Another day, another d(el)ay.
I heard from my PO this evening, via e-mail. He said he'd address the issue of my placement after he returns from Christmas break, which he anticipates to be January 28th. This means basically two more weeks where I'll be sitting here, nuttin' to do, just waiting to hear. I'm not doing anything interesting this year. In fact, this will be the first holiday break I've ever spent by myself. Maybe it's good practice for the Peace Corps years to come. I'm trying to arrange plans to go to Miami to hang out with my ex and her cool family for a few days, but things aren't looking good. The problem lies in where to stay because there are already family coming to visit. I can't afford a hotel room, not really. I mean, technically I can, but not if I want to stay comfortable until my next paycheck in late January!
I'll probably spend this break trying to get through some more of my novel. Yes, I'm working on one. I'm actually about two-thirds of the way through it, just beginning "Book Three." I would be remiss if I brought it up and didn't explain the project, I guess, but I'll only do so just a little -- one of the maxims writers live by is not to divulge too much about one's work until it is written, because that robs one of momentum.
But, anyway, it is (in a nutshell) about the secession of Hawai`i from the United States of America. It follows several characters, from a young local girl to the governor himself, as the ball gets rolling from a heinous terrorist act. The plot involves the remnants of the royal family, who work with the compliant governor to set up a political situation that could bring about such a thing, from securing Chinese support, to declaring a plebescite vote. And lest you think it is all politics, most of it deals with some other characters who are only peripherally related, and tells the story of their lives in those troubled times.
It's far different from the other books I've written (and not published, I might add, because they were written in my early 20s and aren't all that... good), in that it is much more ambitious and mainstream. When I started it last February, I announced my goal to have it done in one year. I could have done it in less than that, if I had a little more discipline. I'm a fast writer. I hope now I can have it done before I depart for the Peace Corps, at the very least, so I can start landing an agent and publisher. We'll see.
In other news, I seem to have irrevocably lost the journal I wrote when I was in the Peace Corps in '98. I wrote several entries over those four weeks, and I thought it would be fun to dig around in there and refresh my memory. But it seems to have completely and totally vanished, and I can't imagine what might have happened to it. I went through a period of "purging" a couple times over the last few years, trying to trim down my great volume of personal possessions, and I know I donated a handful of empty journal books I never used, and so I seriously hope it wasn't mistakenly put in with those things. If it really is gone, this marks a tragic loss to me -- I don't remember all those details off the top of my head. Some of the intimate events and thoughts will forever vanish. As Henry Jones, Indiana Jones' dad, said, "I wrote it down so I wouldn'y have to remember." Bah.
Nevertheless, I mean to write a blog entry about that experience, in a little more detail than my first one. Maybe I'll do that over the holiday break, since I'll have two weeks more of anticipation. If any of my readers is curious about something, too, I'd love to hear questions.
It'd be like a writing assignment! Surprise me!
-Bri
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