The 18 hour teeter-totter

Red is for High moments
Blue is for Low moments

9:00 last night: read the 10,000 word whopper of a story and loved it
10:00 last night: read stephmor ‘s story and discovered that she rose to my ‘no semi-colon challenge’ and did not use a single semi-colon in the entire story!! (She rocks, I might add, as does the semi-colon-free story)
11:30 last night: went to sleep — before midnight! At Clarion!
7:15 this morning: woke up. Look how much sleep I got! Hooray!
9:00 this morning: 95% of the people critiquing my Week 3 story exuded happiness and gave off shiny love hearts as they critted my work. (They also gave very useful suggestions for improvement, all of which seemed to be candy-coated with love.)
9:45 this morning: 100% of the well-published, award-winning, marvellous and entirely enchanting short story writers in the room proved to be rather less than fond of my Week 3 story.
12:30: had a really great lunch, already prepared. Leftovers are our friends.
1:00: Had a fantastic one-on-one session with Margo. We spoke about writing, publishing, short story sequences, work, thesis, and all kinds of valuable things. We laughed (mostly because I found it impossible not to act like a dickhead. I can’t help it. Sarcasm and other low forms of wit just ooze out of my pores when I’m nervous, so luckily Margo found this humourous.). This love-fest was somewhat tempered because there is a very high possibility that Margo is simply (and blamelessly) not a fan of my style or stories.
2:00: Head was all a-jumble with critique and feedback overload. Wondered how I would focus on my story this afternoon. Wasn’t sure what ‘choice’ my character was going to make, and how it would allow the story to have a crisis.
2:45: Had a big debrief with Angela, and felt much cheerier about everything as a result.
2:50: Got back to work on Week 4 story and thought, ‘What the hell is going to happen to liven this sucker up?’
3:00: Harassed Angela *again* by saying, "Maybe if I say this out loud, the story will make more sense." She promptly replied with some ABSOLUTELY GENIUS suggestions, and now I am excited about the story.
So excited that I got onto LJ to write about it, after I had frantically jotted down some notes.
3:21: Now feeling great!
Tonight: dinner with Margo over at our apartment. Yummy pasta meal and some wine will go down a treat! 🙂


Let me just point out how useful it was colour-coding the sequence of these events. As I’m sure you’ll all instantly notice, there are a lot more ‘red’ (aka Happy) moments than there were ‘blue’ (aka Blue) moments. It’s amazing how our perceptions can mislead us. I was thinking that there was so much more blueness in the day, but actually things were generally quite rosy. Happy wins over sad. All is right in the world.