Oh my good god, how did I ever work eight-hour days before? It's Spring Break here on campus, though the library is still open, so I'm at work. I decided that since I didn't have classes this week, and there was some time I missed earlier due to sickness and snow, that I'd work a full day yesterday and today. Man alive! Eight hours is just too many to work in a row! I've gotten spoiled by my school schedule, especially this semester.

But to my suprise, it was fairly easy to get up at 6:30 each morning. I thought I'd be dragging, but I'm wide awake. I discovered that the coffeehouse in the library was closed yesterday (and will be all week), but this morning I stopped by Coffee Haven on the walk from the lot where I'm temporarily parking (the Wolfline buses are also not running this week) to the library. Got me a mint mocha and I'm ready to go.

The absence of classes this week has also been very productive writing-wise. I finished writing a political satire disguised as a secondary-world tale of conquest on Sunday night, and Janet critiqued it last night. It's pretty short, only 2200 words, but it's the most fiction I've written yet this year. I'm going to fix it up based on my lady's canny suggestions and hopefully send it to these nice people by sometime next week.

I was a submitting fool last night (as opposed to the non-submitting fool I normally am), getting three stories ready and emailing them to this weird contest, these groovy people and this university zine. And following Nick M's advice, I queried this cool slick about submitting a story. And if I get my act together, I'll send something to this quarterly contest before the end of the month.

I've also decided what my creative thesis will be: a story-suite (a la Zoran) of seven seemingly unrelated tales of change, called Seven Little Deaths. In tarot, the Death card is typically used to indicate change, and I realized as I was going through some of my stories recently that most of them involve quite a significant change in the main character, through sex or unexplainable phenomena or actual death. Of course, "little death" or petite mort is the French euphemism for orgasm, which has a double meaning in a few of my stories. Once I've gathered six of them, I'll write a seventh to tie them all together. I'm so excited that I finally know what to do for this.

Speaking of Zoran, I've been approved by the very cool Susan Marie Groppi at Strange Horizons to do an email interview with him. Now I just need to think of some intelligent questions so I don't sound like a dope. Once this is done and turned in (it may not be until after the school semester is over in May), I'll let you all know.

If you missed this entry, Janet announced that she will be displaying and hopefully selling her artwork at the 2004 WisCon Art Show. This is quite a big deal as she hasn't ever exhibited her artwork at a con or anywhere in public (offline) before. Since she's arrived here in the States, she's been painting away, completing one work and in the middle of another. She's at that stage right now in the current piece where she's convinced it's total crap and wonders why she started it in the first place, that point kinda like the 30K mark in a novel. I have to keep telling her that's it's beautiful and she's extremely talented and to just push through and keep working on it. It really is quite stunning so far, and is also one of the largest watercolors I've seen her do.

It was supposed to snow again last night, but the weatherpeople proved their ignorance once again, as we only got a light rain. The weather for Saturday is looking to be sunny and hovering around 60F, which seems like the perfect weather for a wedding. Holy crap! Three days to go!

Now Reading:
Ignorance by Milan Kundera

Stories Out to Publishers:
7

Books Read This Year:
17

Zines/Chapbooks/Fiction Mags Read This Year:
4