At the beginning of the semester I was talking to Anna, and she said "During the semester we do our thesis, we shouldn't have to take any other classes." This is the point in the semester - midterm season - where I really, really agree with that more than I ever have up to this point. It's so frustrating, because I finally have a story that I feel I can make work, and the pieces are starting to come together in a somewhat sensible way, and instead of being able to focus all my attention on this wonderful piece of work, I have to write an economics paper... and a literature paper... and do a video project... and... and... and...

Sorry. I won't bore you with any more bitching and moaning (although I won't deny that it IS frustrating). I will, however, say that I really, truly enjoyed our group writing session the other night, and hope we get to do that again. Honestly, I'd almost rather do that every third week than meet in our peer groups without the instructors.

I also realized something else that night, before we even got started. I realized that listening to other folks talk about their writing, reading it, listening to them read it, is something that really gets me jazzed and makes me eager to do some writing myself. So before our writing session, I went to Works in Progress. I listened to the four graduate students read their work, pondered over the fact that it could be me up there sharing my work at WIP someday, and got enthused by the broad range of great works. This was a purposeful strategy: my hope was that if I went and listened to these folks read, I could get juiced up, and then head into our writing session and write my guts out. It worked...sort of... I didn't write a ton (I did 7 pages), but I think I ended up producing more than I would have if I hadn't gone there first.

That said... I think my main challenge now is to keep up enthusiasm for this new storyline, to have faith in it, that even though I don't know everything about where it is going just yet, it will all come together in a way that works eventually. I need to improve the parts of the story that need work without sacrificing the elements that are already working. I must tell myself to push past the frustration and delve into all the good stuff I have to work with. I need to believe that what I create will be good. I need to believe in myself as a writer. Heck, what a challenge!