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The bet you keep

I don’t know if I mentioned this or not, but I’ve started another class for Spring semester. It’s with the same professor and of the twelve other grad students, six were in my last class. It’s sort of surreal because we’re in the exact replica of the room we met in last semester, so with the same teacher and most of the same students, it feels as though there’s been a time shift and half of our classmates have been replaced with imposters, only no one is really mentioning it.

Our first meeting was delightful. First of all, it was absolutely awesome to be in a class and actually know my classmates and have them say hi to me when they walked in the door. Also, the professor started talking about workshops and how if this is someone’s first workshop, maybe it’s not for them, and then went on to talk about being handed ‘steaming piles of turds’ in previous classes. Except that one has to believe that he’s talking about one incident in particular, especially when all of the alumni of the last class sat there smirking, knowingly. That sort of made me feel bad, because I would hate to be the person that everyone was smirking about, but man, don’t take a graduate class in writing if you can’t even write sentence that doesn’t make one openly grieve for the words that you’re destroying. Invite into my bastion to imbibe my comestibles, indeed. Ouch. It hurts even now.

One cool moment: we had to sign up for our workshops, and instead of handing the sheet around, the professor crumpled it up and threw it to someone, who threw it to my girl crush, who threw it to me. Ok, I know this is juvenile, but it was like being picked first to be on a team. My girl crush! Eeeee!

Also, after class, I ended up walking to the parking garage with another classmate, whom I rarely even talked to in the last class. That was very cool too! They like me! They really like me!

I ended up taking a very early workshop for my first story because I wanted it to be handed in before our big weekend but I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to write. I made a bet with Jake that I would have a novel started by January 31, 2005, or be required to make a political contribution to the Republican party, and am proud to say that I have officially started a novel. Several paragraphs of one, anyway, and also a very loose outline. And well within 24 hours of the deadline too. Go me! So maybe I could use the first chapter of that for my first workshop, but then it would have to not suck. Well, we’ll see. I have tons of time, oh, well, several days to mull it over. But at least I’m not contributing to the Evil Empire!