New Term, New Excitement

A week or so ago, I had a school dream. It was the first day of class at the nursing school where I used to teach, and I was running around frantically trying to get ready. I was inside an unfamiliar building, not sure where to go, and I didn't have lesson plans or a text book. After hunting down someone to show me how to get to my classroom, I discovered that the stairwell was blocked. I climbed over it and woke before I saw my students.

I had a bit of anxiety deciding what piece to bring for the first meeting of my writing class, and I wonder if that had anything to do with my school dream. I've completed about a tenth of my novel (6500 of 65,000 words, ha!) but didn't want to bring an excerpt from the middle. I also thought about adapting a recent blog entry. In the end, though, I decided to bring a short piece I'd written in college about two sisters and their Wheel-of-Fortune-obsessed mother.

But I'm not going to use this term to focus on fiction. I'm finally going to write my "Nana stories" (most likely I'll post them here). I'm going to interview her about things, like enrolling in the army, moving to the Midwest, etc., and turn them into short narratives. I won't be challenging to her: I won't ask about subjects that would make either of us uncomfortable. I want them to be something she enjoys reading, as well as the women in my class.