Random Friday bloggy brain dump

If ever there were a week to make you question your faith in humanity, I suppose this would be it. Mind you, I don’t think I have all that much faith in humanity, so there’s that, at least.

I finally finished the last story I needed to turn in for one of my workshops, so my first year of grad school is pretty much done. It was a story I originally wrote for an anthology call, started thinking about more, and decided I wanted to flesh out a bit. Apparently, “a bit” meant turning it into a 10,000-word monstrosity and I don’t even know what it is anymore. I was tempted to tell (beg) the professor not to read it. Now that that workshop is done, I have six stories in various states that are waiting for revisions. That may be a project for this summer.

From my writing for children workshop, I’ve got a picture book manuscript, a YA short story, and the beginnings of a middle-grade novel. Then there’s my graphic novel workshops; the best thing I did there was this story about an alien whose UFO crash-lands in Oklahoma. Yeah, I don’t even know. Webcomic? My drawing skills would have to miraculously improve in the meantime.

That’s assuming I want to pursue any of them. It’s a bit early to tell if there’s material worth salvaging there. I won’t really be able to tell until I get enough distance from them to gain some perspective.

Next week I’ll start working on my outline for my thesis. (Actually, I’ve already written some of it, but it’s mostly a few thousand words of exercises trying to get into the main character’s head and figuring out how I want to tell it.) This weekend I’m taking off and doing nothing but reading and decompressing. That started with a movie last night (No starring Gael García Bernal—he’s pretty swoony, isn’t he?) and will continue this evening with The Place Beyond the Pines starring Ryan Gosling (double swoon). There will likely also be bread baking and a long run.

A propos of nothing, here’s a photo of the cherry trees up the hill from where I’m staying here. They put on a pretty impressive show this month.