Well, I can honestly say that I have made a great deal of progress in my novel since the time of my last post. I have finished up a second full draft, complete with additions, rewrites, revisions, and a few deletions here and there. It still isn’t a final draft, but nor is it rough. Printing out my entire novel at once–having all sorts of difficulties with double-sided printing and ink and page-numbering in the process–and putting it into a binder felt pretty amazing. This cleaner revised draft currently is in the hands of my remarkable advisor, who will read through the entirity in the next couple of weeks.

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What a crazy couple of months! Finals, interviews, applications, and now, home for Winter Break, I’ve been in recovery. Despite my crazy schedule of late, or perhaps because of it, I have actually been surprisingly productive towards the end of November and beginning of December. Since coming home I’ve managed to reconnect with my story even more than in the weeks before finals. I’m hoping to have a clean revision with necessary additions by the end of January.

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Time goes by very quickly during the beginning of the school year. I’m shocked that we are already coming to Fall Break. My friends in Oregon and overseas in Scotland have just finished off their first week or two and when I tell them I’m getting essays together for midterms they initially think I’m joking.

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Between the hurricanes, swamp fires, and earthquakes, our first week of classes has yielded to ‘first week-take two.’ It has been a climatic start to the end of a hot summer whose last month I spent in Williamsburg.

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Me on Orkney Climbing hills

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Rain consumes St Andrews as the days tick by to my departure from this little Scottish seaside town that has served as my home since September. It seems that May wishes to be a month of separations. I have hugged good friends one by one as they’ve headed home and out of my life, a few delayed thanks to Iceland’s volcanic activity. Some I will see again relatively soon, others perhaps not for years. Midway through this month that began in sunshine and has yielded to rain, my beloved Grammy also decided it was time to depart. I unexpectedly touched down in the United States for a week with my family. It is perhaps Grammy’s gift to me that I had some time with my parents, my brother, my aunts, uncles, and cousins before the rollercoaster takes off.

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Somewhere at sometime someone has probably eloquently spoken to the difficulty writers face in beginning to write. I’m sure someone has also expounded on the difficulty of explaining what it is that causes a writer to write. The truth is, I suppose, that there is no one definable beginnning to any work, no isolated spark that results in a novel.

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