Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Spring 2011

I am, after snow delays and ice delays, back in the saddle for Spring 2011.

(Can you believe that year, btw? No jet packs or air cars, but we do have robot maids -- sort of --- and you will pry my iPad out of my cold dead hand.)

Teaching Chaucer, two sections of comp, and a fiction workshop this semester. I'm busy thinking of prompts for the first writing assignment for that last. Most of the students I had last semester so they know all my old tricks -- write a story of less than 1000 words from a POV you would never assume about something you would never write about; write a story about a crucial event in your life, but change one radical thing; write the story you will get in serious trouble for telling. I have to think up new tricks now. Anyone got any ideas?

Meanwhile, I am revising Martin's War to submit to new publishers, and trying to fix an ugly plot knot in the middle. It is keep me up nights.

But it is 2011! We are living in the future! A new decade! Surely we can still hope!

(I am trying this new approach, optimism. I'll let you know how it works out.)

(Update: Killing my attempts to be all cheery in the new decade -- Sarah Palin? Blood libel? I know she's ignorant as dirt, but really?)

(See also this, for a reading of Palin I'll admit I did not consider. So much for optimism.)

3 comments:

Tree of Knowledge said...

One of my favorite fiction writing assignments was to write a one sentence story, using only one semicolon, and punctuated correctly. Mine ended up being 2 pages. I loved it.

zelda1 said...

When I read Palin's latest, all I could think of was, no she didn't. WTF? I mean, really? She has to be the dumbest person on this planet or the most evil or both. Fucking Geeze.

Athena Andreadis said...

I left a comment a few days ago -- it may have been caught in the spam filters because it had a link. I wrote a brief comment on contemporary political discourse:

At Long Last, Have You Left No Sense of Decency?
http://www.starshipreckless.com/blog/?p=3900