in Life's name and for Life's sake

This is a quick "yay for my story" post. It ended up getting finished, at least the first draft, and is not as horrible as I thought it would be. It is also not as life-changing, but that is okay. It's too large to post the whole thing in an LJ entry, but if for some reason you're really interested and want to read it, let me know and I'll e-mail it to you. Now the only thing I'm iffy about is figuring out the exact last line and making sure the title still fits.

Off to breakfast, then reading homework, then perhaps revising the story...

My creative writing professor has a tendency (one I don't terribly like, though I suppose I only slightly dislike it) to ask students, "Where did this story come from?" As though a) we know where it came from and b) it's something impersonal enough to share with a group of relative strangers.

But I'm thinking about the Satan story (titled "First Disobedience" in loving disregard for Milton), and how I'd answer the question if he asked me about it. I came up with the fact that it's a fictional theodicy (helpfully defined as "a vindication of the divine attributes, particularly holiness and justice, in establishing or allowing the existence of physical and moral evil"). And then I was thinking about the word "theodicy," and decided that it would be beautiful to write a story called "Theodyssey" about a main character questing to come to a personal understanding of the presence of evil in the world.

Yes. This will now be written!! Even if only for personal enjoyment.

EDIT: And I think I have the first paragraph (or at least the first draft of the first paragraph) of my story.

Intellectually, the Satan had known all along that his new job had a high turnover rate, but leaning back in his leather swivel chair and observing the view out the window of his 101st story corner office, he really didn’t understand why. He thought, as he had many times since receiving this ultimate promotion, that being the Satan couldn’t be any harder than his millennia spent as Sub-Director of Public Relations (Unnatural Disasters Department). At the very least, even if the job did turn out to be more difficult than he had expected, it would not be boring. Some jobs, no matter that they each served God in unique and meaningful ways, were made for angels of different stuff than he. A puny ten years as Customer Service Liaison for Lesser Mesopotamia had been enough to instill in him a desire for progression upward through the heavenly hierarchy, but the angel who’d succeeded him seemed to derive great joy from answering prayers about discomforts as diverse as crocodile attacks and food poisoning with the general sense of future well-being, which was all the answer that an angel of his status could provide.

:) Now I just need to write the rest of it!

ANOTHER EDIT: Gah. The story is already turning into something else entirely, and I'm not sure what to make of it. All I know is, I need to get to work!

ANOTHER OTHER EDIT MUCH LATER (4/23/09): But it's related, I swear. In the vein of Theodyssey, I should also write something that makes fun of exegesis (the process of making sense of biblical texts) called "Exe-Jesus."

I've got a lot of disjointed thoughts that I'm trying to manage in the hour before tutoring starts and I start earning money. In some kind of organization, then.

I heard back from the study abroad office, and I'm 99% guaranteed to be attending Queen Mary University of London. I'm incredibly looking forward to going abroad, and incredibly nervous, though not for the things that I should be nervous about -- mostly about how I'll deal with it snowing in the winter, and how my folks will handle an empty nest, and other unimportant details. Oh, and perhaps how I will eat. But that, too, is not such a big deal. All I know is, it's gonna be crazy and it's gonna be scary and it's gonna be good.

I don't have very much homework to do this weekend, which makes me feel very strange... There is nothing for me to be frantically working on, and that is not a common feeling! But I don't have any major due dates until after spring break, which is very nice and only slightly eerie.

In other news, we have yet another personal-soul-searching journal prompt from my creative writing professor: we're supposed to write about the one time we were totally and completely wrong. My response to this is summed up best by the response made by one of my classmates: "Professor Farber, anything I turn in will have to be fiction!" Not that I've never done anything wrong. But I can't believe I've ever been completely, one-hundred-percent, this-really-matters-and-you-screwed-up wrong. I take great pains not to be that kind of wrong. And if I had ever been that kind of wrong, I can promise you I wouldn't be telling Farber about it.

I'm really frustrated that we don't get to write about fictional characters in these journal entries; I kind of want to talk with him about it, but I don't think he likes me very much, and I think I've snarked my last snark (out loud, that is) about the journal topics.

If anyone knows of a time when I have been particularly wrong, please tell me. I am currently and honestly at a loss.

Also, I don't know what form he wants these "journals" to take. I write mine mostly as prose ramblings (much like this one) but all the other people I've seen write theirs as scenes in which they are characters. I don't know, that just doesn't do it for me. We're allowed to write about ourselves in the first person now, but even that doesn't alleviate my larger complain about these journals. This is a fiction class. Why aren't we allowed to write fiction??

In other news, we're starting to read Paradise Lost (Milton's epic poem about Genesis. Yes, you did just hear me right) in my Milton class and I'm pretty excited. It's part of what prompted me to write the story about the Satan that I'm still mulling over. Right now my problem is that I need to find the character that the Satan would not want to test -- the person who'd make the devil throw his hands up in the air and say, "Enough already! God, why do I have to keep testing this guy's faith? Isn't it pathetically obvious he believes?" I have this vague desire to set the story in New York City without ever having traveled there, and with very little knowledge about the place. Because I can see this Satan hanging out in NYC. Maybe the person that he's tempting is just a regular kid -- but in my head, when I picture that scenario the devil becomes the Lone Power and the kid becomes Kit Rodriguez from Diane Duane's Young Wizards books (which rock so many socks it's impossible to explain or describe).

(Over an hour later, after being distracted by a conversation and by having to go to work...)

So while walking to work I had this idea that chinchillas needed to end up in this story, but then I had this horrible idea that the boy that the Satan is trying to tempt has a chinchilla, and the Satan KILLS IT! And I almost have to die for thinking that. But now I have a strange image of the boy being a smaller boy (which I don't want to do, because not that I've read The Book of Joby, nor do I intend to before writing this story, but the kid in that story is younger I think) who looks like Kit but for some reason has Star Wars bedsheets and a pet chinchilla that gets killed by the Satan. GAH.

In other news, here are some pretty pictures of how I picture my Satan. Because he's a not-so-shameless rip-off of Diane Duane's Lone Power, except not really. I think my Satan looks kind of like if you could mix Satan from Paradise Lost and the Lone One from Young Wizards (come to think about it, on some days that's how I consider my ideal fictional religion -- a cross between Milton's and Duane's perceptions of their various fictional worlds...this does not make me more of a geek or anything, of course not).

I should probably go do my job now.