Wednesday, January 31, 2007

The Karma Sutra among other things

We had our tutor dinner tonight and as you can see from the title conversation was wide ranging. The process is that each floor hosts a course and the tutor makes his or her way up or down through the floors. We have in our flat a wonderful lady who came laden with things from her garden, not least two large pumpkins, which transformed into delicious soup for the twice we hosted the first course.
I feel satisfied with my crits today. The story weaknesses focused on were very much what I expected and I'm looking forward to rewriting it. Some comments surprised me. The fact that some readers didn't realise this was about a teenage girl when I mentioned on the first page that she went to visit her grandmother every day by bus after school was one. But all in all the comments were very helpful and picked out what I need to deal with and importantly what I thought I had put in the story and had left out.

I was supposed to have my one on one with Gardner Dozois today but I woke up with a bad migraine and he very kindly postponed it so it will be either tomorrow or Friday.

Since the girls prepared the meal tonight, two of the guys having collapsed into exhausted sleep so deep they didn't even hear me knocking on their doors, the guys are washing up so I'm going to take the time to finish my crits and have an early night. My migraine has subsided somewhat but by no means gone so I'm trying to be sensible, however boring that may be.

The students are starting to move back in so we are no longer the only ones here. This means noisy groups and games. It's really only a problem at night but who are we to talk. Mafia sometimes doesn't finish until 1:00 am.

Two more crits to go then I'm off to bed.

3 comments:

Satima Flavell said...

Ouch! The odd migraine is probably inevitable when you consider the stress inherent in the Clarion experience! However, I hope that was the last one and that these next two weeks will be all plain sailing.

And I hope your 1:1 has gone or will go well!

Anonymous said...

Sorry to hear about your migraine. Hope it goes soon.

Helen V. said...

I've been lucky until this migraine. The previous two responded well to the medication. This one didn't unfortunately.
Generally speaking my health has stood up better to this exhausting process than I expected. Now I've got my fingers crossed for the rest of the time.