I’m trying to reconcile myself to the fact that August is rapidly coming to a close.  The thought fills me with a bit of melancholy.  My younger sister will be headed back to LA for her sophomore year of college at the end of the week, and I’ll be leaving for Santa Barbara in about a month.  In the meantime, I have a lot of work to do on the thesis, and I’m feeling that familiar wave of panic over getting this first draft completed.

I’m also starting to stress out about the workload that I’ll have to tackle in the upcoming quarter: finishing and defending the thesis, taking two seminars, and teaching two discussion sections is a lot more than I’ve had to deal with in a while.  I haven’t taught a discussion section in over a year, and while I love being in front of a classroom, I’m definitely a little rusty.  Add this to the fact that I’m actually just tired of taking classes (only 4 left till I’m free of them!), and it makes for a fair amount of trepidation.

Anyway, onto some positive things. The highlights for the week included:

  • Catching up on my CampNaNo word count.  tell me no lies is now 32.5k long, and I am slowly imposing structure upon the mad tangle of scenes that I’ve written.  Only 17,438 words to go!
  • Diagnosing the plot problem that has plagued Path to the Peacock Throne for the better part of two months.  The solution, however, means that the story is going to be a two-parter, but for the saga and adventure that I have in mind, I’ll need two books to tell Liandre’s tale.  It’s a lofty goal, but one that I can’t wait to tackle.  This might just be one of my Round 4 goals. 😀
  • Overhauling the “Novels In-Progress” page on the blog and adding new synopses for the three stories that I’m juggling.  This has been a goal for a while now.
  • Following the #ASA2011 twitter feed for the annual American Sociological Association meeting, currently happening in Las Vegas.  The venue of course means that there are many pithy observations about consumption and commodities, along with highlights from the sessions.  Someone has also gone and made twitter accounts for social theorists Emile Durkheim (@emiledurkheim) and Talcott Parsons (@talcottparsons), which are hilarious, and filled with lots of nerdy soc jokes.  For example:
  • Finally, I read a book!  This has been on my to-do list for a few weeks now. I devoured Elizabeth Redfern’s Music of the Spheres, which is a murder mystery that takes place in 18th century London.  It actually reminds me a fair bit of what I’m trying to do with tell me no lies, so it was both entertaining and useful.
Today is a hard-core work day, so I’m off to make some headway on the thesis, and hopefully add another 1600 words or so to my WIP.  Have a wonderful week, all!