I am struggling to keep up as my poetry and fiction class (internal link) approaches its fourth assignment. One assignment builds on the next. If you don’t understand the previous assignments, you won’t be able to understand the current or upcoming tasks. At least not with confidence. I feel like I’m building on a broken foundation; I don’t know what my building will look like at the end.

I’m used to working on articles until I get them right, or, at least as right as they can be considering deadlines or the dictates of an editor. But here, with this class, I don’t work on correcting previous assignments, I go on instead to compose the next faulty essay or poem. It’s like an expanding balloon I can never get my hands around. I’m feeling very unfinished with my work. It galls me to leave things broken.

The instructor provides excellent comments and the critiques from fellow classmates are valuable. Our last assignment will be a revision of a previous work. I now have to get there. But now, right now, I have coffee to drink and at least ten Google alerts to go through. My off and on blogging for trial lawyers continues.

“The painting is finished when the idea has disappeared.” Georges Braque

“There is this one thing that I never ever want to know, and that is knowing how to give up on a true purpose. If it is necessary to rest, rest! But don’t forever be at rest and don’t ever give up on the rest of the unfinished task!” Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

“In hell there is no other punishment than to begin over and over again the tasks left unfinished in your lifetime.” Andre Gide