Ramble On...

No blacking out today.

As interesting and amusing and bizarre as that was, it left me with a really haunted after taste. The sense that my body rebelled against me. It's sort of humbling.

Today was my eight-hour shift at the library. Long shifts like that are nice because you tend to just settle in and understand that this is your whole day. It makes me start to pine for the whole not being a student thing. Being able to have that library job where I can help people all day, and then have the evenings to myself to write, or just hang out. It's kinda depressing to think that two years ago I would be saying the opposite, swearing that I could never have a nine-to-five desk job. And here I am now pining for it. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

I am coming home for Thanksgiving in a little under a week. I can't wait. It seems that life has been reduced to writing, class, work, riding the train, and counting the days between when I can disappear from Chicago. I have 180 days and 20 hours until my last class is over, unless of course I drop my last class, which means I will only have 180 Days and 16 hours. It's really tempting. The GRE is coming in 18 days and I haven't even cracked a book. This should have me far more worried than I am. Especially the math. *shudder*....

Thank god for audio books. I do 4 hours of "lost missing," which involves going shelf by shelf through the library with a list looking for books that are on the list and are on the shelf, so they can be removed from the list for the next time I go through the library shelf by shelf with the list. I get to listen to large portions of audio books because Lost Missing is a very mindless job, which only requires one out of ever 4 seconds of actual attention. The other three I can listen to audio books, and get twice as much reading done as I normally would. I'm listening to Stephen King's "The Shining" right now.

I shocked my tutor when I told her that I started a book a month ago, and I was planning on tearing a first draft out by New Years. She looked at me like I was ambitious, and maybe a little stupid. Raised eyebrows, briefly slack-jawed "o face." After reading King's "On Writing" I realized that he was right, that what I was doing wrong was letting projects take too long. A book should only take a few months to hammer out a first draft. Any longer and I've spent too much time thinking on. Here's my process theory in a nutshell. First Draft: Get it out. Second Draft: Fill in the weak spots. Third Draft: Now I have a large block. Now I have to chip away at the block, cleaning off the fat and excess.

I'll be back to finish this soon...