The Litocamppus

I have been really busy with school lately. I've had exams, experimental design assignments, and piles of papers to grade. TA is actually a misnomer, they should call what we do indentured servitude. Not that I mind, most of the time, but I hate grading papers. Just one of the many reasons I don't want to be a professor. So I finally had a chance to sit down and read something that wasn't about multiple regression correlation or the striate cortex. I'm reading Exile's Valor by Mercedes Lackey. I'm really enjoying it so far. Alberich is really compelling, and I want to be Selenay's friend. While I was reading last night I realized that I was suddenly feeling "the itch" to write. I took a little break after I finished finished editing Deceiver's Will, and was feeling a little burned out on the series (writing two novels in 6 months will do that, I guess), but as I was reading it was like the writing part of my brain flipped on.

When I read now, I try to analyze the writing style, the perspective, the choice in words, so that I can improve my own writing. In doing so, I guess my "Litocamppus" (my made up brain area) reactivated. So today in the classes that I don't pay attention to, I started jotting a bit of book three down. The characters are coming back so easily, and now that I'm on the final book of the series I feel like I really know where the story is going and it starts to come out in that same natural way that I've been struggling with recently. I guess the moral of the story is: even when you have to memorize a thousand details about ANOVAs and the dorsal and ventral streams and Leta Stetter Hollingworth, it's important to stay in writer mode. If I allow myself to constantly get distracted by school I'll never get this thing published. School is what I'm doing now, but writing is what I want to be doing with the rest of my life.