Holy Hand Grenades! *relieeeeeeef!*

This morning, I had a course survey for History of Pop Culture in my inbox, so I suspected that meant my grade had been entered. Cue nibbling of nails! I didn't want to check my grade while at school because, if it wasn't what I wanted to see, then I would be crabby all day and not in the right frame of mind to interact productively with my students. So I waited till I got home and ...

I got a 96.67% on my final paper! \0/ \0/ \0/

That makes my final grade a pretty dang respectable 97.3%.

Yes, yes, I know some of you are wondering why I was even nervous. I know I'm smart. I know I'm a good writer and a conscientious (to say the least!) student. (It has taken almost three decades to be comfortable in saying that.) But this paper was really a challenge for me. I'm not a historian. I haven't been this frustrated by an assignment in a long time. It's not the kind of thinking or writing I'm used to doing or even that I particularly like doing. Some of the books I read for the paper were wonderful, but others were fall-asleep-at-my-desk-boring treatises on the economics of agriculture, localism, et cetera. Most were in between. The topic is one that I love--sustainable ag--but the approach was one that I don't. I'm not a city girl, either, for a reason. I had to wrench the paper back time and again to an urban studies focus. It wasn't fun, which is rare for me to say of a writing assignment. I wish I could say that it was.

But I did it and, apparently, did it well. The professor said it was one of the best he'd read. Not bad for a non-city-girl and non-historian! I'm very happy.

100 Things Challenge (#3): Confidence and the Wimpy Writer

Today, I received good news about a paper I'd written for my recent grad school class, but for the first time in a long while, I'd been very nervous about something I'd written. It's that comfortable old dread, that sudden realization of the possibility that one has labored hard and still produced a dud. As I clicked through the university's website to view my grade, I had butterflies in my stomach.

I've often thought about writerly confidence and its relationship to skill as a writer. I was once the wimpiest of wimpy writers; I still am wimpy in some ways. And in working with other writers in the capacity of a peer and as an editor, I've made my share of observations about how wimpiness and confidence seem to relate to skill and success, however one chooses to define the latter.

( Writerly wimpiness, for me, coexisted beside a tiny flicker of hope. )