Day Nine in Boston - In Medias Res

Today was fantastically unlike the last two.  My piece was the last to be workshopped and during the course of nit-picking (and, hey, I'm glad that it was whole enough to even get to the point of nit-picking) my hilarious overuse of participle phrases and my love affair with adverbs, we all burst into laughter, some of us to the point of tears.  Sandra even acted out a few of my crazily constructed sentences by means of showing me how they actually read and to keep me mindful of them.  I giggled and informed her that 'yes,' the piece was actually meant to be viewed as an awkward dance, which is, honestly, what it sounds like based on my silly sentence starts.  It was wonderful to laugh and shoot the shit today.  Sandra even showed us some of her art (she's quite the little painter) and some of it was just gorgeous.  I would buy the tree painting in a heartbeat. Also we learned that grey is the British way to spell the color, while gray is the American way.  This is good to know since I have habitually shifted between the two spellings since I was old enough to write.  The rest of workshop was filled with talk of scene construction and various other elements that play a key role in developing a narrative and tomorrow we will continue this conversation.

The class today was an introduction to pedagogy.  While I have some experience in teaching, tutoring, and leading lessons, I have had no academic instruction on the teaching of writing composition and it was kind of an eye opening class for me.  I am nervous but terribly excited to really get a chance to live with the material and even discuss it with my mother (a teacher) and really let some of the methodologies and approaches bloom in my mind.

After the class I had a meeting with my mentor.  It was good to talk to him.  I was able to explain a little bit more about the vampire thing I'm working on, highlighting the fact that the 'vampirism' in the novel is nothing more than a vehicle to allow me to explore the effects of disabling victimization.  He was great about it, telling me that the most important thing is the 'like/love' what I'm writing otherwise there was no way in hell I was going to get anywhere on my accumulative creative thesis.  For that, however, I think I would still really like to explore a semi-Dystopian (if not full out bat shit insane) setting.  It seems to be gearing up to be a YA novel, but I'm not going to think about any of that while I write it.  In the end I want to get a crap load of good pages (perfectly fantastic pages) and win my mentor over with my prose.  I want him to really root for me as a student and as an author.  Today gave me some hope and we already have a semester plan (deadlines) set up for the next six months.  I am going to be one busy bunny.  I have at least eleven novels to read, about ten critical theses to write, five artist statements to produce, responses to generate, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 pages to write toward a novel.  Or at least, that is the general idea.  There will be a great deal of revision in all of that, as well as several bouts of tears.  And yet I say, bring it on!  This is just the sort of thing I need to kick my ass into gear and I am sickly delighted to comprehend the large workload. 

The day is not yet over, hence the in medias res in the title.  Tonight there is a meeting for all those taking the pedagogical track and soon after we will be attending the final faculty reading of the Winter Residency 2013.  There are only two readers tonight, one of them being my mentor.  For now, I leave you with one of the many songs that have been stuck in my head today (no, it's not "Hey there, Cthulhu" those that has definitely been on the tip of my tongue since workshop this morning).  In keeping with the Dystopian theme that has become my life, please enjoy David Bowie's "Fantastic Voyage."