Good news is, I started work on The American Tour again in earnest. I have another 15,000 words or so to the end, and then I have to go back in and remove about 15,000 words (but different words). Of course, the ending of a book so often expands–one scene becomes two scenes and then is suddenly a chapter of its own–but I am really trying not to. This is already much longer than either The Wind in the Willows or The River Bank.
School starts this week. It’s hard to be motivated to do my best designing a class that will never be taught this way again, for a university administration that is threatening to break my contract, and which is asking us all to do a bunch of extra work to make its job (of breaching contracts and tenure) easier for it. This would bother me less if this were a corporation, where at least everyone who comes in the door knows what they’re getting into.
So, yeah, not a great week, despite the writing. I managed to get through all the horrors of last year with my good-humor intact, only to lose it now.
Is there anything else? Not really. School, writing, friends, reading (still a lot of Agatha Christie), watching shows (still in Farscape after bouncing off Expanse again; Season Three of Farscape? So. Fucked. Up.), knitting. It’s not the most exciting or happiest spring of my life, but I am working, creative, warm, fed, healthy, and enjoying things like feeding the squirrels. That’s good enough to go on these days.
