Blue Danube Waltz: the return of progress reports.

[feuervogel]

I sort of got out of the habit, and I thought I was boring/spamming everybody, so I stopped.

When last I mentioned it a week ago, I was at 10,700 words. Today I'm at 16613, and I've done 1825 for the day, including a bit of editing that involved deleting almost 1000 words. (The plot told me it didn't want to go where I'd outlined it, the ungrateful bastard.) The scene to replace it was being difficult, so I moved on to the next one. It doesn't build on it, so that's OK.

9000 left until I hit the minimum length for the call.

Two writing days left this week, then I go to Asheville for 4 days. Monday I'm going to Fayetteville for work (work!), then I have probably the entirety of that week, unless I sign up for work. I'd like to have the first draft completed by 4 July, so I may wait until after that to take assignments. Lucky for me, I get to choose which ones I want from a schedule.

So that's, what, 6-7 writing days until then. If I focus, I can do it. I kept being distracted by stupid shit like which fighter planes the German air force uses, and which one I should base the space fighters off of. Which is completely and utterly irrelevant to this story. Seriously!

I've gotten everything else taken care of, though, like editing another short story I plan to submit this month (and revising it a lot) and beta reading an acquaintance's novel. So I didn't spend any time on BDW over the weekend, which is fine, because sometimes you need to do something else.

Right now, that's going to be reading Joe Haldeman's The Forever War until bedtime.

Comments

[doctorskuld.livejournal.com]

Ask me sometime to relate to you the story of how I ended up drunk at a party being thrown by Joe Haldeman and my grade in his class subsequently jumped from a C to an A-.

[feuervogel]

You can't just leave a comment like that without explaining!

(I'm putting stuff for AX in the mail today. I'll get the ripped CD zipped up and on sendspace or summat later.)

[doctorskuld.livejournal.com]

It's actually not all as exciting as it seems to be. More just full of drunken college debauchery? D:

Anyways, so Joe Haldeman teaches MIT writing classes in spring quarter. I think he usually does one of the Short Story sections, but his two main classes that he feels closest to at the Science Fiction Short Story class and the Novel Writing class. In junior year, I took his Novel Writing class.

He hated my writing style. I was in a phase where I was doing really, thick, purple and descriptive prose, and Haldeman just disliked my writing. He's a hardcore science fiction guy, and I was writing fantasy, so he also hated not only my style, but what I was about. Anyways, the first few chapters I turned in were hovering at about C level, even after the revisions. For our final grade, we were supposed to turn in one final revision, so I decided to pull an all-nighter and basically rewrite everything, covering all the points of writing style that Haldeman thought were crappy and weak in my first few goes.

The weekend of finals week, Joe also always hosts a party for his students. Since he's only in Boston for half the school year, he lives in faculty housing at MIT, so a bunch of us science fiction and novel writing kids piled in there, and the party was basically heavy wine-drinking with a smattering of snacks that disappeared quickly. So here's where the memories start getting fuzzy. I think you can ask rax (Nolan knows her, apparently, which I thought was weird and also hilarious) about it because she was there and more sober than I was.

There was some regaling of the post-Vietnam-war PTSD stories from Joe's part, and that's about all I remember. At some point in time, one of the students, Antony, has his wife on his lap. I am totally smashed at this point, and I decide that hey, I want to sit on Antony's lap too. So when his wife vacates the spot, I take a perch on there. Somehow, I think I get passed around the room. At one point, I am on rax's lap. I may or may not have dozed off there. Rax also tells me that for certain, there was a good chunk of time after Joe's wife had gone to sleep that I was perched on Joe's lap. What I did while I was sitting on Joe Haldeman's lap I am not sure of. I am not sure whether this before or after I ended up sitting at Joe Haldeman's feet, listening to his war stories.

Eventually we're dry, and Rax goes off to fetch a couple of bottles of port that she has sitting in her dorm room, and it's 3:30am so I decide to go home because I really want to sleep in my own bed tonight and not have to crash at somebody else's. I think Joe might have offered me his couch, I can't remember for sure. I stagger home, totally drunk off my ass.

The next week, I get my grades, and mysteriously I have an A- in the class when previously all my grades had been in the C range. ¬_¬

...and that's the story of how I aced Haldeman's novel writing class! :D

Incidentally, the Haldeman thing got me voted by all members of the house as "sketchiest housemember." :( I tried to make a case that Malima and Rax were sketchier, but nobody was having any of it.

[feuervogel]

Man, drunken debauchery. None of my college stories are that interesting ;D

[doctorskuld.livejournal.com]

I am full of so many drunken debauchery stories from college. I mean, you're not really living the undergrad life unless you have drunken debauchery stories!

[kirin]

I totally missed out by not discovering drinks I actually like until like 5 years after undergrad. Oh well.

(I can still have newer drunken debauchery stories. For some reason they mostly seem to involve Mo. This is perhaps related to the awesome girly drinks he makes me.)

[doctorskuld.livejournal.com]

Most alcohols are acquired tastes. I just drank beer until I developed a good sense for it. Same goes for a lot of other things I eat and drink--like tea. :p

[anacoluthon.livejournal.com]

I have to wait to make you more drinks until my nipple piercings heal more - there's no telling what you'll do to them!!!

[anacoluthon.livejournal.com]

That is AWESOME. The only faculty parties I went to in college (there were two) were a lot of fun, but none of them involved more than a minor amount of drinking and there was no debauchery involved.

Too bad I never got to get drunk with Ben Theiss and sit on his lap. Hottest TA EVER. Trust me.