Today we had the "rehearsal" class with the graduate student who was teaching about suspense. Coming out of it, I can say that it's most definitely in the running for both "most useful lecture of the residency" and "most interesting lecture of the residency." Not only in the running, but currently winning; the residency is only half-over, so it may be beaten out later on, but I doubt it. I now get the mechanics and creation of suspense in a way that I never did before. He covered both short, attention-keeping lines of tension (down to syntactical tension in a single sentence, paragraph, or scene) and long, novel-length lines of tension, distilling it down into a single rule that he said at the beginning of the class, and then really clicked for me when he repeated it at the end of the lecture: "The most basic element of suspense is the desire for knowledge." I mean, all his elaboration and examples and exercises elaborated on that and were what made me really understand it, but now that I've gotten all of that I think I can repeat that rule to myself and have the rest follow in my head. I have heard before that the key to creating suspense is withholding information from the reader, but for some reason turning that around to the way this guy phrased it and dealt with it just makes it seem so much clearer to me.

Furthermore, I think that class just fixed 90% of my problems with the currently-in-progress Cracks-verse story. Most of those problems were with stuff already written, but I knew I was going to massively re-write it as I typed it up anyway. I'm looking forward, for the first time ever, to a rewrite. Now I just need to finish the raw draft before I can do it. A lot of me just wants to be done with that part so I can get to the re-writing, so I'm going to have to push myself to get the raw draft finished instead of lingering on revisions that I want to make when I type it up; that feeling has been nagging me for a while now and makes it hard to write, and I still have to deal with it. But I'm not dreading doing the rewrite anymore. \o/

OMG this is beautiful. I don't think I've laughed that hard in months.

I think the short bits of cat narration are my favorite.

I am Maru. I am a study in the most exquisite contrasts. Tabby body and white feet, soft whiskers and sharp teeth, beautiful and terrible both am I, Maru.

At once as vast as a nebula and as elusive as an electron, I am a paradox.

I am Maru, and I can fit into a cardboard box one third my size.

So the drainage pond just below the Village has been frozen over since before I got here (it hasn't gone above 25 F for a week now, never mind going up to 32 F or above). I've been considering trying the ice and playing around on it, but I've been a bit wary. As I was walking up to my dorm just now, I saw two boys running down to the pond. Further observation from my window showed that the ice survived them goofing around in the middle of the pond, and even whacking the ice with a heavy stick. I think that I may go out and try it myself (the playing, not the whacking) tomorrow morning.

The weather is beautiful outside this morning. The sun is shining, and at the same time a very light snowfall is coming down; the wind is just strong enough to stir up the snow so that it doesn't seem to hit the ground, just swirl around in circles, without being strong enough to get in between layers of clothing and chill the body. While I was in lecture, the girl sitting next to me tapped me on the shoulder, pointed outside, and said, "It looks like a snowglobe outside." She was right: the wind was whirling the snow and the sun was making it glitter, and it looked just like a snowglobe right after it's been shaken.

Something I forgot to mention earlier: on Friday I went over to Ann's house, where I saw Kylara and met some of Ann's other friends, and we played the Drawing Game. Ann's brother is apparently into Dwarf Fortress, and so we kept going off into conversations about Boatmurdered, other succession games and forum threads, and, of course, our most epic personal fortress stories. I hadn't played DF in a while because I'd been busy and Komanreg, my main fortress, is decades old and has so many creatures on the map (especially during seiges, which we get on a seasonal basis now) that it moves at an absolute crawl. Talking to him, though, has gotten me really itching to play again.

Playing the Drawing Game was so much fun. Some of the sentences morphed in truly epic ways. And I love how Ann and her brother both started with the sentence "Are you out of your Vulcan mind?" in the same round, without any foreknowledge or planning, and each mutated into something completely different.

Of course my period would start on the very first day of the MFA Residency. Fortunately, I suspected that this would happen, so I saved all of the nice chocolate that Dad gave me for Christmas. There is now an emergency chocolate bar in my bag, and I fully intend to eat at least half of it during lectures and discussions this afternoon. I'm also brewing up a travel mug of the cramp-reducing Wild Weeds Tea.

So I arrived at school this afternoon, and the whole MFA undergraduate group had dinner at the Service Learning House with the college's resident cooking dude (no, seriously, we have an official cooking dude. He runs a program called "Everyone Cooks" and also does supervises Cowpie). We got to see our schedules for the week and do a last run-through of the rules and conditions of the program.

I must say that am heartened by the fact that nothing starts before 9:30 AM. On the other hand, evening readings start at 8:15 PM, and apparently often run to 9:30 PM. The schedule in between varies widely from day to day, but I don't have very much free time in there. As I expected, but still a little intimidated.

I'm not feeling very excited or engaged right now, but I drove three hours earlier, and I just did a two-week pile of moldy dishes, and I am very tired, so I am going to try to get more fired up in the morning. \o/ For now I'm just waiting for my laundry to be done, and then I am going to bed.

[edit]There is one very lucky stroke with the schedule. We're each supposed to pick one graduate student's lecture to attend during the week. I don't know why we only get one, but they're very strict about it; our professor told us that if we absolutely couldn't pick, she could put in a special request to do two. I was particularly attracted to one that appeals to me for its relation to my own personal writing: it's on suspense, which I struggle with in my fiction. On the other hand, there's another that not only looked equally interesting, but was also more relevant to the creative nonfiction writing I've been doing throughout school, about how different layers of structure (sentences, paragraphs, chapters, the whole work) interrelate and complement each other. I really wanted to go to both.

When she handed out the schedule, our professor told us that two of the graduate students were "practicing" their lectures on us. It turns out that one of them was the student doing the lecture on suspense. That means that I get to see it anyway, and can also go to the official lecture on structural layers! \o/ Just on the good vibes from this bit of serendipity, I'm a lot more excited about this whole thing already.[/edit]

That meme where you record the first line of the first entry of every month this year.

January:I'm back, safe and sound!
February: I went to the store today to get Dayquil, tissues, eggs, and tea.
March: According to my LJ inbox, today is sukuhov's birthday.
April: Or maybe I should just become a wandering potato farmer.
May: So every English class for the past three semesters (before this one), I've had recurring nightmares about having to research and write my biggest papers for them in Spanish.
June: This morning Mom woke me up around 11:30 (as per request; I didn't want to sleep too late) and I lazed around the house for a while "eating breakfast."
July: I'm home!
August: My uncle Mike, the one diagnosed last year with brain cancer, is dying.
September: They... they canceled Reading Rainbow.
October: Last weekend, I went home and spent time with my family and pets.
November: Last night I was the designated driver for Gretchen's party, which was at Jenn's house.
December: To do this week, in order not so much of priority as intended completion.

I think my main disappointment for this year is that I did not finish the first Cracks-verse book. So close, only a couple chapters short of the projected ending, and I didn't get it done. And just far that enough I couldn't wrap it up this evening, on purely logistical grounds. I'm going to try to at least finish it before the end of winter break. It's been hard the past two weeks, with no real daily structure (it really helps me get the writing actually done), but I'm about to dive into the MFA program for eight days, and that will have plenty of structure. I just don't know about time. I will do it though, dammit. I will.

For the past few months, whenever I'm home, I've been catching time on Grand Fantasia, Aeria Games' new MMORPG. I tried it out at first just because I was invited to the Closed Beta, but I stuck around after, because it's really cute and a lot of fun. I especially love the sprites--how cute they are, the crafting, even the challenge of keeping them happy and friendly--but I also enjoy the rest of the gameplay. The combat's standard but not too hard, and I can solo a lot more than on most MMORPGs I've tried; for the quests that do need a party (usually at the end of a quest line), I can usually round one up by sitting at the boss-summoning point until more folks show up to take it on.

Most importantly, though, I like the playerbase. During the Closed Beta, I figured it was just because of the CB selection process. They were not going to invite total assholes. Now that it's out of that, though, the folks on my server are still, by and large, pretty cool. There's been a couple of annoying people, but that happens everywhere, and there's a lot fewer than I've ever encountered on Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine or Sword of the New World. I suspect part of it is just the very cutesy nature of the game, part of it may be the server/channel, and part of it is definitely the Spanish-speaking players. They are even more awesome than the playerbase on average. But everyone seems to be friendly and nice to newbies/lower-level characters (with three different end-of-quest-line bosses, our party's been short one and a higher-level character has happened along and jumped in just to help us out).

On the highly unlikely chance that anyone reading this also plays, I'm Alkali, a warrior (going for paladin) on the Alice server; I usually stick to channel 1 because I'm too lazy to pick another when I go on. [edit]I'm planning on throwing up another character on the Siropas server at some point, but I'm not in too much of a hurry. And Gerund (healer, going for cleric) on the Siropas server, though he's going to be more of an alt.[/edit] I'm going back to school soon, and I can't play any MMORPGs at school. For the first time in any game, I'm considering joining a guild, in six months or so when I've graduated school and hopefully am installed somewhere permanent with better Internet.