Overdue updates

February 25, 2010

Incommunicado, that’s me. Since my last post I’ve finished my first and started my second semester of my MFA program in fiction. There’s a lot to be debated about creative writing MFA programs in general, but there’s also a lot of value in sharing work with other writers and talking about reading and writing stories and no longer having that constant sense of gnawing panic I had when I was writing away in a vacuum for years and years and felt like I was shouting my words and stories into an long, empty cave.

I’ve also put my short story collection aside for a bit (to “breathe”) and started work on a novel, which I’m plugging away at in between school work, work work, and the general city grind/life. I’m hoping to finish a first draft by the fall, then spend my second year in the program rewriting it all. I’m crossing my fingers that I’ll get into a residency program for the summer, and if not, maybe I’ll be able to cash my miles in for a trip to China (really, for novel research purposes). But that’s another post.

I spent January off school and in Los Angeles and it was beautiful and dreamy. Beach and sunshine in the middle of the winter, all my favorite foods at their best: tacos, Thai noodle soups, Korean BBQ, FLAVOR. Plus seven straight days of rain. Back in New York it’s the time of winter where you just can’t believe that it will ever be warm again, that sunshine and heat actually happen, have happened (every year, in fact, without fail), in these same sidewalks and streets. I’ve never really been one to dig snow and winter, just give me hot hot hot and ocean breeze and call it a day.

I put up a professional website recently. Someone had been squatting on lisako.com for more than a decade, and then one day I checked on a whim to see if it was available, and it was! After all these years, I’m finally a dot-com. I await my corporate schwag, stock options, and IPO.

2010-02-25  ::  iamlisako