Oh,
Writing is fun
Writing is fun
Better than bang’n on pots

Writing is fun
Writing is fun
Except when it’s not
X-sept-when-it’s-not!!!

Holy shit…………………………………
…………………………..
………………………………….she’s a monster……………………..
I knew Indigos had strong jaws………….but………………………..
……………holy shit………………………………………………………
….that is the grossest……………………………………………………………
………..my little indigo snake just attacked the dead, thawed mouse I threw in….and battled the thing…………………..she squeezed so hard, with her mouth, on one end……..that its insides came out the other……………………………
I’ve never seen anything like that with a snake…………………………………
………………….it’s very gross…………………………………

Thanks everyone – for all the words of encouragement, regarding my last post.  The problem is no more resolved, but I feel a lot better.  The school offices don’t seem up to helping me out, they all turned me away.

But I did write a new slogan for the UIS administration…

UIS – We’ll help you through every hurdle…unless we can think of a reason not to.

But it’s ok, I’m exploring other avenues and loan possibilities – his name’s Johnny the Snake – his office is in a back alley, but he says he has competitive rates, and I get my choice of fingers or toes if I run late with the payments.

I was very stressed yesterday…but stress can go only so far.  I have an automatic release switch, built into my psyche.  It formed, one day, when I was in sixth grade.  The pressures of homework, a school show, the normal embarrassments and intimidations of my grade-school life all came to a boiling point (you see, back then, I was very, very quiet and kept my emotions very, very buried and bottled up).  All it took to set it all off was a particularly nasty Math teacher yelling at me (she was a former nun…I like to think she was kicked out for excessive force).  She always asked students for quarters (in a thick east coast accent…”I wanna quata!”) if their math books did not have book covers and the way she pronounced my last name sounded like some mutant serpent having a mating-gasm (“Mista Deetss-ss-ss”).  The way these characteristics are building up…you’d think I invented this character.  But no.  I still know a couple people who remember her.  Anyway, I didn’t have my homework one day (on very little sleep form doing some after school show and other homework)…or maybe I just didn’t hear when she asked for the work.  She looked through the pile…didn’t see mine.  “Mista Deetss-ss-ss?”  I opened my mouth to speak, but just after the first syllable, she slammed her book down and yelled something (I forget what) before I could get through even a word to confirm or deny her suspicions.  BAM.  Flood gates opened.  I started sobbing and could not stop.  I just had a breakdown.  Embarrassment and tears and quarters and math books.  I hate math.  I eventually, was sent home.

After that day, I didn’t bottle things up so tightly.  I formed my release button.  From then on, stress built to a certain point…and then ZAP, the circuit breaker would shoot off, cutting power, releasing all the stress into the stratosphere.  At that moment, my view of things gets lopsided, I get a little loopy, a go a little crazy (just crazy enough to stay sane), and I start seeing the absurdity in the realities that stress me.  I laugh a lot.

As for the math teacher.  My avenger came in the form of a little garter snake (a ribbon snake) that I owned in the 7^th or 8^th grade.  I purchased him for a project I was working on for the science fair (testing and comparing the three primary senses in a snake’s hunting: sight, vibrations, and the taste/smelling of their tongues).  The science room was the same as the math room.  The snake was packed in a bucket, the fair was over, school was about to get out.  It was me and a couple students in the room.  I heard the math teacher come in and say, “What’s this?”  My back was turned to her…but (from the events that followed) I can picture what happened next.  I can, with a Cheshire grin, imagine her opening the object of her curiosity…my bucket.

“JESUS MARY AND JOSEPH!!!”  I whipped around, hearing this, in time to see her flying backwards, her feet not seeming to really touch the ground, like a floating, shrieking banshee that was just repelled by a cross.  I and a couple other students got a great laugh.  I like science better than math.  I like snakes.

So now, stress, mostly, can only affect me so far.  I have a quota before I purge myself of rationality and fear.  I remember, back as an undergrad, when a bunch of us were in director’s class and starting to freak out at our impending shows.  One day, the stress finally hit me, and I remember, walking into the theatre, that maybe Dee or Amy saw me and said something like, “Oh crap…even you’re stressed Josh?  We’re doomed!”

As it turns out, we weren’t.  Stage-scrim disasters aside.

Tonight I actually got a little writing done.  I was stuck on a plot point…really stuck.  But I did what I did when I wrote the sort of prototype poem, a few years ago, that led to this whole thesis.  I was stuck for at least a week and, not knowing how else to start my long poem, I looked up some voodoo prayers (since the character was a priestess) and just picked one and put it down at the head of the poem.  Sometimes, if you start with someone else’s words, it primes your engine and, taking a running start, the starter turns and you’re off.  And I was.  I did it as an exercise, but ended-up keeping the prayer in – master word-thief that I am.  So that’s what I did tonight…looked at random prayers.  BAM!  One just happened to fit, just right, turned the whole chapter into something a little different, with many more dimensions.  He-he…I was dancing on the ceiling.  That’s when writing is going good…

Bradbury says we write so the real world cannot destroy us.  That’s what is for me.  Especially tonight.  Cops and finances be damned.  I put on my bullet proof vest.  I also find that becoming eccentric can keep the real world from destroying me.  Two vests.

When writing is going good.  Real good.  It’s better than sex.  Sometimes, I like it better than being loved.

So, I’ve been going through a very long process of working out various bits of meaningless red tape, trying to get my financial aid this year. Up to this week, I was still waiting for it.

Apparently, all that struggle was in vain, because the Financial Aid office is (only now) telling me that they cannot give me ANY money. They say there’s a policy where they can’t give a loan unless it’s for credit hours that count towards my degree. While the courses I’m in are in my degree…I already have met my required hours, I was just taking the classes as fillers, until I finished the thesis and graduated.

That’s all well and good….but I didn’t find out about this policy until TODAY. I’m going to go over options with various offices (though…based on helpful they’ve been so far, things seem pretty bleak)…I don’t know if I can maybe cancel the classes I’m in and not owe that money, they might do that…though I doubt I can pack up my things, move out and not owe for housing…I don’t know…

Saturday night’s main event hurt my financial situation…but now it’s just destroyed.

I’m not sure how I’m going to pay for the credit bills I’ve been making (for books and food), when I understood that my loan money was coming in.

I’m not sure I can afford to graduate…

If you need me, I’ll be under my desk, hiding from financial realities…and trying to manifest money with the power of my mind.

OK…twenty questions…err…answers.  I’ve been tagged and so here are some things you may not know about Joshua…

CAUTION – I’m very wordy…but I’ll try and make it entertaining:

1.  I was held back in the 3^rd grade.  A combination of chronic shyness, and what someone was apparently calling “Short Term Visual Memory Disorder” left me behind…much to the jeers of creatures whose wickedness is as pure as serial killers…that is, school children.  A few years later, in grade school, I would test as being able to read and understand a pretty good array of “college” vocabulary, but my math, spelling, mind for dates, and various other subjects suffered.  I used to have a pretty low opinion of my intelligence.  I don’t have the problem now.  I’m pretty clever and modesty aside, I don’t mind admitting it to myself.

2.  In first grade, I was in three different schools.  I left the first because there was a very nasty, slightly abusive crone of a teacher there.  I don’t recall much except her violently spilling desks over if anyone’s desk was messy.  One time, I recall, she was out of the room, and the lunch bell rang.  I shouted “Wa-hooo!”  Nothing very disruptive, just an exclamation from a little boy who was happy to go to eat and compare dino-bots on the blacktop.  She bursted in like a nightmare and yelled, “Who said that!”  All of my friends, faithful as they were, pointed to me in terror (think of the end of Spartacus…now think of the EXACT OPPOSITE).  She raged at me and made me stay in during recess and lunch…and then, after staring at me the whole time, not saying anything, yelled at me afterwards for not using the time to do homework.  I don’t remember this, but my Mom says I would come home, walk up to her and say, “Mom…I’m a very, very bad person.”  When they found out why, my parents went in and my Dad (who bless his soul is very good at yelling at officials/clerks/etc.) probably told them where they could shove their witch of a teacher…and they took me out of that Catholic school.

3.  I was a SHY kid for grade school and most of high school.  I don’t think the word does it justice…people really thought there was something socially or mentally WRONG with me.  I avoided attention and conversation at all costs…living mostly in my head.  I opened up with very close friends and at home…that was about it.  I had a very tiny self esteem (or maybe it was big and I just had to grow into it).  Things changed a little bit in High School.  That’s when theatre happened and I opened up a lot more.  I remember I had met Dave Edwards, recently, through some other friends and he saw some of the transition.  I recall him saying to some of his friends, “Yeah, he’s a funny fucker once you get him going.”  But yeah…before this I was a very embarrassed vegetable.  I think the events in #1 and #2 were mostly to blame.  So see, see all the horrid memories you dredge up when you make fun of my spelling or get mad because I can’t remember a particular date….you big meanies 😉

4.  When I was in 4^th grade, someone told me that diamonds cut glass.  In a science class, we had gotten shards of these geode stones.  A gem, even a cheap one, is a powerful thing to a young person.  Wow, I thought, time to experiment.  I wanted to see if this was a diamond.  My test subject was my parents’ bathroom mirror.  I didn’t think there was any risk.  After all, if it wasn’t a diamond, it wouldn’t cut glass, right?  If it was…well, I and my then rich family could buy a whole bunch of mirrors.  Keep in mind, a teacher had told me that diamonds cut glass.  Now to my mind, that statement seems to indicate that this is a special property to diamonds (the truth is that every freaking substance cuts glass!!!).  I was an inquisitive squirt and you had to take care what scientific facts you gave me.  It was a hard crime to deny, when my parents discovered the horror, because my experiment pretty much consisted of writing my name and drawing a smiley face on their mirror.

5.  I remember two fights in grade school.  One of them was defending my little (and then, very little) brother, Nick.  He was in maybe 2^nd grade and I was in 4^th.  Two 6^th grade bullies were hassling him because he was in “their seat” (the little one in the back of the bus), so the both sat on him, trying to crush him or something.  I very adultly and politely pointed out that this action indicated that both of them were flaming homosexuals (“gay-wad” may have been used…I don’t recall).  This caused the bigger bully to come over and try and sit on me…which led to both us smacking each other’s heads with our fists.  The fight left me in very embarrassed tears, but I must have hurt him too, as he and his toady went up front and Nick and I had both backseats to ourselves.

6.  I own a Paula Abdul CD (stop laughing!!!).  It’s a very nostalgic thing.  I had a massive crush on her as a boy.  I was very jealous of Emilio Estevez.  I cursed his career…now I’m really sorry I did.

7.  I had to wear foot inserts as a child.  My bones in the feet came out wrong in the birthing (guess I’m the prototype) and I had two bones sticking out on that inner ankle (instead of the one).  It caused me pain that I could not put in proper words (I said, “My legs hurt!”).  They finally figured out that it was the feet (after a lot of other procedures) and gave me inserts, saying that I’d be in a wheel chair if it was not corrected.  I also had to take gelatin in the form of massive amounts of Jell-O.  I thought this was awesome…at first…Bill Cosby lied to me…there is NOT always room, it is, in fact, very finite.

8.  In Kindergarten, someone convinced me that sparkly rocks (like the ones in some people’s driveways), when cooked in a pan, turn into coconuts.

9.  When I was very young, I believed the past, up to the 50s or 60s, happened in black and white.

10.  I really hate talking on the phone for long spans of time.  I like being able to read body language and to, in turn, help my communications with body language of my own.

11.  When I was five, I shoplifted an Insectecon (Transormer), from a K-Mart (I thought that if a package was already open…well…it was kind anybodies grab).  My mom took me in to take it back and the manager guy took me in the back and gave me the pre-programmed scary stories about what happens to such criminals.  It worked.  It ended my career in larceny.

12.  I remember, way back, I was afraid of the dark.  That transmuted into being thrilled by it (like going into a really cool/scary haunted house).  That eventually turned into comfort.  I’m comfortable in the dark and I don’t mean that in some transcendental-hip-Goth-kid-wannabe fashion…it’s very true.  I feel discomfort in bright light.  Bright sun, in a very open place, makes me feel very clumsy and irritable.  Squinting makes my whole body tighten, gives me headaches and exhaustion.  When my eyes can open real wide the rest of me opens up…and I’m comfortable.  I rarely have the main lights in my room on (ask Torrie), I have, instead, various black lights and colored lights and a desk lamp that usually fill my illumination needs.

13.  I’ve had facial hair since at least the sixth grade (I’ve been shaving since 6^th or 7^th grade).

14.  I’ve never had stitches or a broken bone (I’m not counting toes…as it’s hard to tell when those are actually broken).  As a kid, a giant dirt-rock bolder rolled over my leg, but the grooves in the ground kept me safe.  I fell down a window-well, head first through the plastic shield – tumbling six feet – crashing my head and back against the concrete – my bare legs breaking through a glass window…I ended up with a small scratch on my arm and an apology to give the neighbor.

15.  Women used to be a MYSTERY to me.  Before then, they were SCIENCE FICTION.  Later they were THRILLER, then ACTION, then ROMANTIC COMEDY, then TRAGEDY.  More recently they were FANTASY and I’m not sure what genre they are now or will be next.

16.  Every time I take one of those Dante or 7 Deadly tests I end up with LUST.  My head is usually pretty full of lusty things and I wonder if I wasn’t a satyr in a past life.

17.  I’m a chronic nail biter.

18.  Politically, I am very much a fence percher.  I think this may be part of what prompted me to write an epic poem about an angel who didn’t choose sides in the war in Heaven.

19.  OK…this is probably one of the bigger ones.  When I was younger, my Mom, I guess, let me stay up a bit later than some folks would – not as late as I stay up now…just a few more hours into the evening.  Apparently a hard nosed, religious relative of mine didn’t like this and even told my mother that she was going to HELL for this great transgression.  I’ve known about this for years and thought it was ridiculous even to the point of laughable.  In recent years, I discovered, through my Mom, that this wasn’t just a little snide comment, but a long, berating conversation in which this relative told my Mom that she was a horrible mother and ruining me and my siblings.  The conversation was so biting and nasty that, when it was over, my Mom, sat in her bathroom, sobbing, contemplating suicide…I guess I’ll never know what the outcome would have been, because my Dad luckily came home right at that moment.  Keep in mind, my Mom was a very young mother (she would have been a few years younger than me at this point) and earlier in my life, I always noticed she wasn’t a very confident person.  She gave and gave and I imagine she would have been hard pressed to describe her self, and I think had moments of depression.  She has, since then, discovered much more of her self, is very much her own person, and gets stronger and stronger and I have no doubt that she will never again be in any real danger of some jack-off telling her she’s horrible.  But this was different the day my relative decided to snidely smite her with religious tripe.  Does this make me angry?  Let me be as clear as I can.  In life, we give those close to us epic qualities, we look at them as bigger than life.  But our closest friends and consorts are still human…so they don’t always live up to the ideal (this isn’t a pessimistic point…people’s flaws endear them to me as much as their strengths).  My Mom, for me, is one of the exceptions.  She was always there.  She never batted me away.  When I was sick or scared she was always there and never left a moment of doubt in that (to this day).  She never lost her patience when I really needed her (or at least she was able to hold it back).  She lived up to the ideal.  I could go on but let me just put it in my four year old self words, “I love my Mommy,” – she is one of the best people I’ve ever known – and she was almost taken away from me because of some sanctimonious person, who’s idiocy seemed to indicate to them that salvation and damnation are somehow connected to bedtime…that the invention of the light bulb hadn’t made diurnal living obsolete a hundred years ago.  YES I AM ANGRY.  I want to breathe fire.  That this person overlooked all my Mom’s good points (you’d have to be fucking blind to miss them) and only saw some vague loophole of a moral notion….well…I’ve written enough and I’m getting angry and shaky just typing it.  I’ve never talked about it with this family member – in fact I’ve NEVER talked about this with anyone (you, lucky reader, are the first).  That family member is much more mellow now and I think has worked her way through a lot of her problems.  But I remember.  My feelings on this thought (the image of my Mom, young and alone and sobbing in the bathroom, with my Dad’s arrival perhaps stopping a tragedy) pretty much sums up my feelings on all religious institutions (not on God or spirituality or you if you happen to be a religious person reading this….but I have no trust for the institutions themselves).

20.  I’m told I’m a pretty modest and sensitive seeming guy.  I think this is as true, as far as it goes.  But I do have an ego…a pretty big one.  It’s just very quiet.  It coils in the back of my head.  It has very, very pretty scales and the slithering muscles have a very sensual rhythm in the undulation.  Sometimes, standing in front of a group of strangers it whispers things in my ear like, You’re better than all these people.  I don’t really listen all that much…but once in a while, I indulge it.  It’s a very pretty ego.

I tag ANYONE who is reading this.  Mwahahahahahaahahahaha!!!

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I was working out a plot point and I took a post-midnight walk.  I was on the more vegetated portion of campus, trees and bushes and shadows and places to sit.  There were three naked flag poles and a blowing wind.  The wind strummed the flagpoles and produced noise.  The thicker pole took the wind, maybe the wind rattled inside the hollow of the pole…or it whipped the rope around (I don’t know), making a noise like a deep, deep didjeridoo.

You know what a didjeradoo is…even if you don’t.  It’s one of those Australian aboriginal instruments, a big pipe, made of wood that you blow and below in (halfway between a trombone and a kazoo).  It makes a noise that sounds a bit like whales humping…with a little less deep bass.

Wuhuhuhuhahahahaowowowowooooooooowowowooooooooo…

Pole one made this noise.  Pole two’s ropes were blowing and the metal attachments kept smacking the pole, in staccato bursts of percussion, like a drum…but with an echoey-metal bend at the end.

Chawah-wah-wah-wah…

Chawah-wah-wah-wah…

Chawah-wah-wah-wah…

And these, in fairly normal intervals, with a little bit of variation and improvisation, made a sort of music.

Wuhuhuhuhahahahaowowowowooooooooowowowooooooooo…

Chawah-wah-wah-wah…

Chawah-wah-wah-wah…

Chawah-wah-wah-wah…

Wuhuhuhuhahahahaowowowowooooooooowowowooooooooo…

I listened for a while, waiting for the third pole to enter into the song.  It never did.  I ended up leaving.  But I’m still convinced the third pole plays a solo…I just didn’t get to that part in the opus.

Several, bat-winged thoughts fluttered in my head, afraid of bright light and I had to wander to the less lit areas so they’d settle and I could pin them down, make sense of them.  I nabbed a couple…which did not turn out to be thoughts about the plot I was working on, and in the struggle, the thoughts that were about the current work, fluttered away, cackling in the yew trees.  So I had to make do with what I did capture…

Thoughts of a Neil Gaiman’s comic book that won a prestigious short fiction, literary award…and the stony gray-beards who found this so shocking and scandalous, that they changed the rules so that, in the following years, no mere graphic novels could ever sully their presumptuous waters again.  Thoughts of the teeney-bop pack of girls I saw in Barnes & Noble, in the magazine section, finding out, with bated breath, what was going on between Pit and Jolie, the alpha bimbo proclaiming to her pack, “Like, I would ever read a whole book?” and the rest of them, realizing prestige points were on the line, all agreeing, with giggles, proclaiming, proudly, in a book store, of their partial illiteracy.  The occasional, lazily disgusted looks, creative writing students sometimes get from some lit scholars, as if they’re conmen getting away with something (well…it’s true…we are…and more than they realize…but this does not demean our intelligence).  Thoughts of those folks who cringe at the mention of anything “popular” and demand that the only worthwhile art has dust all over it.  Thoughts that anything: ugly buildings, whores, politicians, and poorly written poetry, get respect if they live long enough.  The hipster, neo[fill-in-the-blank] crowd who think anything past its 15 sec. expiration date is worthless, and drone on and on and ON (like flies fucking) about “avant-garde” this and that, this piece of “art” made by a neo-Buddhist-Eskimo-pagan-platypus who urinated blood on a spattered canvas or that random jumble of words, randomly pulled from a thesaurus, and called a “poem,” and what can pass for “hip” and “new” and “intellectual” these days.  Thoughts on “old-fashioned” and what that means.  Thoughts on “new” and what that means.  Thoughts on “timeless” and what that means.

The bats came to some conclusions, before I let them go.  “Old-fashioned” just means you’re not fashioned old enough – that being stuck in an anachronism really just means your stuck on a thought that is only decades or a century old – that if you go back far enough, you find things new because time and thought move in revolutions and spirals and leading a “revolution” just means your doing something really-really-really-really old, not new – that being stuck on the avant-garde is the same as old-fashioned, equally intellectually flaccid, both being stuck in an anachronism, one slightly older than the other and in the total stream of time, both are only an imperceptible bit of space apart.  Being “timeless,” concluded the bats, is leaving the stream and touching the eternal, making old stories new, using “fresh” archetypes that are really variations of archetypes mystics sang about, around the fire, while everyone ate barbequed mastodon.  Then you’re timeless and you stumble on the names of ancient gods.  Then you realize that both QUALITY and CRAP have no notion of the difference between different times and different genres and flow freely into all of them.  Then you know that, in the grand scheme of things, in the comparison of all the things in the universal continuum, high-epic language, Shakespearean sonnets, and the blues are hardly very different.  Then you are unafraid to read a comic and call it literature – read The Epic of Gilgamesh and unembarrassed to call it cool.  You’re perfectly comfortable telling tales about figures from Greek tragedy singing duets with stuffed animal rabbits who smoke weed, about the evils of genocide…and infomercials.

Now, you’re a word shaman.

Now you’re flyin’.

Holy-torporous-sleep Batman!

My plan was to get an actual eight hours sleep, to curb the delirium…but I slept straight to this evening!  I think I needed it.  The last few days were starting to meld together and spectral crows and voodoo chants were taking on far more reality than…reality.  I’m pretty sure my toe is broken…but I honestly don’t remember how or when.  My vague recollections seem to indicate that The pain’s been with me for at least a day or two.

I did wake up, at noon, just enough to answer my phone and receive a most happy call.  On a whim (and because one of my friends here at school said I should give it a shot) I tried out for a part in UIS’s next theatre show, Oedipus Rex.  I’ve never tried out for any shows here and don’t really know anyone in the theatre department.  Since grad school started, I’ve mostly been shut away in the writing program (with occasional theatre activity in Eureka).

So I tried out.  Didn’t know anyone.  Didn’t have a prepared monologue.  Wasn’t all that nervous.  Not a big deal either way.

Then call backs.  Same thing.  Cold readings.

This time the director talked with me a bit at break.  I think I may have been one of the only people to bring in a resume (and…besides a little gap in the last couple years, it’s pretty full).  Turns out the program here is pretty young and he was curious that I had suddenly popped out of the woodwork this late in the game (like I said, I know almost no one outside my little writing program).

Well, a call came today, informing me I got the lead.  I’ll be playing Oedipus.  Which is cool.  I’ve always liked the play – even wrote a couple of short stories that bend the metafiction of the story – one that tells Oedipus’s story…only he’s a teddy bear – and another that combines Oedipus Rex, Poe’s “The Conqueror Worm,” and Jerry Springer.

So it’s back to a full length theatre production for me.  So – Nov 4-6 and 11-13, I’ll be playing Oedipus here in Springfield.

That’s right!  I get to be the stage’s first MOTHERF#$*%ER.

Hello Nancy,

Sorry you haven’t heard from me in a while. I’ve been very incognito, very much swimming in this book, and very, very much at its mercy. The courtship took a long time, lots of dancing around it, research, playing, experimenting, trying to make it mine. I have definitely broken the barrier and gotten into the story, the pages are dropping away (at last). I’ve broken an important milestone too, as I’ve gotten over all my little hang-ups on writing a book-length work, and seem able to do it now.

But every step I take, this thing gets a little more life and will and it walks on its own and it grows, becomes larger and more ambitious. For example, the form I’ve given this epic (as we’ve previously discussed) is a series of main chapters (“books”) that are in a chaotic, poetic form, a dialogue between the priestess (who now, in a roundabout way, has your namesake) and the muse who she’s summoned (and who she cannot control…I guess their relationship was an unintentional prophecy of what my relationship to this book would be). In-between these chapters (dealing with ritual and the spirit world) are prose chapters (mostly dealing with the mundane world), which I’m calling “interludes” that indirectly touch back on the themes of the main plotline. Thus, the story moves in a spiral.

Well, back to my example, I set out to write an introductory interlude, basically, explaining how in Voodoo (Vodou), history is told by telling little stories again and again, in a spiral – basically, just a little interlude to introduce the following interludes. But it changed, took on a will of its own, and, quite unintentionally, I wrote this chapter on the shape of the universe and time and how everything is made of spirals, how shamans knew of the double-helix (through hallucinations with the spiraling ayahusaca vine) thousands of years before scientists did, and suddenly….my whole epic is becoming this intricate spiral, made of tiny spirals, of repeating sounds and themes and motifs…

It’s in control and it is bigger and smarter than me.

This bodes well for the work itself…the writing is going GREAT! But it’s bad for earthly deadlines. I’m now into about 75+ pages of actual text (and many, many, files and pages of notes and characters)…but I think this monster will easily top 300 pages by the time I get to the ending I want (and I know the last sentence…it’s the same as the first sentence…spirals and all that).

I can’t get there by the deadline of next week.

So…I have two options. I think I can easily, in this semester, get to the amount of “work” that would be deemed necessary to complete a thesis…even if the story itself is not at the end. I think, by the deadline next week, I’ll be somewhere over a hundred pages – completing the first main arc of the plot (the priestess discovering the identity of our tattered hero, a fallen angel, and convincing him to go into the Underworld to rescue a lost soul). Maybe I could nip it off here, find a stopping point, with the hint of further books (like Dante’s three epics).

Would this work?

Or…there is the option of another semester (I keep pulling semesters out of my pockets…sleight of hand and time). I know, now that I have a grasp of the form of this book and the end is in site and the pages are falling away, that I’d be done with the WHOLE plot by then (turning in the book to you by the end of December/beginning of January), with quite a nice thesis to put on the rack in the archives of the library.

The advantage to the first option is being graduated and being sent on my way into the world (and I can write the rest of the book(s) on my own).

The advantage to the second option is finishing this thing (while it’s all on my mind…so heavy!) under the watch and aegis of you, the program, and my fellow writers here in Springfield. For example, I’m in Joanna’s creative writing class and it’s served as an invaluable testing ground for the first chapters of the story and making sure all the experimental things I’m doing actually make sense to an audience.

Those are the options I think I can manage. What do you think?

take care,

Joshua

PS – Thank you for mentoring me through this the last few years (not to mention the years before in Eureka). I appreciate it more than I can write out in literal sentences…thank God I have metaphors and stories to fill in the gaps.