'is feeling all splintered'

So I consciously (obviously) left it well too late to get in contact with the Mary Ward Centre, A Friendly Place to Learn. Can I enquire about a few courses please, full, she said, full, and that one, and that one too, full, sorry. Yes, I joked, I know, I knew, I actually left it this late because I didn't want to use up my work points with these courses that imagine so much but deliver much less. I didn't say that.

Adult education. For people in the nine-to-five, who want to improve themselves, popularly. If that is the correct use of 'pop'. In a pop manner. It doesn't fit into my half career, or my experience. It felt wrong to apply for beginners' creative writing, I'm not a beginner, right, I've been 'writing creatively' for perhaps eight years now. It would be weird to be taught like a layman, because I'm not. Same with yoga, I'm out of practice but nowhere near the beginning.

It makes me want to use living here, and all it's resources. I have all these creative people around me, Ready, Able, to teach me. I have a level of knowledge that just needs a bit of human interaction to push it into production. A part of me wants the structure of a once a week reconnaissance, a part of me knows I know too much. I remembered reading about the pans, the amazement. Again it's that thing of jarred intelligence. Too much to go back, not enough to go forward. A very frustrating place.

I didn't do much at all today, except sort out my studio, still reluctant to call it that, but I have now removed all traces of art making and creating from my bedroom, which feels like a good thing. I tried to start writing a couple of things, it shouldn't be hard, she said, if you've written journals forever you've already written a novel. But at the time I didn't know what the story was, it's still not complete.

Story. Tale, anecdote, yarn, scenario, libretto, rumour, statement, account. Allegory, fable, short story, urban myth. "Since the short story format includes a wide range of genres and styles, the actual length is mitigated somewhere between the individual author's preference (or the story's actual needs in terms of creative trajectory or story arc)". Sounds hard.

"Many short story writers define their work through a combination of creative, personal expression and artistic integrity. As a result, many attempt to resist categorization by genre as well as definition by numbers, finding such approaches limiting and counter-intuitive to artistic form and reasoning. As a result, definitions of the short story based upon length splinter even more when the writing process is taken into consideration."

Splintered alright.