Metablog on Metafiction

I am not writing this. This blog is writing me.

I did not want — nor was I able — to write this myself. I will create a persona as I go along, let’s call him Ronosaurus, that will do the work for me, someone simpler, who does not get pimples nor have a crick in his neck (such things will not be mentioned). Not only will I simplify, I will fictionalize myself and make myself seem smarter, more well-read, wittier, and, while I am at it, better looking. But this is not a story about me, it is a story about stories. To tell it, I must invent a speaker, which I will call, for convenience, myself. The needs of the blog will determine the voice I use. If you know it is a lie and I know it is a lie, then I will be telling the truth.

The big, big project is to tie together all the stories of the universe into one, to make sense of everything, and to determine who we are in relation to the stories we hear and tell. The impetus for these writings is a class I have designed and will teach myself, under the guidance of the somewhat-fictional Doctor Geoffrey Green, professor, metafictionist, and Don Juan. As I should write “sorties of interpretation” for him, I will include him in the story as the second reader after myself, but I hope others — friends, colleagues and maybe even strangers — will join me as well. If you can’t make it, don’t worry, you are already written you into the text. All my readers are imaginary at the point of writing. My examination of metafiction will be informed by a class on narrative theory taught by the matchless, mysterious Doctor Hackenberg. (Can I in good conscience say my writings will be informed by her class if I haven’t taken the class or written much yet? Well, by saying it, I am wishing it so. By imagining what may happen here, I might make it happen.)

This will also be a blog is about reading, writing, teaching, and making blogs. Since my goal is to teach literature and writing, I will be reflecting on how I teach and how I learn from myself, which fits in perfectly with the class I am taking from cyborg and scholar Kory Lawson Ching, “Teaching Writing in the Digital Age.” The writing process has changed completely; for example, the concept of drafts is obsolete. Instead we work with the text we have, correcting, rewording, reorganizing, as I am doing here. There is no final version of this blog, since I can edit it at any time. It is only final when I have abandoned it and you have stopped reading. This blog will serve as the new media project for the class. I confess I am a complete beginner at blogging (what an awful word: blah, bog, logging, plodding and blocking), so I will also be reflecting on blogs themselves and how we write them and how we might use them to teach ourselves and others, thus it is a metablog on a metaclass on metafiction and I am the metateacher and the metastudent, but you, the metareader, are the one that makes this possible, for if I could not imagine a reader, I could not write. You are writing this blog because once I am done typing (am I ever done revising?), it is up to you to recreate the text.

At least that is how the story goes.