Good night cohesion and bad tooth. Wednesday 25 February 2009.

Drove home feeling idiotically happy after last night's lesson, even despite seriously losing my glasses, twice, during the day. A Serious Lose is when I clear out the car and then rationalise that I must have had the glasses almost two and a half years and, although they cost as much as a small second hand car, at price per wear they represent good value for the money. And they’re dated. And I start to concoct a cock and bull story about what’s happened to them to tell to Ian.

We seemed to get on well during the lesson and we all said confident stuff about each others (conjunction conscious) work in relation to the cohesion created by reference chains, lexical continuity and ellipsis. This despite (if I'm representative), feeling like frauds because we were making it all up.

Fiction writing is hard. I like my ideas but when I write them they sound juvenile, earnest and crawling with cliché. I’m reading Ernest Hemingway, Ali Smith and Susan Hill short stories so I can copy how real writers make words sound grown-up. But it’s like learning to drive again. I start out thinking narrative stylistics and next thing I know I’m thinking: “that was a good sto…Shit!" and I’ve finished the story and I completely forgot to look out for incongruity discourse (or whatever). I've just finished reading Career Move by Martin Amis and it might be better if I just content myself with being a mediocre academic librarian and pretend-proper kind person. Or maybe I should forget about writing grown-up sounding fiction and work on my looking-interested expression for when people are telling me about animals; that might be more managable and it certainly needs working on.

Last week the Writer with the Writerly Name read extracts from each of us to the whole group to see if we could identify the writer (there was quite a bit of sneaky bluffing going on). We guessed every one of us correctly. Then we wrote in a disguised voice, mine was wearing short white socks, and Writer with the Writerly Name repeated the exercise. This time it was much more difficult to identify the author but I was rumbled immediately – me dratted tricky-tinker verbiage again I think.

I had a 56 inch nerve taken out of a tooth today. It wasn’t the most agreeable 45 minutes; but by far the worst bit is at the end when the Dentist says: “chatter your teeth together hard until I say stop”. My coordination is bad enough at the best of times but with a head full of anaesthetic it’s none-existent. I feel like one of those sets of clockwork false-teeth that isn’t going nicely. And then I was spaced out on novocaine all afternoon, the Dentist tells me it’s only local anaesthetic and it won’t make me think I’m a Womble. But it does, every time. Rather look forward to it now.