Hm.. umm.... I hate Literary Magazine. Yes. At first, I liked it--dare I say, even, looked forward to it. It was a lot of fun when I was merely a poetry editor, but this year it's just... ugh. Okay, first of all, even though I'm an editor, no one ever tells me anything, which is why I'm rendered totally useless in the current crisis we are experiencing, which is that Kinko's doesn't have the magazines ready and they need to be ready so we can send a copy to Wordsmith. But I basically know nothing about anything, since Ms. Garrison had the other editor do it, so I don't know why she keeps asking me things that she knows I don't know, because I was never told them in the first place. This isn't the other editor's fault--like me, she's only following orders, the other thing I'm really hating. I thought that, if I were editor, I'd have some influence as to how things were done. Turns out I have none. Less than none, really. All that's changed is that I do a lot more work. I thought this would be easier this semester since the spring edition doesn't go to competition, and maybe it will, but so far it's been really annoying due to this crisis and due to the fact that, FOR SOME REASON, I'm being used to run Wordsmith errands as well (I'll get to why I hate Wordsmith now in a minute =P). So yesterday I literally walked over the entire school--we are talking every nook and cranny of this place, I even got to see the inside of the Shop room, very interesting o_o;--delivering Wordsmith nonsense.

Wordsmith (which I've poorly explained here before; if you want something better then go here), which used to be controlled by a freshman english teacher, is now controlled by a junior english teacher. This teacher is an intelligent man, to be sure, but he plays favorites like no other teacher I have seen before (excepting an art teacher), and I've never had him. This is not to say that he would like me even if I'd been a member of his class, but me not being a member of his class puts me at an immediate disadvantage. Not to say that I was chosen as an alternate twice solely because of his favortism (or even -largely-, as the two that are picked are -excellent- writers from what I've read), but when he chooses the exact same team two years in a row... -__-; I don't know. I'm just inclined to think it's a bit of favortism because of the way he acts.

Besides that.. Wordsmith, once the novelty of writing about objects and photographs and so on wears off... isn't all that enjoyable. It was for the first two years, and I was kind of looking forward to it last year (which is why I was pretty crushed when I was only the alternate) but this year I realize that I would have thought it was a pain in the ass even if I had been selected.

And even the Creative Writing class I took (with Ms. G, who is a good teacher but is more into poems than stories, which is my preferred modus operandi) wasn't all that geared towards the stories I like to write--in fact, Ms. G basically uses it as an auxiliary source for gathering lit mag submissions, it seems. -_- I guess this is what I fear the most about college, although since Rhodes has courses specifically designated as 'fiction' and 'poetry', I don't think it'll be too much of a problem.

So yeah. I do not like the way fiction/creative writing is handled at my school, is what it boils down to. But I did enjoy the CW class, actually (and we did actually get to write a short story near the end, which was great, although I've lost mine which is too bad because I liked it n_n), and since we were usually prompted, it being mainly about poetry and/or incredibly short prose wasn't that big of a deal. It's really Literary Mag that I just hate, because I thought when I was editor I could change the things I disliked (the elitism that happens in the selection of art and writing, for example), but I couldn't and I can't, and it sucks.