Today...

I finished my essay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Okay, I'm not entirely done. I still have to add a conclusion, and revise it for clarity and strong support, and it ends on the 6th page instead of the 5th so there's some cutting to do, but for all intents and purposes I'm done. All the hard thinking has pretty much ended. I just wanted to let everyone know how excited I am to be blogging instead of writing my essay. Remember all those things that I had to remember in order to write this essay? All of that has made it one of the most difficult essays I've ever written. But I still love being an English major. Occasionally I look at the requirements for other majors, and some of those classes sound like fun, but there's just no way in the world I would ever switch my major. If I changed anything it would be my Creative Writing emphasis (which I would hypothetically trade for Literary Studies) but I only have a year of that left so I might as well finish. And I am learning a lot.

I haven't written anything for my story yet. Yikes! I'm hoping to get at least 8 pages done tomorrow before my student-instructor conference on Wednesday.

I still haven't read any Jane Eyre this weekend, and it doesn't look like it'll happen for another week or so because I have to write this 20 page story and I have poetry homework to do and I'll have to start reading a Victorian novel. Think the length of most Charles Dickens books and I have to read that between now and the end of the semester in April. Which I guess isn't that bad except that this novel was originally published in sections over the course of a year, so Victorians had some time to delve deeply into the book.

So I realized I keep talking about my 20 page story #2 but I haven't said anything about story #1. That was a 10 page requirement and I wrote about an art history graduate on a tour of Italy (she told us to write about a gutsy topic and mine was a travelogue--lame I know). The thing I want to talk about though isn't the actual story but the workshop. I had to print 20 copies of this story for everyone to read, so everyone wrote comments on their copies and gave them back to me, so now I have this 1-inch thick stack of papers to go through whenever I find time to revise the story. The only good thing about that workshop was that they told me what I did well--apparently I describe scenes really well and observe characters--which was great for me since I by the time we workshopped mine I was convinced it was a crappy work of fiction. But I still don't know if I'll ever be able to revise the story because the stack of comments is really intimidating.