vixalicious | Long, rambling update (Reply)

I've been meaning and meaning to update, but I never get around to it. So in a nutshell, what I have been up to:

*Went home to Missouri for the 4th. It's a big holiday for my family, and we're all about going to the lake and going boating and water-skiing. The lake is up really high with all the rain they've been getting, up higher than my dad, who is 73, can ever remember it being. Here's a picture, which is probably only funny to people who know what it normally looks like, but suffice it to say, the lake, while always ahead, not usually that close:

Anyway, good times. Got to hang out with my sis, my brother and his wife drove in from Boston, and my cousins were down from Iowa. I managed to get the first actual sunburn I've had in probably a decade, in which I managed to burn my back, and ONE SHIN. Just one. It was a good look, let me tell you.

*Got back, managed to do absolutely nothing for two days, except for read a fantastic book, My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Piccoult.

krazycat recced it to me, and it was so amazing. One of those books that makes me wonder why I even want to bother trying to write, because how can I ever do anything close to that?

*Which was an excellent way to feel when starting a course on Creative Writing, which I did last week! Fear my timing, people! :D I'm taking a five week course from Emory University's night school. By the end of it, we are promised to have two chapters of our novels written, and then critiqued by the professor. Last week, I had to leave a bit early, so I missed the in-class writing assignment. Our homework though was to write the first three pages, or the hook. I got it done, sort of - I wrote 3 pages, but didn't finish my scene. I handed it in anyway, we'll see what he has to say. Tonight was the second class, and we did a couple of in-class exercises. One I did well on, but the second one was a group assignment and it was hard to corral everyone, without taking over. We were supposed to be constructing a scene based on information given to us by the teacher, and they kept wanting to write the whole story.

*Last week I was in Florida. Not much happened. My insomnia, which had gone away while I was on vacation, came back full-force. Whee. This is partially why I didn't get my scene finished; creativity is low when sleep is deprived.

*This week, we are meant to write the first chapter of our novel to turn in on Monday. The only problem is that I'm not sure what length the professor is looking for. I sat down tonight after class and wrote out an outline for what I consider to be the first two chapters, and wrote the first scene of the first chapter. Then I tried to figure out the length requirement, because I am a brown-noser student :) The teacher talked about his first novel being 50K, with 60 chapters. That seems a bit short though, because that would mean a chapter is only 834 words. Maybe once I read the assigned text it will be clearer. Either way, I got 695 words written tonight, and my goal is to write one more scene and fix the intro this week.

So I'm trying to learn to parent myself again while I'm home, since I'm not traveling for the next month (knock on wood). My plan is to try to practice my drums in the morning before work this week since I'm working West Coast hours, then after work to write from 10 to 11pm, quickly get ready for bed and then watch the Colbert Report and go to bed by midnight. We shall see! The laptop is no longer allowed to go upstairs with me.

Also, since the Colbert Report just finished, I'm off to bed.

ETA: And of course, I type this all up and LJ freakin' goes down. Guess I'll post it tomorrow!