Wednesday, 20 June 2001

Woo hoo! I've revised the story that I finished yesterday. It is still icky. It's even ickier. I like it a lot more, now. I'll turn it in tomorrow morning for critique (I hope) Friday morning.

Today was my conference with Jim. It went well. I've mentioned that I didn't come to Clarion to be validated as a writer. But that doesn't mean that it isn't fun when it happens. He had a great specific suggestion for my other submission story. It's small, but it will be perfect. He also had a general suggestion about me putting more of myself into my work. He's right, and I've taken it to heart.

The story I turned in Monday got critiqued today. It got a generally positive critique. (At least until I tried to explain the bits that confused people. Then they were even more confused.) Some people liked it a lot. The critique gave me one definite thing to fix. There were also a couple of suggestions that I'm less sure about. I'll let it sit for a while. After Clarion I'll go over my notes and everything people wrote on the ms and then decide what to do with it.

This evening a bunch of us watched "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" which I hadn't seen before. That's a great movie! Great music is a big part of it, but there's lots of other great stuff too. Great acting. Great script. Great concept. Wow. (Of course I realize that I'm six months late in getting to here, but I'm not sure the movie even came to Champaign.)

I did get out for my run today. It was a rather feeble run, which was predictable after taking close to ten days off. But I'll get back into the swing of things pretty quickly. Tomorrow I need to lift.

I ended up having a very light supper tonight. I got a salad and some roasted chicken. That seemed safe--how to you ruin roasted chicken? I'm not sure, but they managed it. I only ate two bites.

On the other hand, it wasn't as bad as the chicken kiev that Amy tried to eat a day or two ago. I think chicken kiev is supposed to be a chicken breast stuffed with something and then breaded and fried. But this wasn't stuffed with anything, it was just hollow. The (predictable) result was that the hollow filled up with cooking grease. When Amy cut it open, hot grease squirted out across the table. If anyone had been sitting in front of her, his meal would have gotten drenched in grease. She asked if there wasn't supposed to be something inside the chicken, but they said no--that's what it was supposed to be like. Amy got something different for dinner.