After work yesterday and today at lunch I wrote the beginning of a new chapter for the novel I'm currently working on, Painting Over Mistakes. It felt so good to have an oasis of creative writing between writing the first draft of the ECE and the group-anthology SCE followed by returning to the ECE after my mentor makes comments. Writing these pages is a taste of the semester after the ECE is accepted and I'll turn from critical to creative work for a while.
It's also good to be writing new material. It will need to be edited heavily, I am sure, but so many bad habits have been replaced by good ones since I started my Spalding MFA work. Now rewrites can focus on deeper issues, such as character development, the chapter's structure, and how they both fit into the novel as a whole. And more fun: I'm writing the chapter in second person (you: the ashamed I), and it is set in Manhattan in 1970, 1987, and 1992/4.
Should a person have this much fun working? Yes, yes, a person should. And this person is very happy about her status.
