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Note to self for future: when you are flaily about some big task, try sitting down, writing out (truthfully! honestly!) why you are flailing about it, and then developing from there into actual things you can do about it. You are a writer. This is how your brain functions.

(Not every writer's brain does. But mine does sometimes, and more than I remember.)

I don't know that I have made material progress on my Conway research proposal--downloaded a bunch of scholarly articles, skimmed some of them to find out they weren't taking the tack I was trying to find--but I am way less flaily and stressed about it now. Which is progress of its own sort.

Today and tomorrow are Reading Days for the college, so we don't have classes and finals don't start until Friday. Which is nice, except for the part where it's cold and grey outside and ohmigod it's snowing. Okay, so that just made my day about ten times better.

At any rate, I am thoroughly uninspired to study for my finals, which is why I am writing a post instead.

Things I have done:
- written out equation sheets for the physics final
- typed up review questions for philosophy

Have yet to do:
- go over calculus material, obtain 3x5 notecard, write things on it that I will not remember
- actually go through the philosophy review
- study for my sociology final

On the other hand, there is all of tomorrow, so really I am just going to sit here and pretend to work on my philosophy review for a while. (Which is, of course, the best way to make myself do something.)

I also wrote some truly terrible poetry today. Terrible in that--well, it was; but largely because I haven't written poetry seriously for about seven years, or at all really for two, and it's the sort of thing that needs to be in one's ear. My mind is trained for prose, so it doesn't work out so well when I try to stick in a poem here or there.

Haven't decided one way or the other on Arisia yet. Seeing the full programming schedule will probably help this decision.

I've been working on The Urban Fantasy Novel in driblets here and there. (I've been busy, both in the taking-up-time way and the distracting-things way, but making an effort once in a while.) I was going to work on that this morning, but then I got distracted by the terrible poetry. I'm very close to 10k at the moment, which is a nice feeling although in the larger terms it's not all that much progress. On the other hand, J-term should serve very nicely to give me time to work on the draft.

This has been another Rapid Sum-Up of what happened my life while I was forgetting about LJ. Well, not everything. I left a lot of bits out. All the exciting things really. But those are for other posts and other days. Maybe. If you're lucky.

20k (or 17k) feels like less when it's at the end of a novel than at the beginning, but it still feels like a lot.

In other words, when I had the first 20k of this novel, I was very pleased with myself. I felt like I had gotten a lot done.

Now, with 20k (or rather 17k) left of the novel, it just feels like I have the last few events to put into place and then it will all be done and over with. Which is... not really true.

On the other hand, I can't think of this 20k (17k) as being A Lot Wow, because if I do, I will start to panic and never get anything done.

I thought it was supposed to get easy near the end?

I guess if it turns out to be shorter I can just add in a few thousand words of Epilogue where they all apologize to each other for being mean and everyone reconciles. Or don't reconcile. And in the next draft I will actually describe things instead of just being vague, and that will make up for it, and no one will ever know.

(Yes, this is known as bribing myself with the promise of Easy to get myself writing, because probably my length prediction of 80k will turn out to be right anyway.)