SCHOOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It’s that time. I’m back in Los Angeles at Antioch University starting my second term as a graduate student. It is freaking awesome. I have Gayle Brandeis as my workshop leader. She is kind, gentle, perceptive and exacting all at once. My fellow workshoppers have been pretty amazing. I cannot believe the good help I got toward planning out the novel I just started. I’d like to carry them all around in my back pocket forever.

Lauren Strasnick is going to be my mentor for the next project period and I am so excited. Her books are amazing and she is lovely. It just so happens that we met once before in Florida at the RWA conference when she was a double-RITA nominee for her first book. I was kind of relieved that she didn’t remember me from the Pocket Party. Kresley Cole was egging me on to ever more inappropriate things. There may have been alcohol involved. Just maybe.

I went to a terrific seminar by Bernadette Murphy on road trip narratives, specifically the dearth of female road trip narratives where the women don’t end up dead or raped. I went to another one by Ed Frankel about teaching academic writing which he somehow made super fun and entertaining while bombarding us with information. Later this week I’m apparently going to learn how to be  a genius and how to give a reading without boring people.

I already feel the call of home a bit. Just that tiny tinge of sadness at the end of the day, but I also kind of don’t want to leave.