Coming Into the Home Stretch...

But not on a manuscript. Boo.

On my Master's Degree. After three years of juggling and putting things off, especially writing, and especially after I got a full-time job, I am on the last month of Graduate School. I am working like mad to get my Special Project finalized and turned in (this week!), and all the paperwork that goes with graduating, AND finishing the final two courses, one of which is absolutely insane with work.

I keep thinking of all the things I will have time for once this is over. NOT getting up at 5:15 am to read textbooks. Or working on papers while sitting at son's football practice. Or having Sundays to do...anything. House projects. House cleaning, which has gone woefully undone for far too long.

And finally...writing. It's not like I haven't written anything the last three years. I put out two novels, one of which was done before I started grad school, the other half done when I sold it. I finished another, and got an agent. I spent the summer pounding away at the keys to get just over 20K in a new book so that I have something to show a prospective editor when my agent sells the book she has. And I wrote hundreds of thousands of words of academia. Yuck. It's weird, some days I don't even think about writing at all, and I don't miss it, and others I long to break into a project and work, work, work. Some days I just want to get some sleep and watch some TV without a computer on my lap.

Oh, I don't plan to start writing for fun and profit the day after grad school is over. I plan on getting very very drunk before that. But once the hangover is gone, and I get a few days to breathe, I will be ready to go. I will have to shift my brain from logical thinking to fictional thinking, but I think it's like riding a bicycle. And there are so many projects just waiting, so many stories to be told.

Home stretch, baby. By Thanksgiving, this will all be but a memory.