Sprint Week and Other Updates, Or, The Short Story of How Liz Has Too Much to Do and Yet Keeps Piling Stuff on Anyway

Hey all!

Sorry I’ve been so absent lately. Things (novel-ing, grad school-ing, reading, writing, Final Fantasy-ing) have been hectic. Here’s a quick rehash of what I’ve been up to:

-Louisville Comic Con (haven’t decided yet whether or not I’m going to write a post about this — I’ll have to find a connection to writing, which isn’t there yet, but I DID take lots of cool pictures)
-Finished the first draft of my novel! Woo! (post coming)
-Finished/started a few of my reading list books
-Continued working on a personal writing project and got some good feedback from classmates (post coming)
-Was pitched a plan for making le monies after grad school by a fellow classmate; I won’t say much now, only that it may be the only feasible use of the literary analysis part of our degree that I’ve seen to date
-Grinding out some Final Fantasy XIV (which I have become addicted to in a very bad way at the worst possible time in my life)
-SPRINT WEEK!

That last is in all caps because not only is it important, but it is also happening right now. My graduate program does something called “Sprint Week” every spring semester where they bring in a published author who teaches an intensive week-long course about a certain theme. In this post, I called Sprint Week “The Week of All Things Writing During Which You Will Probably Cry,” which is a great title in retrospect. What “sprint” basically means is that we have class four days this week — on top of everything else I have to do, I now have a three-hour workshop class EVERY DAY. While that sounds crazy busy and hard and tiring and all that rot (and it is), last year Sprint Week was hella fun and inspiring, and I’m looking forward to having the same kinds of gooey writing feelings this time around.

Our published author this time around is Kelcey Parker, who wrote a gorgeous novella called “Liliane’s Balcony” (which we read for class). You can check out her website here (you can also see what we’ll be doing in the class, which she has developed a page for on her blog, here). The “theme” that she’s chosen to structure the class around is, well, structure. More specifically: how architecture works in narrative, how space is filled by words and thoughts.

I’m excited about this theme. I’m already getting good ideas, and I’m going to use this week to its full advantage. I have this personal writing project that I’ve been trying to work on for a while (it’s what came out of this post — I will elaborate on this later in the week, maybe), and some of these ideas about space and architecture can be used to my advantage in thinking about how this piece will work as a whole or as a sum of parts.

So anyway, the homework for tonight is to come up with a designed piece of architecture that you would want to write a story about. My mind, at first, failed me, and I sat for a while without coming up with anything. How do I architecture? But then I thought of The Shard, in the London Bridge Quarter of London, England. Did some research — this place is fascinating. But this post is already too long. I’ll elaborate tomorrow.

Thanks for sticking with me, dear Readers. More to come on the morrow!

~Liz