I guess I’m really a grown-up now. As of today. Even if I was a hobbit, as of today, I’d be a grown-up.

Like Frodo Baggins at the beginning of Fellowship, I turned 33 today. The age at which Hobbits come of age and take on adult responsibilities.

I’m not saying that I have any plans for returning the One Ring to the fires of Mordor, or the rightful King to the throne of men, though I’ll admit that the tasks that I set for myself sometimes feel as gargantuan as the challenges that Frodo faces.

Not often, but sometimes.

More like Frodo, though, I’ve been reminded today that I have good friends, loving relatives, and a place to lay my head at night. And I’m thankful for all of those things. Very thankful.

And who knows, there may be a quest in my future after all. I’ll be on the lookout for the gray wizard, at any rate.

And, maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to write another post called “If I Was a Hobbit, Part 2” seventy-eight years from today, on my eleventy-first birthday.

I wrote, earlier in the week, about the question of what inspires writers. Or perhaps that question might be better expressed as the location of the line between inspiration, derivation, and plagiarism. And I’ve been thinking about it since I wrote that post.

(And I managed to miss the film version of Rebecca on tv last night—when it got home from my Saturday exam, I was exhausted, but I did some work, made some supper, and then fell asleep on the couch at about 7, waking up at nine, when the movie was half over. Anyway….)

I’ve been thinking about what inspires writers, and I’ve been thinking about my own writing (my academic writing, this blog, my creative work) and what inspires that. Funny thing is, I can’t come up with a good answer to those questions…. Or maybe the answers I’m finding are good in the sense of accurate, but they’re not good in the sense of satisfying.

Starting with academic writing. The biggest motivating factor for my academic writing is, simply put, “because I gotta.” It is expected of me, that I will write and publish academic papers, books, textbooks, and so forth—all the stuff that makes the academic world spin. And that expectation is my motivation. Now, I’m still fascinated by ideas, to be sure, and that fascination is what leads me to want to write about a particular topic—inspiration by fascination, you might call it. But the fact that there is such a disconnect here between inspiration and motivation is sort of disturbing to me.

But then there’s this blog. I know a number of writers who are, for the most part, very busy with other things, who claim that they keep a blog to keep their skills sharp. That the act of blogging is, for them, a way to keep in practice on the whole writing thing. Of course, I could claim that as my motivation, as well, and it’s certainly one of my motivators for blogging. But only one, and not a very big one. At this point, you see, I’m feeling, at least in part, extrinsically motivated to blog, too. I know I have a number of people who read here regularly (it may be a small number, but it is a number), and I don’t want to let them down. I actually felt guilty, in April, when I went a week or so without posting. And as to what I post here, it’s plain to see that not much of it is inspired, inspiring, or inspirational in any real sense. I’m inspired to write, most of the time, by some little thing that happens to me, strikes me as odd, or just seems somehow worth narrating, as I go throughout my day.

In my creative work is where I am the most inspired, and where I’m the most interested in other people’s inspiration, as well. What is it that inspires us to make up stories, to craft poetry, to create drama (particularly when most of us are already overwhelmed by the amount of drama in our lives). And here is where I find the most satisfactory answer for myself, too. I am inspired by ideas that intrigue me. Things I think about, but want to think about in ways that the rigid structure and expectations of academic prose can’t allow me to use. I tend to think best about the loftiest subjects in the realm of fiction and creative nonfiction—much better than I think about them in the realm of the formal academic. And I don’t question my motivations as much in this area, either, because I have yet to gain anything from the writing of fiction or nonfiction.

But I often wonder what inspires other writers as I read their work. What makes them want to write what they write when they write it? If you consider yourself a writer and you’re reading here, I invite your response. What inspires your work? Because I’d really like to know.

Rock Band, the video game, is fun. Or perhaps I should say that playing guitar for Rock Band is fun. I learned this last night, along with learning that I am way too uncoordinated to ever consider taking up the drums.

I actually returned to campus at 10 pm yesterday because one of my students had invited me to play Rock Band. Of course, this particular student (also my I’m-out-of-town cat sitter), is one of the group who were telling me just yesterday how awesome I am, and she admitted that the invitation was half joking when issued. But I went, and it turns out that three of my current students were there, out of the four students present, including the boyfriend of the one who invited me, who was putting finishing touches on his paper and presentation for my class (due at 1 pm today).

I didn’t try the singing. I was with students after all, so there was no alcohol involved, and while I can sing (I’m not half bad, really), I don’t generally do so publicly unless I’m at least buzzed. So no singing, and my clumsiness precluded me doing any good at all with the drums.

The guitar, however, was fun. And i got decent at it fairly quickly (might have to try a harder level at some point). I only played it on the easiest level, and even at that the most challenging song of the night, the last song we played, Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” still kinda kicked my butt.

The students said that they had just gotten the game earlier this week—and laughed about buying a new game that’s both addictive and a group activity right before finals. I had to laugh at that, too. Because I’m finding a couple of things lately.

First, for whatever reason, I’m discovering that it’s more fun to play games with other people. That’s never necessarily been the case for me before. After all, I’ve primarily been an RPG and plot-driven shooter player up to now. Since these games have such long arcs, it’s difficult to find enough time to play through them with another person (not to mention that many of them are designed to be single-player games). But, of late, I’m finding gaming of all stripes much more fun as a group activity.

Second, I learned that Rock Band is, in fact, addictive. I’m not necessarily thinking of getting it, though, because it involves a number of accessories for the PS2, and I’m thinking I have enough clutter in my life…. Also, while this particular PS2 game is addictive (and I have a PS2), I’m thinking too, that Wii is more addictive, and that’s pretty much what I’m jonesing for, in the video game world, right now.

But we’ll (Wii’ll?) see.

Several of my students reminded me today why it is that I fell in love with teaching in the first place. I’ve been feeling down lately about my job, and, in some cases, about the actual teaching portion of my job, because I haven’t had a great experience with most of what “I do” as a teacher this semester and this year.

Here’s what I mean. I really make an effort to give my students and their work tons of individual attention throughout the semester: I hold individual conferences with my students, particularly those in first-year writing classes, throughout the semester. I cancel class meetings, and I schedule ten minutes for each of my students to meet with me and discuss their work. I’ve done this six times with my first-year students this semester. These meetings have been productive, don’t get me wrong about that, but I feel like they could have been more educationally fulfilling for me and the students.

Today, however, some of my students made my day, week, semester. These were students in the Business Communication course, and they’re working on professional portfolios of their work, and they’re really working. And they have ideas, and they want to discuss those ideas, and they can discuss those ideas.

I went to the office today for four hours in order to meet with any of my students about whatever concerns they might have about their end-of-the-semester work in my courses. Two students from the Business Comm class took advantage. But those two really took advantage. I helped one of them with computer-related questions and difficulties twice. The other came to talk to me about organizing her portfolio and putting it together; we talked about her work, which of it to include, and how to present it all, for forty-five minutes this morning.

I guess what really made me feel good about these meetings was that I wasn’t there to fix their work, but to offer opinions and guidance, and to help them make their work what they know they want it to be. And it was great to discuss—really discuss—what they were doing, even at the very practical level of shaping their professional portfolios.

It was a really good day in the office. And I really do ♥ my students.

After spending more than a month reading Rebecca, I finished Stephen King’s Cycle of the Werewolf in a day. Really.

This likely has as much to do with the fact that the book is brief (less than one hundred pages total), and is lavishly illustrated. The text itself is basically a long short story, but not even as long as the novellas for which King has gained notoriety—often publishing them four at a whack in a collection of novellas.

The book tells the tale of a werewolf coming to a small Maine town. There is little explanation of how the wolf gets there and none of how a man becomes a werewolf. Instead, it focuses on the carnage that ensues at each full moon, and the town’s reaction to it.

Probably because of the brevity of the tale, the attempt at building suspense around the identity of the wolf—and there is some attempt, with the town’s constable noting that he couldn’t believe it would be the one person whom the evidence, at one point, indicates it could be—is not terribly effective. It is, after all, hard to build suspense when the identity of the wolf is revealed ten pages after the suspense-building device is introduced. (That, and I had figured it out before the constable was even able to doubt it.)

Beyond this, though, it is an interesting little story. The question of how one becomes a werewolf is never addressed, but all the other standard rules of werewolfery apply. Including, in the end, the silver bullet theory. That the person who figures it out and pulls the trigger at the end is a wheelchair-bound boy of ten, and the villain really is the person you’d least suspect…well, I guess that’s to be expected.

King, generally speaking, is a master of nuance and subtlety. Doing that in a work this short, and in which the illustrations are so much of the point (it’s actually misidentified as a graphic novel), is difficult at best. And while King appears, in this brief work to be the equal of that challenge, it doesn’t rise much above that level. This is not, definitely, one i would list among King’s best.

But then again, it’s not what he’s best at, either.

Two notes I’d like to add to the posts about Rebecca and the things that inspire writers, from yesterday.

A conversation I had later in the evening reminded me of another similarity between the the two books, and I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that I overlooked it in the first place. Both books (Rebecca and Bag of Bones) have a “name thing” about them. In both my review of Rebecca and my later musings on it, I noted that the the narrator, the second Mrs. de Winter, is never given a first name in the novel. The later conversation, last evening, reminded me that this is, basically, the point of the novel: the narrator has no identity prior to her marriage, and her marriage identifies her as Mrs. de Winter, but she, as Max’s wife, lives throughout the novel in the shadow of Rebecca. Rebecca who was also Mrs. de Winter, but had mystique and gravitas all her own, and which the narrator feels she can never share despite her best efforts.

In Bag of Bones, all the characters are named: the narrator is Mike Noonan; his deceased wife is Johanna Noonan; the young woman he falls in love with is Mattie Devore. The play on names is not in this odd three-sided relationship (or, perhaps, four-sided, when we consider that Mattie, at 20, is also widowed, though her husband, Lance, plays little role in the tale). The name game in King’s work is what the narrator describes as “sound-alike kids.” He has discovered that there are a number of children in his little corner of the world with similar names: Mattie’s daughter is Kira; Mike and Jo’s unborn daughter would have been Kia; Mike’s caretaker, Bill Dean, had a twin sister named Karla; the carpenter who Bill uses for repairs on Mike’s house is Kenny and Kenny’s younger brother, also deceased, is Kerry; and way back at the turn of the 20th century, a young boy drowned in the nearby lake—Kito.

I am ashamed to admit that I overlooked this similarity because the unnamedness of the narrator is the point of Rebecca; it is an extremely prominent feature of the novel, and du Maurier acknowledged that it became a challenge that she set for herself. And in paralleling du Maurier’s tale, King also plays a name game, albeit a very different one.

So one more similarity.

The other note is much briefer. Alfred Hitchcock’s film version of Rebecca is airing this Saturday night at 8 pm (Eastern) on TCM. Talk about serendipity!

I clearly should have mowed the grass before tonight. I’ve known this. I want to be clear about that: I’m well aware that I should have mowed the grass about two weeks ago.

Seriously.

But life got away. I decided I’d do the mowing tonight. And I got about half of it done. You see, the grass was high enough that the mower was stalling frequently. And then the starter rope broke. There was enough left that I was able to restring it, and I thought I was ready to start mowing again.

Pulled the rope and it broke again. Need a new starter rope for the mower. It does, at least, look good looking out from the front of the house. I’ll need to get a new rope tomorrow, fix the mower, and address the inverse mohawk my back yard is currently sporting.

But I do love mowing the grass.