Yeah, another writing update. Well, I finally got “The Broken Pathway” (aka “The Broken Path” and “The Spike”) done. Some neat magical stuff and a (somewhat) dramatic (and dramatically magical) ending with a tiny, quiet coda at the very end… which expanded the story up to nearly the same length as the original draft, even though I removed several characters — one of them animal — and a subplot about a monk raping a woman sent by her infertile husband to the temple to pray for a son… and about his meeting the daughter he never knew he sired that …
Month: December 2007
Costochondritis
Apparently this is what was causing me to feel weird when taking a deep breath. The doctor I saw last week correctly noted that it was not a broken rib — which was my first suspicion — but he said he thought it was a muscular issue, especially with the muscles connecting the pelvis to the ribcage. Last night, I finally had had enough and went to the hospital, and the patient, friendly doctor checked me carefully (even offering to do an electrocardiogram, though I’ve had a few of those in the last few months and they’ve always been okay) …
Go, Mo-Sa, Go, Go!
I’ve spent a lot of time in the past day thinking about how my story “The Broken Pathway” needs to end. Mo-Sa, the focal character, has been coughing and sniffling rather impatiently as I’ve struggled to figure this out, and finally, looking through older drafts, and at what I did with what was once his cat, Nabi (“Butterfly”, a common name for cats in Korea, for who knows what reason) — now it’s a shabby little brown thing, an apparently stray mountain cat who leads him right to the big what-the-hell-is-that early in the story — and at one other …
Chapbook and The Broken Path
I spent time today on two projects. One is a chapbook of poems written by my poetry course students. Some people haven’t mailed in their poems yet, but most have, and it’s now at almost 50 pages. I’m guessing 60-72 pages when it’s done. I’ll see what the costs are at the printshop, to get enough for three copies for each student, plus a few spares for me and for other profs in the department. (Plus mailing a few to friends.) Since I cannot do the layout for staple-bound texts, they’re going to have to be perfect-bound, and that costs …
FFFFFFFFFFF!
That’s what I wrote on the top of one paper from midterms, which, yes, sadly I’m only handing back this week. (I’ve had them for several weeks, but been to busy to grade them.) Most of the essays were fine, a few were inspiring (considering the students’ circumstances — it’s not easy to write an essay in a foreign language about a poem in a foreign language, after all — but a few were pathetically plagiarized. I stopped in the middle of higlighting the stolen bits in one — they made up two solid pages at that point — and …