I may be insane

Given the heavy teaching load (and I mean heavy... some days it feels downright unmanageable), my intention to present at three conferences over this year, and the need to take the dissertation material in an entirely new direction in order to make it into a workable book, I'm insane to have agreed to join our re-started fiction writing group.

Insane.

And yet.

I'm buying myself a little time by sending off material that's already been roughly drafted (though not completed by a long shot). Which means that I spent some of the last part of this week running through a first chapter draft, trying to eliminate the most awkward prose (not worrying so much about story at this point - that will have to come later).

Weird thing is, I really, really enjoyed it.

I also found myself becoming interested in the story again. I had started it quite a while ago, but got stuck after the fourth chapter (they're long, so it's about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way through a book-length manuscript). And so I left it. And left it.

But I'm actually getting interested in it again. I still don't know how to get out of the fourth chapter and into the final one(s). But I'm beginning to suspect that in the process of editing what I've already got, I'll figure it out. And that feels pretty good.

Now to get back to the conference paper that has a real and hard deadline that's rapidly approaching, rather than the agreed-upon deadline of the writing group!