Assignments

This morning, the roads were icy.  It was a perfect excuse to stay home, but I had a fiction writing class to attend at the Neenah campus of the Fox River Technical College.  It took me 70 minutes to do a 40 minute drive, but it was worth it.  I get inspiration, new ideas, and most important, deadlines from these classes.  Without deadlines, I procrastinate. With them, I get busy and write, write, write.

The first assignment was to read a book I would never read otherwise.  I've come up with three possibilities:
--  I could borrow one of Gary's thrillers.  He pulled one out of his library and handed it to me.  It's Harlan Coben's Long Lost.  I have not a clue about it.  The dust jacket says this is a best selling author, but I've never heard of him.
--  I could read Hunger Games, a post-apocalyptic book that started a new trend.  I'll order it from the library and take a look.
--  or I could follow another of Gary's suggestions, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, an Updated Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping, a scientific book by Robert M. Sapolsky. We've watched some of Sapolsky's lectures and they certainly are interesting. It's non-fiction but nothing I have ever considered reading.

I'll have to make a choice on that one, soon.

Then there are a couple of books Nikki, our instructor, recommended.  I'll look for those, too.

During the class, we did a writing exercise about our morning and how it had progressed.  Since I had just driven on icy roads that was easy enough.   Now I have to polish it up and add some fiction to it by next week.

At the same time, I continue to work on my novel plus finish writing "Island Fever" for Black Coffee Fiction.

Have I ever mentioned that I once had to write seven 20 page term papers and read 49 books during one college semester?   What I'm doing now looks easy compared to that!