I have realized that when the semester begins again, I am horrible about updating my blog (I’m going to try to work on that this time). It has been a crazy week but a good one.
This week was the beginning of the spring semester at my university. At the beginning of each semester I am a bundle of nerves complete with tension headaches and the urge to vomit. Last semester began with me coming home my second day there and crying at my kitchen table for feeling like an inadequate fraud after I didn’t know who Kerouac and Carver were. The name dropping and writing exercises (where I sat staring blankly at my notebook) pushed me past the breaking point when combined with my anxiety. This semester, I can happily report that I did not come home and cry into my dinner. I think I am going to like working with both of my professors, one of which I had last semester for a literature course. I am taking Creative Writing II and Women and Autonomy. The balance between having one literature class and one writing class is a lot better than taking two of one and one of the other, which is what I did for the past year.
Luckily, having two classes should (hopefully) give me more time to actually write for myself this semester, and I would love to knock out a good chunk of book three of the Ingenious Mechanical Devices. Right now I am finishing up The Winter Garden and only have one more chapter to knock out, which should be an easy one as it is the penultimate chapter and I already wrote the epilogue last week. For days, I was stuck on the final pivotal scene. Probably half of it was performance anxiety while the other half was working out a sensible choreography. Note to self: do not make another huge scene with ten people in the room. Way too many bodies in one space that I need to keep track of. At least I am nearly done. I also only have ten more chapters to edit before I send it off to my beta readers.
Part of me wonders if I am absolutely insane for creating a pre-order for The Winter Garden before it was finished. It’s coming out on March 31st, so I have to submit the final draft to Amazon by March 20th. Honestly, I have plenty of time (61 days), but I still am holding my breath to make sure I get it in on time. Is this absolutely insane? Yeah, probably, but I’m sure other writers have flown by the seat of their pants with a lot less time and a lot more to do. Sometimes I feel like if I had all the time in the world, I would never get anything done. A solid deadline will do me good, even if I give myself grey hair in the process.
In other news, I did a fun Q&A with a few other authors who will be appearing in the first issue of Selfish, which can be found here. Because The Winter Garden is coming out in a few months, I put The Earl of Brass on sale for 99 cents for two days (January 18th-19th), and can be found here. Please check it out if you have the chance as well as the pre-order for The Winter Garden.
Kara Jorgensen 