I just received an email from John Kessel, announcing that because of the new re-written prelude and first chapter of Echo of the Invisible World, they are going to admit me to the Creative Writing concentration of the Master's in English at NCSU! WOOHOO! I can hardly believe it.

I don't remember if I mentioned it on this journal before, but my status there was in jeopardy. Evidently, my GRE scores were great, and my undergraduate grades were good enough, but the first writing sample I sent didn't impress the folks making the judgement to let me in, and they actually turned me down. I had a good talk with John Kessel before ICFA, and he agreed to let me submit another sample, the first 20 pages of my novel, which was my next assigment in my novel-writing class. He said because of the MFA starting soon at NCSU, the pressure has been on to make the MA program very competitive this year.

In my class last night, I got some really great comments from Dr. Barnhardt, who is one of the core faculty, and he had some very positive things to say about the beginning of my novel. I was hoping I'd won him over, changed his mind, and apparently I did. I am so jazzed.

The only problem is that since my undergrad GPA was not 3.0 or higher (even though it was 2.97, three measly hundreths of a point), I won't be eligible for a teaching assistantship until my second year. So I'm going to have to rely on financial aid. I've saved up a lot from work, but I'll probably have to get a student loan. I can certainly think of worse things, however, and that's a problem I can deal with.

Yeehaw! I'm going to graduate school!

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Now Reading:
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

Stories Out to Publishers:
13

Stories Sold This Year:
3

Novel Word Count:
5100