DePaul 2011 Summer Writing Conference

This is not my usual type of post and I generally do not like to plug, but as I am a volunteer for this event and I'm in charge of contacting other bloggers, I feel its only appropriate that I use my own blog for the same purpose.

So, without further ado, the DePaul 2011 Summer Writing Conference!

Polish your prose or poetry at DePaul’s third annual Summer Writing Conference, July 15-17

DePaul’s third annual Summer Writing Conference begins July 15 with a keynote address by journalist and best-selling author Alex Kotlowitz.

Kotlowitz, author of the best-seller There Are No Children Here and other books, will describe his experiences as a non-fiction storyteller during his address from noon to 1 p.m.  in the Pritzker Auditorium of the Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State St.

The three-day conference’s closing speaker will be Miles Harvey, an assistant professor of English at DePaul and an award-winning fiction writer. His presentation will also take place in the Pritzker Auditorium, July 17. Classes and panel discussions will be in the DePaul Center, and readings will take place at Blackie’s restaurant, 755 S. Clark St.

The conference will feature other DePaul faculty and nationally distinguished writers of poetry, non-fiction and fiction. Experts on writing for children and teens and those with expertise in publishing and mixed media will also be featured at the conference that is designed for writers of all experience levels.

DePaul’s Continuing and Professional Education , the Department of English and The Chicago Public Library are the sponsors. 

Tuition is $300 or $125 for any single day. Please email Chris Green cgreen1@depaul.edu with any questions.

Registration is required.  For more information and to register visit cpe.depaul.edu/writingconference

Tell your friends, your enemies, your pets. Feel free to re-post this to your own blog (I'm looking at you, Gia ) Tweet it, Facebook it, whatever. Just get the word out--it's going to be a blast!

In Which I Complain About Getting Old

I sleep, on average, 4-6 hours a night.

I have always been a light sleeper, a weird combination of night owl and early bird which enabled me to stay up for hours after my bedtime as a child (usually hunkered over by my nightlight, reading way into the night) only to pop out of bed first thing in the morning, cheery and wide awake for school. One summer when I worked for a cafe chain, the managers of all the stores in my town loved me because I would work split shifts, waking up at 4 in the morning to open at one store, then staying up til almost 11 at night closing at another, only to do the whole thing again the next day. My ability to not need sleep made me relatively unique (and, that summer anyway, very rich) among my peers, who could not seem to drag themselves out of bed before noon without a very very good reason.

Now, though, I notice that things are changing. I still stay up late and get up early. I still sleep like my cat, ears quivering, awake at the slightest provacation. Now, though, I start to feel it after a few days.

I am REALLY feeling it this week.

My new job is affording me lots of hours. This is good, as hours=pay=financial stability=good. My classes, though, also take up quite a lot of time, not just in the classroom, but in terms of homework as well. I also cover outside projects for our school paper, which adds to my workload.

The hilarious thing is, I spend SO MUCH TIME writing--I've written thousands of words in the past week alone--and yet almost none of it is the kind of writing I really want to do. I am still working on my WIP (still has momentum--yay!) but my writing time has been relegated to my half hour train commute to and from work/class, and on my lunch breaks. Hardly a solid writing session, it must be confessed!

I know priorities must be kept aligned. At this point, much of my ability to write hinges on first having the money=financial stability=good equation completely hammered out. Which requires a degree. Which itself requires money. Which requires the job which helps pay for the degree so I can get more money so that ONE DAY I can spend all the time I currently spend on homework and articles on MY WRITING.

/end rant.

This is what happens when you only average 4-ish hours of sleep a night. I need to sleep, for real.

Until next time, keep writing! (regardless of topic! :D)

~Katherine

And lo! There Was A New Post

First, an enormous thank-you to the estimable Gia for her help getting this blog layout a little closer to how I want it. I love electric blue as  much as the next person, but it was a bit hard on the eyes.

So, blogworld. It has been a while. A great many things have transpired since the last time I word-vomited in this space, some of them great, some of them not-so-great. But since I spend enough time ranting and whining to people in real life about the not-so-great things, here we shall mention only the good!

Perhaps most important at the moment: I have a new job! Or rather, I have the same job, but with a different company. The up side of this is that my workplace is on the same block as my school. On the down side, both school and work are a million miles from my home, which requires a million-hour commute. BUT, I am employed. Celebrate.

Second, but no less important (to me, anyway) is that after what felt like an endless hiatus, I seem to be writing again! And not just writing, but writing and NOT HATING EVERY WORD. The biggest deterrent for me while I was working on both Five and Holly was every time I finished a paragraph, I wrinkled my nose and muttered "this is absolute shit. I wrote better stuff when I was TWELVE." This time, though, I am cruising (mostly) along, perhaps not writing the next Great American Novel, but writing a story I am enjoying with characters who are fun to write.

I am trying not to talk about it too much, for fear of it falling victim to my vicious inner editor (who, I can only assume, is too preoccupied with violently editing my schoolwork to notice I am working on a story) so I will just say that I have made pretty good progress *knock on wood, knock on everything* and should continue to do so!

And so, until next time. Hopefully it'll be a quicker update than this one was!

~Katherine

Why Yes, I did Fall Off the Face of the Earth

I suppose I should apologize for disappearing right when things were starting to get exciting in Nanowrimo, huh?
I do apologize blogworld. I will say, though, that the last week of Nanowrimo, while successful, was a struggle, and one about which I did not really wish to write. Too much moaning. Too much head-keyboard contact. Too much caffeine.
Then, with the blog-daily habit broken, I kind of fell out of it as other things swarmed in. Things like graduate school, which I started just after the New Year--I got my acceptance letter on the 30th, the same day I finished Nano (but the story is nowhere near finished. In fact, it's still on chapter 7. Yes, I know that is pathetic). Things like my fiance finally (finally) moving here permanently, and wedding planning taking off at about five million miles an hour (I don't see how people can get married multiple times. Just arranging my own single wedding has turned me off event planning FOREVER. And I'm not even doing much of it!) Things like that, which kept me from blogging. The 'real' world needed my attention desperately, and so my stories, once again, were put on the back burner.

Today, however, the real world reminded me that despite the amount of attention I give it, its sometimes not enough to keep things running smoothly. Today, I lost my job.

Now, that is not to say I was fired (I wasn't) or that something terrible has happened that requires medical leave (it hasn't). No, the company for which I work has fallen prey to our sucky economy, and today they announced they were closing stores in an effort to restructure and become more competitive. My store was one of those stores.

We'll have a few weeks, I think, while we try to sell all our merchandise. At least one more paycheck, though hopefully two. Then, it'll be just school, and the quarter is ending soon, so I'll have at least a week of absolutely nothing to do, unless I find a new job double stat.

obviously, I am looking. I was looking before this even became a reality because, honestly, most of us knew SOMETHING like this was going to happen. Now that it has, I really need to put the drive on now.

But there's a small part of me that is kind of looking forward to one less 'real world' responsibility and a little more free time. Maybe, just maybe, I can climb back in the saddle (for the forty-sixth BILLION time) and approach my poor stories with a little more dedication, a little more inspiration. I think about them constantly, especially Five, but when I sit down to actually write, nothing happens.

I need to hold myself more accountable for my writing. You can have all the talent in the world, but if you don't have the discipline to hone that talent and commit to it, you might as well have no talent at all. I have a tiny smidge of talent--I need to nurture it and help it get stronger, not ignore it until I can't write worth a damn anymore.

So here's to new beginnings. I won't promise more consistent posting (yet) because I'm not sure I can deliver. But I fully intend to use this turn of events in a positive way, and I intend to use this space to hold myself accountable to that plan.

Good luck to me. God knows I need it.

~Katherine

Nov. 20: Time. I lack it.

A miracle occurred today. I sat down to work on my WIP, and by some grace of karma or good luck, I managed to squeak in the mandatory word count for today, keeping me if not ahead of the game, than at least right IN the game.
I haven't fallen behind yet, but a series of extremely hard days and late nights have definitely killed my lead.
Thanksgiving is coming up this week, which means my ability to write is going to be further compromised. With less than 20k to go in this project, I really REALLY don't want to fall behind and fail now, but naturally this is also when life decides to get serious about trying to kill me.
Persevere, fellow writers. We'll get there. Eventually.

~Katherine

Nov. 15: Sleep is For the Weak!! *snore*

I am quite sleep deprived, blogworld. The screech of my building's ancient heating system kept me up half the night, and my cat felt it was of capital importance to wake me up two hours before my alarm went off, roughly three hours after I had finally gotten to sleep once the afroementioned screeching had finally stopped. As a result, there may be a few tupos in this post.
Tpyos.
Typos.
There.
I have hit 27,588 words tonight (most of them mispelled). I am, so far, still pleased with my plot, but increasingly bored with my charactrers. They are moving verrrryyyy sloowwwwwllllyyyy. This is partly due to the fact that the beginning of this story takes some time to build. But I think it is also largely due to the fact that they are not being fueled by a sense of urgency. I am not being fueled by a sense of urgency. My story is in danger of falling victim to its own insolence.
No. Indolence. I mean Indolence. My story is in danger of becoming indolent, which means it will slow to a complete halt and just sort of wallow somewhere in chapter five. Not good.
Maybe I should make one of my characters REALLY sleep deprived. That might make things more interesting. Have them trip over things a lot. It would certainly make weriting the text more interesting.
writing*
I think I should probably stop writing this post, now, as I'm clearly not going anywhere with it.
But yes, 27k. Yay! Everyone keep writing! Sleep is for the wkea!!!! And the weak**!!!!!
~Katherine

Nov. 14: Oooh, We're Halfway There, Oooh, We're Living on a Prayer!

Ah Bon Jovi. You always have a lyric appropriate for every time and situation.

It's been four days, blogworld. Four very long, very tiring days. I've been working a lot of 9 hour shifts, including a fun one a few days ago in preparation for a national event of the celebrity-coming-to-promote-book variety. We weren't so much bookstore employees that day as we were bouncers and traffic wardens. Holy cow it was crazy.
I have also been homemaking with the fiance. This mostly involves following him around Ikea in a state of confusion while he writes things down on a piece of paper and accumulates maybe ten thousand pounds of heavy pieces of wood and impossibly tiny screws. This also involves waving my arms around in panic when I realize the ten thousand pieces of wood make an ABSOLUTELY ENORMOUS media console. Don't get me wrong, I like it. I like that I can close the doors on the tv set and not have to see it day in and day out. But it is big. Alarmingly so. We have named it Monster.
But amidst all this, I have also been writing. It hasn't been my best writing, by any stretch, and some days I only got a couple hundred words in. But tonight, I crossed the halfway point of 25k, and I am quite pleased! Week two did not kill me, after all!
I hope it hasn't killed anyone else, and that everyone is still plugging along! Don't worry even if you fall a bit behind--I was WAY behind two days ago--for there is still time to get back on track! Even if you end up setting smaller personal goals for yourself for the rest of Nanowrimo, pick some goals and run with them! You will be happy you did!
And now, because I have another 9 hour shift tomorrow, I am going to sleep. Good night!

~Katherine