Work/ School Balance

I missed posing last week because it was a little busy in my neck of the woods. I had a lot of reading and a lot of writing to do. I read an interesting collection of short stories in a book called Cursed Bunny, which was oddly intriguing. I’m not going to say I was the biggest fan of every story in the collection, but they were interesting. I also had a short story to write because guess who decided the one I’d been working on for two weeks wasn’t what I wanted to submit and changed it to something else! I like the new story, though, so I can’t really complain. We’ll be doing workshop on it on Monday, so hopefully it won’t be too bad.

Thursday was supposed to be the day my big paper was due, a ten-page paper on four books, but my teacher was nice and decided to push it out another two weeks, so I have about a week and a half to finish it. I still have some reading to do, but I have a clear idea of what I want to do for the paper.

Thursday also brought about some good news and my HUGE sigh of relief. No more reading for my Thursday night class. I don’t have to bring home stories to critique; I don’t have any assigned reading (other than what I have to do for my paper). I do have to make changes to my short story and bring it to class, though. I can manage that. My other class has me revising two short stories that I wrote for it and critiquing the other students’ stories, along with two more books to read. I can do it.

Last weekend, I did something I didn’t think I’d do: I bought a ticket to the AWP Writers’ Conference. It’s not until March, and I’m not sure exactly what days I’ll be going, other than Saturday, but I’m looking forward to it.

I have sworn to never decorate for Christmas before Thanksgiving. I got my trees today, and I decorated them. They’re not the prettiest, but they work. I get two small live trees, so I can plant them in my backyard in the spring. Once I have my yard set up with them the way I want, then I’ll get an artificial one, but having a house put in the middle of a field doesn’t allow for much privacy unless the corn is grown. So, I’m planting alpine spruce trees. Plus, it’s just the dog, fish, and me, so I don’t really need a lot. I did decorate it with 90s country music playing, so it wasn’t exactly Christmas, right?