Somewhere Strange

Some amazing things have happened recently. I will run them down. First, I was offered an internship at Monday Night, a literary journal. My official title is Editorial Intern. I'm very excited about getting the chance to work with the editors. Second, I received an email from an on-line journal letting me know that one of my non-fiction essays would be published in September. Currently, two excerpts from my novel are published on-line. However, for both of these, the person responsible for them being published was directly related to me (a fellow student). I'm eternally grateful for that peer's support, but I will consider this September to be the first time I'm truly published. The specifics of all this shouldn't really matter, but to me, they do. Third, I was solicited to submit to another journal. That's about all I can say about it. I have to write something really special for it. If they accept my submission, it will be a big deal and I will be very happy. Fourth, this morning and early afternoon, I was on the phone with one of my other school peers and collaborators. We were uploading a document to Lulu. The picture to the left is what we were working on. Jessica, Katelyn and I have been working on this collection since May I think and it's finally finished. Once we all approve of the final product, Summer Idea No. 6, by us three, will be available for purchase.

I've finished the rewriting of WOLF. I'm quite relieved by this. It's amazing how much I cut out from the 2nd draft to the 3rd draft. Around 6500 words. From the first draft to the second I cut about 5500. So by draft 3 I was to 12000 words. I kept track of all of this just because this is my first novel and I want to record everything that I do at every point so that I can hopefully make the writing of the next one less difficult. Though probably from book to book the process is always different. What I've discovered is that I didn't write enough for the first draft. Perhaps that's not true though. I did edit while writing a lot of the time because I would receive workshop critiques from peers. However, overall, I didn't edit that much during the creation of the pages. I tried to just write as much as I could because I knew I would be able to rewrite everything later on. All that said, I don't think I wrote enough. I would like to maybe have another 10k words to have. As it is, WOLF has shrunk to below 100 pages. Given the story's major plot-line, this seems understandable. The good news is that in beginning the rewrite of catherine, I've discovered that there is a lot of room to expand catherine, or Part Two of the novel. My original concept for the novel was for WOLF to be the significantly longer part which preceded catherine, the shorter part. Now, it seems that they might end up being around the same length. I will just have to see about that though.

Two of my best friends in the world are getting married. Their happiness surrounds me.