P: TGI...Friday?

Hey Annie,
I especially enjoyed your last post, as it was so overwhelmingly positive! Way to rally and head over to trivia night and all those other things. I totally hear you about sometimes just wanting to plop on the couch after work and watch Hulu.tv all night, but in keeping with your New Year's resolution, brava! And girl, if I had a penny for everytime I fell while running (on the indoor track, no less), I'd have 4 cents.

Wednesday was the first day of class and I finally met THE Ha Jin! He had a soft, Chinese accent, and these pearls of wisdom would dribble from his lips. We were ALL in awe. And unlike that tyrannical Leslie, Xuefei (as we're invited to call him, as Ha Jin is his pen name) said, just get the pages down on paper. Don't go back and labor over lines--you don't have time for this. He was pretty amazing--he would look over our novella ideas (we each turned in 3) and he's like: okay, this is a full-blown novel, it would be 30 scenes, 400 pages and it will take you at least a few years to write. Then he'd read over someone else's, and he's like, this is more of a short story--I can see it being 25 pages with 5 major scenes, but you need to have these 2 storylines come together at the end. "The old man should have a daughter. She is very bee-oo-tee-pful, and then there's a will..."

He was like some kind of literary forecaster, a construction savant! Of course, this means I need to first outline my novel/la (a reinterpretation of Jane Eyre, which he suggests should take place IN a supermarket, to combine my 2 disparate novella ideas), and then I need to churn in a minimum of 50 pages in a few weeks. While writing a 15p short story for another class, while teaching. WHEW! I'm exhausted before I even begin.

As for the long wknd, I have no idea what my plans will be. I canceled a drink date I had in Cambridge on Sunday because I was just feeling too overwhelmed. So unlike you, Annie, I've taken the opposite attitude where I'm pulling back from making new friends, etc. All I know for sure is that I'm doing a 6 mile run tomorrow morning along the Charles, in -2 degrees (real feel) temp. I guess I'll let the rest fall into place.

cheers, P