Before My Birthday Goals

This Saturday I turn the dreaded 3-oh.  I will be spending it down in Moscow with some friends and in order to make sure I have a nice and relaxed time, I have some MFA related things that need to be finished prior to Saturday morning.  I need to finish at least two of the four following books:  One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The End of the Affair, and The Heart of the Matter.  I have so very many more books to read - two of which where written by none other than my mentor, and several more that detail sci-fi and Dystopian landscapes.  I'm feeling a bit of a crunch because my critical thesis is going to happen next semester and I'm really struggling this time around with writing a truly effective craft analysis.  Creatively, I'm writing fragmented scenes and drifting a little.  I am still very involved in the project and since I have two protagonist's (one main one and one to act as a foil) I do get a break in POVs occasionally that helps to keep my narrative from getting too comfortable and losing flare.

I have a few weeks left before this packet is due.  This one is kind of important.  Also I need to have either two more complete chapters to submit for workshop (new and bizarre and unique) or I need to have two short stories or pieces of short stories.  There just isn't enough time in the day.  And sleep seems to me to be very overrated.  When I was in college I stayed up for a little over 72 hours straight.  It was during the Rocky Mountain Theatre Festivention and I was taking part of a critique writing contest.  I totally won.  The experience afforded me a few things, one of those things being a shiny plaque and a check for $100.  Other things I learned were: hard work and going further than others does pay off, espresso tastes like shit but does the job, and that sleep deprivation creates edginess in writing.  The last of these things is what I rather hope for in the days to come.  For now, however, I think I need to stock up on a little bit of sleep, get all my ideas straight in my mind, then throw sleep to the curb.  I need edge in this story and I want to plow onward and upward, I want to keep the herd moving west, I want to generate as much new material as I can so that when fourth semester comes I can chop and rewrite and mangle what I've got down instead of trying to pull some slipshod ending out of my ass.

I only work two more days before my birthday.  Usually at work I can get at least thirty pages read but lately we've been slammed.  It's not that I want boring days at work, but I wouldn't mind like a few thirty minute periods where we can just sit sip coffee and I can read.  As it is, we're running around like chickens sans heads from the moment we open until close to closing time.  When I get home from all of this, I feel so drained that reading is out of the question and writing is a faraway dream.  Tomorrow I'm off, however, and I want to keep pushing on the books that I'm reading, but mostly I want to get some Simon written.  What's so great about one of the books I'm reading, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, is that Billy Bibbit has a very pronounced stutter and I recently decided that the reason Simon doesn't talk to strangers in my novel is that he stutters, so now I get to see how Kesey handled the actual writing of the dialogue in his story.