I sent in and got feedback on my next 20 pages on my third assignment packet of scenes but now need to get my essays done. Part of the delay is finding adequate support from the reading, so it involves a lot of cut and paste from a lot of 300+ page books. I'm hoping to find several examples from several texts that show the principle being discussed.

In the process of doing the one essay, it grew into four essays or articles, since some tend to be just facts and data.

The four books I'm using as the main source are my semester reading assignment selected by me and Evelyn Conlon:

1. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li
2. East Wind West Wind by Pearl S. Buck
3. Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian
4. The Writer and Her Work by Janet Sternburg

I'm also using 4-8 other resources in support of these essays, so all in all it adds up to a lot of work.

I spent several days doing submissions and will hope to do some more after I've finished these essays.

Also finished reading Birds of America by Laurie Moore, she really uses dialogue to good purpose in these stories. Most have a distant portrayal of painful situations that affects the readers emotions.

My "volunteer work" or getting out and about these last weeks surrounds Zoouniverse, my work on my model, and this month I'm the coordinator for the Central Florida Golf Club. Also loved seeing Mama Mia at the Bob Carr Performing Arts Center.

I also did some place setting research for the novel and worked on the keyword specification of my blogs. I may well start a new political oriented blog. 

I'm looking forward to judging my first poetry soup contest in two weeks along with a visit from my niece.

So with my main assignment for my Carlow University MFA program residency complete, all I had to do is write, right? Sure thing, clear sailing, but then this little bitty niggly worry thingie kept plaguing me. Stare at the ceiling. Stare at the garden. Stare at the floor. Stare at the piles of books. What was I missing?

Eventually, I get it. I'm missing a plan. I know I have another essay due on the 7th along with 20 pages, but what pages?

Why am I uneasy? Is it because I haven't submitted anything recently? Yes, that, too, but what should I submit and where?

What if they all get accepted? Am I ready?

So I did accomplish something. I did figure out I needed to send the rewritten beginning, still in modern time rather than future. I always build from the existing because we may forgive and forget but we always have our roots. I collected data, invented a subplot, wrote 3000 words. I did pick out various stops along the main character's route and found pictures and background data about some of the cities, and some points along the plot line enhanced by history. I discovered I could go to Shandong Province in China with A Broader View Volunteers, too, which sounds fun but probably not possible until next year--this year is pretty booked up. A lot of my brainstorming comes out of longer range parts of the story where I need to backfill to the first part of the novel.

So then I had to wonder, am I ready for such a trip to China? So I bought MacGraw-Hill's Chinese Dictionary & Guide by Quanyu Huang--it focuses on teaching written Chinese via the marks and mark count. I bought the Tuttle Mini Chinese Dictionary by the Tuttle Editors because it has a word oriented way to find words and meanings. Finally I bought Side by Side Chinese and English Grammar by C. Frederick Farrell, Feng-hsi Lui, Xiaozhou Wu, and Rongrong Liao. I've wanted to check my names so that I don't inadvertently call something using a Chinese-English homonym that might embarrass me. Also the equivalent names in the languages especially sounds might create a sense of common knowledge. I also found a Pinyin Pronunciation Guide from the Centre for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language in order to understand how the different tones were sounded as marked by accents in various directions.

My reading consisted of my book that I'm reading for this month--One Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li--I'll have a review, soon. I also came up with some ideas of what to look for in writing the essay. 

I also read, Chinese Intelligence Operations by Nicholas Eftimiades since I may have a thriller plot, I don't quite know how it will affect the story yet. I already know I have one character whose purpose is hidden maybe even sinister and I know that I need my villain(s)--how political is that? Sometimes character's don't even know their purpose so they act without knowing and only understand at the very end.

I also couldn't help peeking into Laurie Moore's Birds of America: Stories which I found quite charming, more eventually on that topic.

Note: Some of what I cover in this overall blog, especially reading materials, will be covered in some of the other blog sections where I talk specifically about stories, poems, etc.

Then I built a list of item I had close to ready for submission and matched them against a potential list of calls for submission. I worked on a letter for an agent but ended up not liking it.

I took a look at my marketing plan--matching up my blogs and other online activities against those products I had created and found some holes--these will come about eventually.

I made an error in my essay when I said I needed to write 600,000 words, like many who find connections I combined word count and page number so I really meant 150,000 words and 600 pages, divided into three volumes.

Good news--I received notice that Loconeal Publishing is interested in my short story "Death and the Fishbowl Pontoon" for their Pirate Anthology, more about that in later reports.

And I think I may be near agreement on the illustrations for my golf book.