitar and those are roughly his expectations of his musical ability.

I would have to, of course, rethink my career. Teaching positions don't come to people who haven't been published as that outside stamp of approval is required by academia but perhaps I could run a writer's retreat. That could be fun.

Then agin, the comment I left on Nathan's blog was that if I would never be published that I'd like to know ASAP so that I could start working on my trophy-wife body. See, if I had to write merely for pleasure I'd need income. And maybe convincing some poor rich shmuck to provide for me while I spent his money could satisfy the part of my brain that, by nature, wants to create character and drama. Hmm... possibilities ... LOL!

Margosita also answered this question in her blog.

Art Show

Oh! Interesting. http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/07/08/arts/20080709_ROCK_SLIDESHOW_index.html

Reason to Weep

I've always been a fan of Donald Hall's poetry. He keeps things simple, straightforward, clear. But I have only recently discovered his collection published ten years ago called Without. It's gorgeous and well worth the cry. Especially when you consider that his wife, fellow poet Jane Kenyon was almost 20 years his junior when this was all taking place.

Power Outages Are Fun!

We had another 2+ power outage, much like the one in February, except this time I had already showered and had my coffee -- and it wasn't 35 degrees outside.

It wasn't storm related although we've been having those too. Power had flickered during the day. Just long enough to make all the clocks start blinking about four times and then once for a couple of minutes. So I figure the power company had to be working on something ... I hope.

When the power cut out later that afternoon and two fire trucks toodled down my street, I knew it wasn't going to come back on anytime soon. Not just any firetrucks, but ladder trucks the both of them.

Then I watched one, two, three ... four bucket trucks from the power company, a tree trimming truck and a bucket truck named Atlec (also owned by the power company) all roll by my window one right after another like ducklings on diesel.

Normally when this happens I just move the "home office" to the "coffee shop office" except this time there was a complication: I had just put potato wedges in the oven for "baked home fries." I wasn't concerned about losing the potatoes as much as I was wondering if the oven would click back on when the power came back on ... and if I left I wouldn't be able to know when it came back on or if it was making little potato fire balls that would those fire trucks would be heading back to my house again.

So I stayed put.

Turns out that the electric oven does not turn itself back on and instead my first instinct was correct: digital displays/controls wipe when they don't have power.

More Questions, Few Answers.

Notes on Craft cont.

First I’d like to make a distinction not made in the previous post/discussion to help with the clarity of this post: There's stealing from Life as it surrounds you and then there's deliberately excerpting your personal-life for fiction. I know the first story I turned in as an undergrad was entirely a patchwork of things that had happened to me over the past five years and focused by a then recent breakup -- which is much different from lifting the conversation of the people at the booth next to you whom you have never met.

So I'm still wondering how much of a main character is you the writer? How much (how many elements, if any) of a main character have to be the writer in order for the writer to be sympathetic to her own character?

I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer. I don’t think there is one way of doing it that is better than another. I think it is completely possible to write an entire story, polish it until it shines and then look at it five years later and realize that the narrator (who may have been so not-the-writer that he was even a different gender) really was you just in different underwear.

In the comments section of the last post, Margosita brought up an author she had been discussing in her MFA program where the author had suffered the loss of a parent at a very young age and many of his characters dealt with the same kind of loss in his novels. I often look at those kinds of correlations as fiction-as-therapy. When a reader brought up to Brad Kessler that after reading the opening chapter of his novel she [the reader] thinks about it every time she gets on a plane he first apologized (it's ruthlessly emotional) and then said "I was really working through something at the time." If that is his form of therapy then I want the man to have more issues because that was definitely a wow-moment for the reader.

But I start to wonder do writers use those characters because of functionality? -- That they "worked" as realistic narrators. -- Or because the author found them compelling enough to drive the conflict? Or because they were characters that the writer was sympathetic to and could spend months and months of her life with?

I agree with Mella/Melanie that often not thinking about [the above questions] while writing is the most productive means to the end. Character development is definitely on art end of the art-craft spectrum of writing. How many times have you heard writers talking about having conversations with characters or going on a date with their characters or that a secondary character clamored for attention and it turned out the novel was really about him, or that the novel – like a river or a living, breathing thing – went in an unplanned direction and couldn’t be reined back in because the characters refused? I think these are all just means of personifying and explaining that it’s an art that comes more from the subconscious and is tooled into something well structured by the conscious -- left brain, whatever -- and that too much conscious thought can kill it. And that letting the character grow organically into a person is useful.

But – to establish yet another unnecessary analogy – when you give birth to a child you know logically that half of his genetic material is your own, but that doesn’t mean he won’t look exactly like his father and nothing like you.

Okay, I don’t even know what I mean by that last thought. But it’s something else for me to think through.

I know I can’t analyze the characters of the projects I’m currently working on because I have a limited sense of who the character is at the moment -- but as a retrospective question I’m fascinated by it. I know it’s not a question writers care to answer. I hated when the damn English literature majors in my writing classes would get all analytical with unfinished work (I was an English writing major and we were much more chill) but on this question I would be interested to think further.

And to drop in another related yet unhelpful thought: in the movie The Martian Child the John Cusack character opens the movie being interviewed on some sort of “Book TV” show about his wildly popular science fiction novels. The interviewer asks him if he’s put himself as a character in any of his novels and he responds [paraphrased] “Oh yeah, I think I’m a character in each of my novels. Not always the same character though. That changes with each book.” The interviewer prompts him, and in this book? “In this book I’m the monster.”

Stolen, Stolen, Stolen

Stolen, Stolen ...

Loneliness: the state of imagining there is no one out there with whom you can connect

Traffic: Conceptually impossible. In theory, anything that wants to move should be in movement so why are those things, which are willfully acting upon a desire, not moving?

Chaos: An almost grown German Shepard that lives with my relations and does not respond to to sit or stay but phrases like what do you do?

Burp: That thing which I do not do. Seriously. I make a noise and people think it's a sneeze. I am happy to let them assume as much.

500: Miles. And I would walk 500 miles and I would walk 500 more just to be the man that walked a thousand miles to fall down at your door ...

Movie: magic

Coma: tose

Bark: health food

Stare: if this is a contest I lose instantly. I've never cared for that game.

Angelina: proof that I'm not the only woman condemmed to have twins should I wind up preggers -- How does 21 sets of twins and 1 set of triplets in three generations sound to you Angelina? Sounds like I'm screwed frankly.

Ad of the Week

Supposedly this is an x-box ad that will never air.

Real Life in Fiction?

Notes on Craft



Family Guy is amazing.

But that made me start thinking about the conundrum that is fiction. Sure it's easy to say it's all made up -- and that's how we proceed through workshops because assuming any of it actually happened to the writer gets uncomfortable at best and down right mean and harassing at worst -- but how much of that is really true?

How much of fiction is real? And what is the dividing line?

I know that I will never write about a physical location that I have never been. There are just too many interesting details that you miss out on when you have to guess or do "research" on a location. If you haven't lived it can you really say that the cicadas were chirping that night? Or would it be crickets? Or frogs? Or - god help me - some infinitesimally grosser insect?

Those well chosen physical details make the situation real. I have heard tell of romance authors staging characters on every country and continent they can make the least bit romantically appealing and these women haven't ever been over state lines [exaggeration]. But their stories show as much. They may have fabulous imaginations that dream up details but the only reason the novels work is because they are reliant not on an experience but on a romantic love story.

So if you don't have that, you have ... what? True to life details.

Sure, you get to pick and choose. You get to take which details you've experienced and decide which ones your narrator would notice and why. Which ones the narrator would ignore. But if you had none of that, or if you had extremely generic details you might not feel placed as a reader.

Then there's the whole "emotional experience" bundle, and the "did this happen to you" bundle that may or may not have to do with the physical location.

When you first start writing, everything is about you in some form. It's all vaguely autobiographical (or it's piss poor writing). But that use of true to life experience allows you to learn how to write, and the more you learn the less you need to lean on your own life.

Sometimes.

Sometimes I just love to steal from my own experience. Pretty quickly though, often in that first draft when I'm typing things out I end up taking my life weaving it in then twisting it to make it more interesting. Wouldn't it be great if ... or If he thinks such n such here then it'll parallel with the opening and suddenly my life is way more literary.

Any thoughts? How much of fiction is real life? How much should be real in order to make compelling fiction? Or should the author completely distance herself from her work?

Publisher's Lunch

I'm finally getting Publisher's Lunch emailed to me. I had nearly given up -- scratch that, I had given up on ever getting the wonky email server to recognize me. I requested the email newsletter at least a month ago possibly as far back as six weeks. But apparently all is now well with the world and I've got another piece of self-inflicted spam, I mean potentially helpful newsletter in my inbox. (I think I'm up to 15 that show up sporadically).

But it's from Publisher's Lunch that I cull this *ahem* wonderful nugget and proof that the weight of an Iowa MFA can, in fact, get anyone published.

Iowa MFA graduate Peter Bognanni's THE HOUSE OF TOMORROW, a humorous and heartwarming story about a young man raised by his grandmother in a geodesic dome and home-schooled on the teachings of the inventor and futurist Buckminster Fuller, who upon leaving the isolated existence he has always known discovers the joys of punk music and the heartbreak of first love, to Amy Einhorn at Amy Einhorn Books, by Julie Barer at Barer Literary (World).

Seriously?

Apartment Hunting

I have no literary insight for the day but I have an apartment! And it's pretty nice. Tiny but nice.

This past Saturday I started physically apartment hunting. My father and I drove over to Kalamazoo to do the physical leg work. These are the moments I'm glad I'm going across state and not across country. (Although Tanya seems to have had luck so far - which is fabulous because I'd be a nervous wreck if I was trying to rent in NH right now.)

The night before we went I was on the computer showing my father the listing that I had made arrangements to see (I was hoping just to show up and scout the others because they were larger complexes) when my father's girlfriend rang the doorbell. [We don't like her.] And she gave me the name of some property that I then had to look up while she stood in the kitchen with me and it's WAAAAY out of my price range. Seriously, what kind of college student lives there? But supposedly her hair dresser's son had lived there several years ago when he was a student. Hmm. Sure. Whatever. For the price of a one bedroom I could have a two all to myself and be a helluva lot closer to campus.

But I digress...

What really got to me was when she stated how exciting this all was. Which I thoroughly have to disagree with. It's stressful and time consuming. It's work. And once I make a decision there's more work. Calls-to-utility-people work. Packing-logic-and-logistics work. Physical-moving-and-lifting work. Then there's living with my decision and hoping it's a good one.

It's not exciting. It's work.

This is new for me. I've been a strictly dorm, sorority, campus housing-apartment kind of girl. That's why the parental unit is coming along for the ride. He volunteered before I even asked but that's probably a smart thing. But there were no decisions made over the weekend. There were a couple possibilities but we weren't sold on anything. Drove back over today, this time with the mother-parental unit and found something lovely.

It'll cost me a little more and it's smaller than my other choice, but I like the area and it's new construction and nice interior as well as within close walking distance of the end of campus I'll need to get to. After I sign, my father goes and asks if I'm planning on walking back from my night classes as well as the day and all I could do was blink. Obviously I'm planning on that. It's a ten minute walk (which, depending on the day is about the same to get to the farthest parking lot), swarming with students and if I could do it in down town Chicago I can do it in the generic frickin Midwest. If he's concerned I can get some pepper spray to go with my don't-fuck-with-me stare. I'm good at that stare. I even had a self-defense instructor tell me so.

So I've gone and signed my first real lease. Strange. I have friends with mortgages, friend's who are married, friends with kids, and here I am just now signing my first lease with a non-university.

One more step closer to my MFA.

I'm wondering if this whole "taking steps" thing is less of a walk or a journey and more of a dance. That would account for the whole two steps forward one step back feeling that you get sometimes. And the twirling. Damn, there's a lot of twirling.