I'm so stoked. i only have 4 more workshops for the rest of my MFA career. i can't explain how delighted i am about this. now some people are scratching their head, like, Jackson, isn't that sad? my god, it's not sad at all, it's the greatest thing ever. don't get me wrong, i'm totally for workshops, i think at their best they can help us become aware of our patterns, conceits, flaws and blind spots. at their worst however, they can be disastrous, they can assassinate beauty, they can become psychoanalytic gang bangs, mere pretexts to lay into people using art as an excuse. and there's an irony, at least with fiction workshops, which is that we actually spend alot more time reading other manuscripts than we do working on our own. well, some people don't do either--suckas. but for me, i put alot of time in my critiques because i want to make people's stories better, and it will be nice to be able to focus on my thesis, and my stories, and just work on that for awhile. so yeah, i'm hella stoked about this. four workshops, that's nothing. anyway, this makes me happy.
now, i need to start cranking up my novel. i'm at the 220 page mark, but nowhere near completion yet. my next character to develop is Ginger Lin, Winnie Yu's shorty. GL is my sixth and final main character in my novel. i'll tell you more about her later.
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Mcsweeney's
Double Room (well, actually, they said, wait until our next reading period. okay, fine).