06/12/00 -- Can you say "Sleep Deprivation"?

I knew you could

I wound up awake until 2am this morning.  Hit about 2300 words on the story, then wrote another 200 before I went down to class this morning.  Unlike I remember from previous Clarion journals, we weren't assigned submission stories Sunday night to crit for this morning.  Probably a good thing.  Most of us were trying to get something written to turn in this morning, though.  Two of us managed.

I wasn't one of them.  But I think I'll have this story ready to go in tomorrow morning. Going to try and schedule my conference with Suzy for Thursday or Friday.

Suzy's great.  We got gloom-and-doomed this morning, but it reinforced what I already knew (to some extent) about the pro industry.  It's hard.  Making it requires luck.  I jokingly asked the requisite, "What's the secret handshake."

Before you ask, there isn't one.  But I knew that, already.

The weather cooled off drastically (and I'd be perfectly content to keep it this temperature the rest of the summer!).  I think that's why I managed to sleep last night.  Actually hauled the PFT(tm) (purple fluffy thing) up over me and stayed quite comfortable.  Didn't want to get up when the alarm went off, nonetheless.  I dunno how long I'm going to be able to keep going on 5 or 6 hours of sleep a night.  I really need more than that.  I'm going to try really hard to get at least 8 tonight.

Except I want to finish this story.  And we have five stories to crit for tomorrow morning, too: the two new ones turned in this morning, and three that Suzy picked from submission stories.

Suzy talked about Zen painting during class this morning.  Sounds interesting.  You draw/paint/whatever without looking at what you're doing.  You just look at the thing you're painting/drawing/whatevering.  It's an exercise in observation.  I might try it, at some point.  Then she went on, later, to talk about something that sounded like the same thing, only with writing.  She said to turn off the monitor and type with your fingers on the home keys (so you know what you typed when you go back to read it!).  I'm thinking about trying that after I finish this story... just to try something new, something different.  Maybe my muse will sneak up on me with her sledgehammer and hit me a little bit harder than she did yesterday while I was listening to Nick Cave's Murder Ballads.

Oh!  And I have Green & Blacks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Karen, goddess that she is, brought a lovely supply of Green & Blacks to use as currency.  I'm in heaven and I haven't even opened the bar, yet.

I should actually be able to upload my journal (newly updated in frames!) today, too.  There are a couple of folks who have the IPs and what we need to do to get set up.  Apparently we have something we need to setup to get our machines registered with the DHCP or somesuch, and then everything should be set.  Whee!  I'll just have to be good and not use the 'net for too much.

And speaking of Karen.... She's a trip and a half to go shopping with.  Controlling her is almost as difficult as controlling me when I'm impulse shopping.  Only she gets far more excited about produce and other such grocery type things than I think I could ever manage.

It pissed down rain on us on our way back from Meijer's this afternoon.  Karen, Jen, Buck and I wound up absolutely soaked.  Ugh.

Back in my room, with a bag of beef jerky for dinner, I procrastinated.  I wrote.  I critiqued.  I wrote.  Oh, and I did my assignment.

At least, that's how it worked in my little fantasy world where I have enough time to do everything I could possibly want to do (and at least 32 hours in each day in which to do them).  I actually procrastinated, wrote, read, critiqued and whined about how late I was awake.  No more major bouts of procrastination for me (though the conversation was really interesting!!).  I saved the assignment for first thing in the morning and reset my alarm to give me an extra half an hour to get it done before class started.

I just hope it stays as cool as it is right now.  I doubt I'll be so lucky.

 

(Oh, and we got our student ID cards today.  Wowzers.. I think this is the first photo ID I have that I don't look like a terroist in!)