Preparing to Talk to CW2.

Time Spent: 5 hours.

Ah yes, more catch up. Fortunately, it's Spring Break and I'm on vacation, so I have plenty of time to get caught up. My goal for this week is 25 hours for my AST. I haven't totaled my hours lately, but this should put me slightly ahead of schedule. Which is a great thing. Next week, the crap hits the fan - from here on out I am busy, busy, BUSY with school. Tuesday I'm visiting Joanna's creative writing class to talk about flash fiction and the AST. Thursday we visit River Styx in STL. In about three weeks we'll go to Urbana to visit The Ninth Letter, then the public reading is the 28th of April. And I still have to do all of the AST work (site visit, midterm, final) and my work for other classes as well. Just thinking about all of it makes me short of breath. There's so much to do. PLENTY of time to do it all, that's not the problem. It's just so much, and I really have to pace myself and stay disciplined, or it won't get done. It's got to get done. Breathe in, breathe out. OK, that's a little better. Repeat as necessary.

Sunday I also bought the newest issue of Writers' Journal Magazine. The headlines are great: "Stop Procrastinating" and "Shut Up and Write." Ha. It's like it was specially written just for me. ::snort::: No, I'm sure I'm not the only writer who needs to hear those things. The first two articles were on rejection letters/finding the right publisher for your story - timely, considering I received my first rejection letter for "The Monster Under the Bed" in the mail today. It was actually kind of exciting, as far as being rejected goes, because hey, you gotta start somewhere, right? Jeff said we'd get a photo album or something for all my rejection letters so that when I do get something published, we can look back at them and laugh. I really thought I'd be upset, at least some, but I'm not. I'm surprised I heard back so quickly - they said they looked at it, but honestly, I wonder. ::chuckle::: But that's alright. Anyway - the best thing I read yesterday was "don't take it personally," so I'm not. And the tips on beating procrastination were good as well. I'll need to cut that article out and stick it on every wall of my house, I think.

As I said, next Tuesday I'll visit the creative writing 2 class and talk about some things I'm doing for this project, so that's what I spent a good chunk of time working on. I dug out my WD Writer's Yearbook 2006 from January and made a list of some of the good sites they could look at to help them in their writing endeavors. I'll mention Lit Buzz some (and remind them that looking through all those broken links takes immense patience and an open mind - you know, I'm STILL only about 2/3 of the way through all those links, and that's just the literary journals section. There's a whole section on publishers and ezines in there too). I'll also tell them a little about the Applied Study program and how my project fits into it, then of course I talk to them about my love of flash fiction. I'm nervous about speaking to them, but I'm looking forward to it as well. I think I still have a few more hours of work to do before I'm really prepared, but I have plenty of time to prepare.

But it's good to look at what I've done so far because it shows me exactly what I've been learning from this project. It's shown me what I want to go back and look at again, what I need to look at a first time, and what I can tell them works or doesn't work.