aamcnamara

I have been sick. Just a cold, but enough to fuzz my brain and make me not want to do work, or anything else. I did my work, though, yesterday and the day before, and my reward for virtue is a GIANT SNOWSTORM and no classes this afternoon and tomorrow. 6-8 inches already, apparently.

In celebration, we are having tea. And I picked up the copy of Among Others I'd ordered in, so I have some new pleasure-reading waiting for me as well.

As of yesterday evening, most of my REU applications are totally complete! One of them I have to polish the essay for, another I have to print out and mail forms, but all the rest of them are in and so are my transcripts and recommendations.

Which all means that I am a really happy, not very stressed at all Alena, and over the next day or so expect to finish up the last-last-last of REU applications, slush, do homework for Thursday and Friday--but this afternoon to do nothing productive or practical at all.

Massachusetts winter, you have good timing. I think I'll keep you.

As of this evening, there's one fewer novel outline on my wall. First-and-a-half draft of A Returning Power is done.

I knew for a while it would be shorter than 80k (or 70k, or 60k...), but I kept not shrinking the meter--I think because I didn't want to make myself believe I was closer to the end than I actually was. But 47.3k seems a perfectly adequate length for this novel to be, and it has pretty much all the things in it that I wanted to be in it and pretty much none of the boring and/or pointless parts.

This novel rounding out just under 50k while scores of NaNoers race on toward the finish line make me think about NaNo and me and writing. The process of redrafting this novel was way, way, way different than my NaNo process ever was. It also took much longer, taken as a whole (started this summer, finished up, well, now). In some ways I miss the scramble and particularly the community of NaNoWriMo. But (at least right now) I like this novel and I think it works in a way that I personally doubt, given my method and attitude toward NaNoWriMo, ever would have happened for me in that hurtle toward the finish line.

Which boils down to: it's true what they say. Writers really do all have different processes, and different things that work for them at one time or another.

The break was awesome--I got to hang out with vcmw and drink lots of tea (five kinds between Friday and Saturday, and all excellent) and work on novels and talk about whatever and anything. She has the smart and also experience of the world I do not. I think she's great.

Came home to a rejection notice from Apex. Out again, small story! Out!

Now there's just one novel hanging on my wall... and that physics homework I really should be working on before I collapse into my bed. What was that you said? No, it's not due tomorrow... 'course not. Nope.