Monday, February 26, 2007

A new week, a new outlook

Thanks for all of you who helped me (on here and off) to get myself into a better mood. The Buddhist instuction to meditate on the fact that nothing is permanent is a helpful one, as is reaching out to friends.

I'm relatively happy with my first draft of my new story, which is also helping my mood. I know I've got a long way to go before I'm ready to submit it, though. I'll start on one of my annotations tonight.

A question for my fellow MFAers: are any of you doing reading for your IS (or have done it in the past)? I'm finding it very hard to balance reading for that project and my regular MFA reading. Wondering if anyone has any solutions on that front.

I'll also post later a draft of my short short story on riding the bus and dumping out your purse, which I mentioned in an earlier post. Best Blogger Tips

2 comments:

Idiot Cook said...

Congrats on getting through a tough week. Mercury goes retrograde in March which is an excellent time for revisions (doing anything with an "re" prefix). I look forward to reading the bus story.

As for your question, I struggle with balancing the work for the IS (both reading and writing) with the core submission work. I don't have any suggestions but am hoping some of the others weigh in (I'm especially finding it challenging toggling between nonfiction and fiction--I wonder if I use different parts of my brain?).

Keep at it, Bug! :)

Repeater said...

Yeah, balance is the issue. I personally have to do one thing at a time, so for several days I'll only read a book for annotation, write the annotation, and then read a book for IS, take notes, write that, etc. Generally I try to get the annot. out of the way in the first week (I think of it as power reading), leaving the 2nd week for IS, 3rd & 4th for my own writing (& getting a jump on the next month's readings if there's time). Don't know if that helps, but it works for me.