Wednesday, February 22, 2012

I'm not sure if we are required to have a post for today considering we weren't supposed to have homework over the long weekend, but better safe than sorry. It's going to be a short one today, though, because I didn't work a lot on Focus over the weekend--somehow I managed to have homework in every other class.

I've been working on revising the first short story (Interior Space) and so far it's been coming along pretty well. I have it all organized and laid out--all in handwritten notes--and I have completed a few pages as far as actual rewriting. The problem is that several of the main events need to be organized and because that draft itself was so thoroughly revised, it's difficult to copy and paste things to new places and have them still make sense. One of my guiding questions is about revision and this week has definitely helped to answer. It's been a little rocky just because of the time constraints--Lit and Art History have really been kicking in, this week in particular--but after tomorrow (after my art history test) hopefully I will be able to put more time and effort into the work I have to do for Monday. I have workshopped only one of the four pieces I have to do for next week, and I've been falling a little behind on the morning pages. I have not done the vision exercise yet (this is all from Shelly's class) but I have to get around to it, otherwise there will be trouble. Myla Goldberg's class starts in a few weeks and I'm excited for that, too--that workshop I actually had to apply to and I think it's a miracle that I got in.

I've been toying ever so quietly with the idea of a novella instead of several short stories because with every draft, Interior Space grows and grows and grows... I'm not sure what the page count would have to be on that, but I think once I start going upwards of 20-30 (which is not too far a stretch at this point) I'm going to have to consider that I might not have time to do another short story of the same length and that my time might be better spent working on a novella rather than scrambling to come up with new material. And of course I could just link scenes from my potential short stories (I have notes everywhere, literally everywhere) into the original so that I could have a multi-scene text going on. I just read The Dead by James Joyce in Lit and I have a feeling that's where I'm going to come out, although I would die to have my own work be half as good as his.