Craziness

I've been shamefully absent (still) from the blog scene and at the rate I'm going I'll be lucky to blog once a week. This poor blog has degenerated to a journal-style update of what's going on in my life, mostly because all of my deep thought-provoking thoughts are going into my school work. After I drain my mind there, I just don't have anything left for here!

Sooooo....here's what's going on in my writing life:

I finished the story summary for my screenplay and turned it in to my mentor. He thinks it's good material. He made suggestions, some of which I agree with, and otherwise turned me loose to write the outline. Whew. I was worried the story sucked, so it's good to have some affirmation! Now, on to the work of outlining....

The rest of my MFA classes consist of drowning in reading I can't possibly keep up with and trying to write meaningful, or at least coherent, responses to said reading. I'm not having a lot of luck with the reading or the coherent responses right now. I kind of feel like a college freshman asking, "okay, now why exactly do I have to read this again?"

I've got the first draft of my romance novel out to a couple of people to read and hopefully get some useful suggestions for revisions. I'd like to get those underway. I don't want the poor book to fall by the wayside. My evil plan is to get it (and the 2 subsequent sequels) published in order to pay for my student loans. *crosses fingers*

I'm also gearing up for NaNoWriMo in November. Because I don't have enough stuff crammed into my life, I thought it would be awesome to ratchet up the pressure on myself and try to write 50,000 words in a month. That's in addition to working full time and going to school full time. On the one hand, I could get the second romance novel in my trilogy written in a month. On the other hand in some circles they would call that masochistic. Glutton for punishment in others. We'll see if I survive November.

And, on top of it all, I'm presenting a paper at the Women's Studies conference at University of North Dakota in November.

I must be crazy.