My life is in a state of turmoil between my two courses for now. So far, I have a perfect score in my Technical Writing course and have not received a single bit of feedback for my Modern Novel course. I’m holding on to the hope that my prof will give us something back tonight about last week’s paper, because I have to turn in 2 papers tonight and 2 more next week.

Tech Writing is going as smoothly as one can imagine. After getting some sense from the others after week 2 that they would rather participate in the discussion on the work than hear what I have to say about it (well, they were being too quiet and saying dumb things), I decided that I would be quiet this week.

That plan lasted all of about 5 minutes before the instructor began calling on me to get my “expert working student” opinion on some things he was going over for life-application stuff involving the techniques learned in tech writing. “Great, so much for that plan.”

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It’s still crazy here with a flurry of activity. Last week I managed to put in my third consequitive 50+ hour week in at the office and started classes with 3 hours of Technical Writing on Tuesday and 3 hours of Modern Short Novel on Thursday.

Thankfully, Tech Writing is shaping up to be the easiest course I’ve taken, not by its content, but by the nature of my strengths. Combine that with the first two assignments being the same as my assignments for Professional Writing, it’s making the beginning quite smooth.

Not so much for Modern Short Novel. My wife had this professor when she was finishing up her degree… and I was wary of the situation. There were several occasions of cancelled classes and unneccessary reading because of that. I don’t have time to waste on reading stuff that doesn’t count, so I looked for alternatives. I’m in it now, so you can guess how the search went.

Our first novelette is “Daisy Miller” by Henry James. It was agonizingly slow because of it being a period piece of 19th century language and 8pt font with long paragraphs. Sometimes I had to re-read a 5-line paragraph 4 times to get what was actually being said. After page 5, I started writing down words I didn’t know for sure, and ended up with a list of 21 new words to add to my vocabulary. How embarrassing. I’m almost 30! I’m supposed to know everything by now and start forgetting it by the time I’m retired. At this pace, I’m not going to have time to forget everything I know by the time I’m supposed to.

We have to read 14 novelettes and 14 3/4-page critiques of them plus a 10-13 page paper on an outside book selected from her reading list. I haven’t quite decided between Steinbeck or Hemingway, but time is drawing near on getting started… like this weekend.

Being this busy is literally not leaving me much time to come up with original thoughts, advice, complaints, or much of anything at all. As a treat, I may post my critiques for you to see what kind of crap I put out there for the prof.