A liveblog of my thoughts while reading Stitch Bitch

I am not done with the fourth paragraph of ‘The Patchwork Girl’ and I am already lost and confused. Well, that took long.

Shelley Jackson says that her favorite writing is “impure, improper, and disorienting.” Really? I could hardly tell.

Her writing seemed to skip around like a record with a nice scratch on it, leaving me perplexed and wondering what the hell was going on exactly. What is the point of her writing? Was she mad at this woman impersonating her (at least I think that’s what the introduction was about)? Was she talking about hypertext? Was she talking about her favorite types of writing, about how one should be able to write whatever they want, whenever they want without fear or consequences?

Ok, I need to write this down now: halfway down on page 245, she openly says she wants readers to steal her ideas. She wants them to plagiarize her and that she would openly do that back. As a journalist, this bothers me more than anything else. You are taught from elementary school through college that plagiarism is the worst thing you can do as a writer, not something to be praised and encouraged. As a writer, you do not steal ideas. You come up with your own ideas and perhaps borrow concepts from others, but nothing more than that.

That’s it. I quit. I cannot follow this. I am on PDF page six of eight and am still not 100% sure what is going on. I understand that Ms. Jackson loves nonlinear stories, but it is darn near impossible to keep up with this. Maybe if she started off by explaining her love of nonlinear writing earlier in the story, it would have worked better. But it just did not work out for her, at least not in Stitch Bitch.

I lied. I made it through the end. I can agree with her statement about how nonlinear stories can be as entertaining as a “long and complicated novel,” but as I stated in the above paragraph, it was a fail here. Good effort, good job Ms. Jackson.