As most of you probably noticed, I was very outspoken in class today. “The Bloody Chamber” is, in fact, one of my favorite stories, and Angela Carter’s works are, as a general rule, brilliant. If anyone ever wants to read good short stories, seriously, just check out her book The Bloody Chamber (Tanith Lee’s Red as Blood is also good, not Carter good, but good non-the-less). Now that I am done making my little plug for two of my favorite authors/research topics, I’ll move on…

The exercise we did at the end of class today about rewriting another person’s story was both easier and far more difficult than I had expected. When I started reading the piece I was to rewrite I admit that I had no idea how to do it. I say this not because I haven’t re-written stories or expanded on plot-bunnies before (I actually keep a file-folder on my computer that contains a whole slue of plot ideas that spring to my mind at random, usually in the form of little “camera flashes” that are between a sentence and a page in length. Assignment 3 was actually written from a 100 word “flash” I had had on file for over a year). What was so hard was that I was rewriting someone else’s work. I guess the part of me that believes strongly in the intellectual rights of author’s to their own works made me balk; this, after all, was someone else’s personal life I was recreating as fiction. Once I got past that the writing was fun and went very fast, but it was strange just how much, and for how long, I was hung up on that little fact.