May 25, 2006
sneezing and sleeping
I'm home again - St. Louis home. After another email that Bryce so helpfully worked on with me (to up my assertiveness) I did get the ok to head home, and so I did.
The drive was...long. But sunny pretty much all the way. I only stopped twice, and there were no real problems until I pulled into my street and a squirrel and a rabbit both attempted to commit suicide by my car. Luckily, I avoided them and stumbled into the house.
There's not really much to report. Yesterday I recovered from driving, and wrote a little. But my day was not exciting - for which I am grateful, after reading Jo's adventure last night. (Omg scary!)
Trying to get back into the swing of writing
Totals for May 25th
Began: 13,202 words
End: 14,438
I'll do better today.
May 22, 2006
damn it
guess I didn't ask you to cross your fingers soon enough.
K and the vacation
So yesterday, I was supposed to have a meeting with my trainer at K. I was told it was a meeting, as were the other three trainees who were there.
So imagine our surprise when, instead, we had the first session of our training.
Argh. I've had such problems with that place and scheduling, and blah blah. I was hoping that I could put off training until after the family vacation, but here I was, and already I'd unwittingly started.
I called my mom to tell her I wouldn't be coming in this week, and her voice went from happy to sad faster than I've ever heard it. It's sort of gratifying, but also...well, I felt bad. And then I realized I'd be doing half the training, and then going away for two weeks anyway, and then completing it when I returned. And that seems, well...like a bad idea. I've emailed the trainer to see if I could just start with the next session of training instead - haven't recieved a reply. Keep your fingers crossed for me - I'd really like to go home this week. There's an opera on friday that looks amazing.
In other news, went dumpster diving again. That puts this spring's current list at:
one pair black stilletto heels
a milk crate
a set of bamboo coasters
a matted print
an espresso maker (though I've yet to see how it works)
a purse
a replacement coffee carafe for my espresso maker
a whole collection of records in decent condition
Not bad so far.
Writing Update:
started: 11,8887 words
ended: 13,202 words (48 pages) - obviously not as much as I'd hoped for.
May 20, 2006
the itch
My feet are covered in chigger bites. This makes sense. I've taken two walks into Tigerland over the past week, and the little path from our part on the edge to Tigerland proper is mostly just worn down grass.
I'm feeling the urge to move lately - to go traveling, to get away, yes, but other things too - to create, to cook elaborate artistic feasts, to build things. Which is good. It fits with what I'm doing right now. I've been productive this week. I feel productive.
I really want to go home for a while, though. I'm hoping that training will be scheduled for mid-June so that I can leave Tuesday. That would give me a week at home, and a week on the family vacation, which would be really nice. It's gotten hot in the past two days. Not quite Baton-Rouge-Summer hot, but getting there. But the view from my dining room is beautiful - lush and green and clear.
Writing Update for yesterday:
Starting word count: 7,387
Ending word count: 11,887. (That's 43 pages size 12 double-spaced) Woot!
May 19, 2006
dumpster diving
Yesterday, dumpster diving yielded a nice prize: someone's big collection of records. Everything from storybooks with records to childrens' songs to disco to 70's hair bands. It was lovely. I kept a few to bring to St. Louis and play on our record player, and the rest I think I'm going to bring to a used music store and see if I can get credit for them. A lot are in really nice condition - all shiny and lovely. So that was a fun find.
Today is graduation, so I'm figuring there will be a lot of stuff today, tomorrow and sunday. Woo!
Writing Update:
At the beginning of yesterday, I had 1,991 words written. By the end of the day I had 7,387. That's about 27 pages double-spaced.
May 17, 2006
Really Big Update, Finale (the future)
Towards the end of the semester, there were a lot of discussions among the MFA's on how we were planning to spend our summer. And by the end of themk, I was sort of...inspired.
I'd planned to work for Kaplan (which seems to be on track) and then look for a day job to save up some money. But then I talked to other people, the people I work with. And I came to this conclusion:
I'm here to write.
That's the entire point of me being here in Baton Rouge - to become a better writer. Most of the MFA programs acknowledge that what they really provide isn't an education so much as a chance to focus purely on your writing, possibly for the only time in your life. So that's what I'm going to do.
I'll work for Kaplan. I've even applied for a freelance copyediting job, but if I don't get it - no big deal. I have enough money if I'm careful. I'm taking this summer, and I'm going to see if I really have what it takes to be the kind of person who really, really writes for a living.
So the plan is, I will get up every morning and go to the LSU library, plug in my laptop, and write. I'll break for lunch, return and write until 4 or 5 pm. And at the summer, we'll see what happens.
My goals:
Finish Editing "Sylvia" and find a publisher to send it to.
Finish my movie script "And the Parrot" and ask Rick what to do with it.
Get a damn good start on my Young Adult fantasy trilogy
Outline and Research for "Blood Mysteries", a novel.
Send out short stories.
I need to build up a 'resume' of sorts, because this winter I will be applying for a women writer's grant, that would allow me to focus much more on my writing and stop worrying about things like bills.
But I'm not so stupid as to think I can do this without help and support. So that's what I'm asking for, all you wonderful people.
I'm asking for encouragement, mostly. That you guys give me a kick in the ass when I need it, and a pat on the head when I deserve it. That you keep an eye on me from time to time. And I'm asking for people who'd like to be readers.
Not editors, per se, but readers - people who will look over things I've done and tell me if they're crap or not, because after I finish a first draft I'm always convinced it's absolute trash. I'm not asking you to tell me it's good when it's not (in fact I really REALLY want you to tell me if it's not) but anyone who'd like to sign up to give me reality checks now and again, I would love you forever and ever.
So that's what life is - the Summer of the Novel. And I"m going to be posting updates of my progress on here, as a way of forcing myself to make some.
So cross your fingers for me, guys. It's going to be a really interesting summer.
Really Big Update Part 2 (more past)
When I left off, I was about to tell you of my hideous lip thing.
So, it started out with a small red bump. Nothing big, most people said they couldn't see it. But then it stayed, for weeks. Finally I asked Dr. Google what it was, and recieved a very scary answer. So I made an appointment with the dermatologist in the Health Center. *He* said that it was a swollen blood vessel, and that if I made an appointment they could numb me up and cut it out.
Hah, I said. That's expensive. Plus, the women in my family have a tendency to end up with keloid scars when we have things cut out - and I have to say, don't really trust the health center to be cutting on my face. I need my face. I use it every day, really! So I decided to wait, as it wasn't really that bad, and he said it was harmless. I had a vague idea of going to a good plastic surgeon in St. Louis (as my mother knows all about who's good and bad back home). This was a big mistake.
It stayed about the same for many weeks. And then one week, it started to grow. And grow. AND GROW. It swelled out and got huge and disgusting - seriously big, to the point where it was awkward to drink from a glass, and touched my upper lip when I said 'b' words. Worse than that, it started getting caught on things like my shirt when I changed and my towel when I dried off. And it got hard, and it leaked plasma. And I felt...really hideous, actually. I started keeping my mouth covered in public. It was weird.
But I got an appointment with a cosmetic surgeon immediately.
The day of my appointment (which was supposed to be an evaluation and a chance to plan for the surgery) the Doctor came in - he is a short, oddly-voiced man with no bedside manner. He looked at it, hemmed and hawed and said it looked like a granuloma, and he could make the next patient wait while he removed it.
"Oh!" the nurses said. "Oh my goodness. He never does that."
Yes. That's the way to make me not worry that there's something terrifyingly wrong with me.
He gave me a shot that BURNED LIKE FREAKING HELL until my lip got huge and numb. And then he sliced it off, stitched me up, and sent me home with no painkillers. Cue three days of constant agony and a lip the size of Goldie Hawn's in First Wive's Club. Also, cue an infection that I had to go to the health center for. But, after all was said and done, I can drink out of cups again, speak and brush my teeth, and I pretty much did it all by myself. Though when I was in there waiting to have surgery, I really really wanted someone to hold my hand.
And through this, I was going through the end of the semester. I had three projects: a first act of a movie script (27 pages) a non-fiction personal essay (25 pages) and a project for my Faerie Queene class. (25 pages) The last one was killing me slowly - I'd decided (smartly) that a creative project would be better than attempting to write a decent research paper that could stand among those of the PhD candidates I took the class with. So I ended up writing a faux-canto of 43 nine-line stanzas (rhyme scheme ababbcbcc) re-writing the story of two of the characters from Spenser's poem. I then added footnotes written by an unreliable narrator who, it turned out, was trapped within the footnotes and ended begging for his freedom. Then I wrote exerpts of the 'real' story behind the story in the poem, in which my heroine was a lot less heroic.
Oy.
But I turned the fucker in, and my other assignments, and even got all of my grading done on time. And now...
I'm done.
Done with the semester. Done with a third of my degree omfg. It's...wow.
Really Big Update Part 1 (the past)
This semester has been...well, insane.
I've had more weird crises this spring than perhaps ever before (not counting those created by myself in the past, such as the 'whoops, I got behind on my geography homework so I'll just stop turning it in' episode, the 'every time I open my chemistry book I start crying' episode, and the 'Fuck, I can no longer pay attention at all in math class' episode). It's also had a lot of real high points. But the most important thing about this semester, as far as the History of Stephie is concerned is this: I didn't lose it.
Now, spring semester is infamous in my family. Every spring that rolled around, from fourth grade onward, inspired a run of hysterics, wild assertions that I would flunk out of school and end up as a homeless person, and nights of sobbing myself to sleep. So generally I face the spring semester like a soldier about to go to war. This semester, however, I didn't lose it, no matter how many things went insane.
Bryce visited - which was awesome. But his visit ended up being a bit stressful for both of us. First, my car broke when I was supposed to pick him up from the airport. It just wouldn't turn on - not even a little bit. Not even a cough to assure me that it yet lived. Then his luggage was lost and - well, I had fun anyway, but poor Bryce spent a good portion of the trip arguing with the airlines.
At least he got some free stuff.
Then time passed. My grandmother, after going to the hospital with chest pains (cause by stress, we discovered - she has a damn good heart) finally put my grandfather into a home. It's a wonderful place, according to my family. There are fountains and nice nurses and all sorts of things. I think it's better for him to be there than at home, actually. He wasn't getting enough stimulation at home, and I think that was only contributing to his problems. My mom visits him six days a week, and often has him to dinner with my grandmother on the seventh. She's running herself ragged doing it, and juggling work and everything else. The older I get, the more I realize how amazing she is.
Then, one day I got the news that he'd been taken to the hospital after vomiting blood in his room at night -and aspirating some of it, leading to pnumonia. I'd been particularly stressed by classes and teaching that week. And suddenly...it just didn't matter. The Faerie Queene had no importance at all, when I was talking to my mother about funeral arrangements. The family opted not to treat his pnumonia, and to let him go. As my mother pointed out, if he'd known about what would happen to his mind, he would have told us to shoot him in the head anyway.
I wasn't ready. I guess you never are. I was closer to him this summer than I had been in years, and to me in a lot of ways he's still the same person who taught me how to make scrambled eggs and crack open hickory nuts in a grocery bag.
He got better - spontaneously. He's got a constitution of iron, and always has. So now the family is back to visiting him constantly, and he seems happy. At least that's what I've been told.
But that was a wake-up call, in a lot of ways, for me.
Rachel's visit was fantastic, beyond words fantastic - though first my car started 'not starting' again, and I had to take it in for repairs. That was $500 I didn't think I'd be spending this semester. But I handled that and renting a car on my own, and I'm pretty proud of that. And now I know that I can do it again when I have to, which is a good feeling.
When Rachel got here, it was...amazing. We did a ton. We cooked, we talked, we watched television. We went to New Orleans, where I had the best vegetarian meal I've ever had, and where Rachel strung along a poor former-millionaire named Lloyed (No, seriously!) to get me a free bottle of wine, which she then mostly consumed. Drunk-Rachel is hilarious. Drunk-Rachel calling everyone we know while I drive back to Baton Rouge is even more hilarious. I'm sure I'll write more about this episode later, because it seems Rachel isn't going to. Suffice to say that she looks more stunning every time I see her, and I'm hoping to use her as inspiration to lose weight this summer.
With Rachel gone, I had to buckle back down into schoolwork. This semester was grueling, as far as work went. I was stuck in a class called "Spenser's Faerie Queen" - an epic poem written in a faux-midieval style by a man during the Renaissance, full of historical Allegory and DEAR LORD WHY DIDN'T HE JUST STOP? The class would have been easier, but the professor had us turn in: a) seven response papers. b) an annotated bibliography of at least 20 sources. c) an outline and summary of our paper. d) a rough draft of our 20-25 page paper and e) a final draft. It was...a lot of work. And it was a lit course that I was only in because I had to take another class and it fit the schedule. Ah well. I've taken two Renaissance Lit courses now, so I guess I've got something of a concentration. Bizarre.
I was also teaching for a class entitled "Sex and Violence in Film Literature". In essence, it was a class that gave three credits and basically required at least seven hours of class time a week, in addition to reading Clauswitz, Freud, Nietzsche, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Remarque, Einstein and more. And this class? Was for Sophomores.
It was an amazing class. It was a class that I fervently wish I could have taken in undergrad. It also kicked my ass. The time commitment was amazing, the readings difficult, and the students felt the same way. Those who stuck to it, though - a lot fo them rocked my socks off. I had a few who made me happy just to work with them. That's...an incredible feeling.
I grew a hideous lip thing. No, seriously. But Lisa and her dad have just arrived to take me to India's, so I'll leave that for Part 2.
May 13, 2006
foodgasm
Every once in a while, there's a perfect meal. Not necessarily because of the quality of the food, but somehow it is exactly what you want. Just...exactly. Tomato sandwich on toasted, garlic-rubbed whole wheat baguette with spinach and mozzarella...it was absolutely perfect.
Mmm.
Real update coming later, I promise.