Practice Round:

I am long overdue for a blog entry in order to get you up to speed on the events in my life.  I sincerely hope that I may get this blog back on a regular schedule someday soon, maybe with weekly posts.  But I make no guarantees, since I couldn't even find enough time in the whole month of March to bring you an update.  Also, quite honestly, my intention to bring you news of my life is only one reason why I have chosen to write a post today.  I have an ulterior motive for writing this blog entry.  It has been too many days since I last wrote any words towards my novel, and I must start writing the next chapter today.  However, given my prolonged absence from this work, I fear that the writing process may turn out to be slow and grueling today, a feeling that is usually likened to "pulling teeth."  Of course, I value originality, and so I would never recycle such an overused simile.  Instead, I choose to compare this difficult stage of writing to playing a match of tug-of-war against someone who is essentially your physical equal.  At some short points, I can produce the words naturally, as long as my tug-of-war opponent is slipping with fatigue a little bit.  However, these moments of fleeting triumph are usually outweighed by minutes of struggle with sentence structure and diction, because my equally capable rival has put up his strongest defenses again.  On days like these, nobody wins, and I am lucky to produce two pages that aren't worthless.  Therefore, I have taken it upon myself to write this blog entry in preparation for writing my next chapter, as a sort of exercise to warm up my writing muscles.  With any luck, this workout will give me the advantage I need to overcome my mirror image on the other side of that rope.

Since I have already brought up the subject of my novel, I suppose that I shall give you an update on that front.  When last I spoke to you at the close of February, I had written the first draft of a single chapter.  Now, I have written six chapters, and if I do not begin the seventh today then I think I shall leave my home in disgrace and wander the streets until I've learned my lesson.  I have been working according to a loose schedule which allows me to produce, on average, a chapter per week.  That has not always been the case, however, since there have been some shifts in the academic course for which I am writing this work.  Since there are four students in the course who all meet once a week, we originally did four workshops per class on the latest works of each writer.  More recently, we have decided to devote each class to only two writers, since each workshop deserves more time.  Therefore, in order to keep the pace, each student ought to prepare twice the work for his own workshop.  Of course, to say that I am not writing two chapters every two weeks is the same as saying one chapter per week, so I don't know whether this actually represents any sort of shift in the amount of time I spend writing.  I do not write every day, and I know that I should, so you don't have to tell me that.  I remind myself of that fact a lot.  Then I defend myself by recalling that I am taking three other academic courses besides the one focused on the novel.  I have pledged that, once summer vacation begins, then I will make every effort to write at least six days a week, which brings me to my ultimate goal.  By the end of the summer, before I go away to college, I intend to have a complete draft written and revised until it is in a state whereby I am comfortable sending it to trustworthy people who will read it.  Since there is not enough time left in the independent study course to actually finish the story, I think that is a reasonable goal.

I mentioned college in the paragraph above.  I will treat that as a segue in order to tell you about the schools to which I have been accepted, since I only knew about one of them at the time of my last entry.  The first school to accept me was Susquehanna University, where I have received a Presidential Scholarship, I have been accepted to the Honors Program, and some professors have read my writing portfolio and approved me for the study of creative writing.  Obviously, I seemed to be well liked there.  I am making plans to visit the school next week, at which point I shall tour the campus and sit in on a writing class.  I have high hopes that Susquehanna will have the perfect, Baby Bear quality that caused Goldilocks say, "This one is just right."  Of course, if I'm going to maintain this "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" analogy, then there must be a Mama Bear and a Papa Bear as well.  (And that makes me Goldilocks.  Oh well, this won't be the first time that I sacrifice my manhood for the sake of a simile.)  The second college to accept me, and the first campus that I visited this month, was Brandeis University in Massachusetts.  I had the opportunity to be a guest in a few of their classes, and I really enjoyed each one, especially the English class on Romanticism and the fiction workshop.  After the latter class, I approached the professor and asked him whether any of his students write science fiction or fantasy for his class.  He frowned upon me and genre fiction in general.  I walked out of the building discouraged, onto a campus that I don't particularly like, what with all its hills and long distances between buildings that were constructed with architectural designs too recent to look appealing.  Next, I took a trip to Connecticut College.  Now there is a campus I could get used to--very small, quaint, flat, green, and just darn pretty.  The writing class, however, was not what I had hoped for.  The professor read professional short stories aloud, until finally she also read the work of a student.  What followed was a discussion so laid back and informal that it did not seem like the environment of a constructive workshop, or at least not the sort that I enjoy.  Later, I approached the professor and asked whether the English department offers any classes that are exclusively devoted to workshops for students.  She replied, "Now what would be the point of that?"  Confusion and rage mixed into a bitter porridge inside me, as I thought of the (not one but) two workshop-focused classes that I currently take in high school.  I walked out of the classroom dumbfounded, wondering why everywhere I go I meet someone who is so set in her or his own ways that she or he does not realize that I take offense to their statements.

There is another school that has accepted me, a sort of Estranged Cousin Bear by the name of Kenyon College, which resides on a hilltop all the way in Ohio (and not in Kenya, as some people think when they first hear the name).  I can't fly out to Ohio this month to visit the campus, but I did get a chance to see it firsthand last summer.  For now, I can only say that I will consider Kenyon in the event that Susquehanna does not turn out to be "just right."  Furthermore, I can only hope that, wherever I choose to attend college, I will not be chased away by bears or anything that could be likened to bears in yet another extension of this analogy.  That's all I have time to report today.  Wish me luck at Susquehanna next week, and more immediately wish me luck in trying to write the next chapter in my novel.  Join me next time when perhaps I will tell you about my experiences at the State Championship for Speech and Debate in Albany earlier this month.  Thanks for reading.

End Post.