It's been much harder than I expected to make a part time job for myself as a writer/student. Things come up and press in on unstructured time. Like taxes... which I spent all morning doing. It's also been hard to not spend more unpaid time at my "real" job.

My goal has been to spend one day a week catching up on all the things English majors learned that I didn't and one day a week writing. The latter goal was confounded when Eli November's diaphanous existence and my hard drive crashed last month. I also lost all of the notes I'd taken on Steven King's On Writing. I've decided this isn't much of a loss: if you take advice from a pulp horror novelist you'll write like a pulp horror novelist. Not a genre I particularly enjoy or admire, and so Eli and I are much better off without it. And probablly that much the better for the fresh start.

I've struggled with my studying and writing, but have been entirely successful in reading more. I've read more fiction in the last four months than in the past four years. Making reading a priority has been one of the best changes I've made in my life.

Since I need more structure in my writing life at present I'm applying to do a post-baccalaureate minor in writing at Oregon State University. Corvallis is the West coast version of Ithaca: the best of all worlds (minus sun, which I'll steal from North Dakota).

To lunch...