Three Weeks Later...

I made grand plans for my Spring Break, as you may recall. I claimed that I was, over 11 days, going to try to (start and) finish first-pass revisions on my MS.

The 11 days came and went, and I did make hella good progress. I revised what ended up being 16 out of 24 chapters.

Last night, I finished.

Before the reflection, here are some fun stats:

Original draft word count: 86,115
Second draft word count: 88,362

Number of chapter totally cut: 3
Number of chapters totally re-written or added new: 5

I couldn't even begin to estimate how many new words I wrote, beyond the entirely new chapters. There isn't a chapter in the book that hasn't been tweaked, and most of them got some pretty serious scene re-vamps.

So, this has been my first foray into revising a novel. Honestly, I really like it. Drafting is stressful for me, and it's been nice to finally be on the other side: the path is already laid; I'm just planting flowers. (Is that a terrible analogy for it?) Really, I was doing more than planting flowers. I'd thought my "few" ideas for changes would require minor rewrites, but obviously that did not come to be.

And I came up with even more new ideas as I rewrote and wrote new chapters and scenes, so now I'll be going back to add in the needed groundwork for those ideas...

I suppose that will go on for a while until I've gotten all my threads neatly tucked. Then I get to make sentences pretty.

As for when that will be, I'm not sure yet. The semester is hurtling toward an end. I have to write 2 care plans in the next 3 weeks and take one more Pharmacology test.

Then we have the joy of having 2 finals for each nursing course and my A & P final and then... I'm done with my first year of nursing school. I'll be half-way done.

Holy crap.

What Disgusting Thing Did I Do This Week?

This is too exciting not to share.

[ P(re)S: Did I mention I was offered a nurse extern position for the summer? Woot. ]


So this week in clinical, not only did I get to give a bunch of meds for the first time, but I also got to place my first indwelling Foley catheter!

I know it's horrific and gross to most people, but it's a huge scary mountain for us nursing students. Practicing on a mannequin was one thing; just the thought of doing the procedure on a living, breathing, VERY awake patient was terrifying.

But you know what? I followed all my steps, just like I did on the mannequin, and it went perfectly. And then just like that, I'd crossed a huge hurdle.

In four weeks, I'll be starting finals. First year of nursing school, over! Holy hell. Where does the time go?

I got my schedule for fall. I'll be taking Med-Surg and Psych! (OB and Peds in the spring!)

Now, I have some neuropharmacology to read...

Did I? Did I?

Today I'm heading back to class after a well-timed and much-needed week of spring break. I made huge goals here in the blog: I wanted to finish first-pass revisions of my MS.

So, did I?

Answer: I came very close. Turned out that a lot more scenes/chapters needed to be totally rewritten, not just tweaked here and there.

 As of yesterday, I've completely rough-revised 18/21 chapters. Now I'm having to write 1-3 chapters of new material in the end and tweak the current ending to line up, and I'll be done.

I'm pleased with that. I even made time to do other fun stuff, like yard work and playing Assassin's Creed and watching Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I did have my interviews for the nurse extern program. I don't want to jinx myself before I get the official offer, but things are looking very good for me this summer! :)

So. We're right back into the deep, with a test on Thursday and another a week from today, so no estimations on when I may finish first revisions. I'm just glad I've done what I did!

I can say, though, that so far I like revision a lot better than drafting. Once the course is laid for me, it's a lot easier for me to work within it.

Spring Break!

I skipped my last class and Spring Break came a day early!!!

Sadly, I'm not going anywhere over the break this year. Not even a weird trip to Maryland, like last year. I'm not really sad about it--I have too much to do over the break to think about going anywhere.

There's the requisite studying and catching up and getting ahead, but then I also have Plans.

I told my CP's this and tweeted it, but I'll blog it too:

Staring Thursday, March 08, I pledge to make my fullest attempt to do first-pass revisions on my entire novel, being 86k+, in 11 days.

It's crazy times, I know, but the good thing is there are only 3 really major plot events that have to change, and the ripple effects from them. Unfortunately, one of them is in the beginning of the book, so that's a lot of ripples.

Anyway, this is my first time revising and editing a novel, so I have no idea what to expect. I've gotten Scrivener all pimped out with my draft and scene cards and all kinds of stuff. So far I like working in it. Makes deleting shizz a lot easier, as well as appealing to my visual and liner nature.

Other Stuff:


As I was sitting down to type this, the old TV in the office made a really loud cracking sound. I don't know what the eff it was. It still works just fine. (GREMLINS.)

Thanks to Amazon Prime and a media streamer/Blue Ray player we got for Christmas, hubby and I are watching all of the Star Trek series from the beginning. Starting, of course, with The Next Generation. It's pure geeky bliss. Every time I hear that opening, I'm transported back to being a little kid. Seriously, some of my earliest memories are of watching Star Trek.

I have 3 interviews next week for a nurse extern summer job. I'm nervous as hell.

I think "complexes" should be a verb, as in "That complexes me." Nice ring, huh?

I forgot how hungry I am when I'm at home and not thinking about school constantly. In related news, I have no snacks.


Hmmm....That's it, I think. I hope you are well, that Spring is springing, and that you find a $20 bill in a bush.

Week...whatever...

Today it's 75 degrees and the sun is blazing. We're deeply entrenched in the beginning of crazy Georgia spring, which basically alternates tornadoes with ice storms until April comes and it rockets to 100 degrees and stays there until October.

I'm in my last big 6-day stretch of crazy school stuff until my Spring Break. I made it through Hell Month (February), and though these next six days are on par with all of the past 5 weeks' shenanigans, I'm feeling a lot calmer and less stressed.

On the nursing school front: started back to clinical this week. I'm still on the ortho/neuro floor at the hospital. First day was pretty dull for me--shared a single patient, and the only interesting thing about them was that they only spoke/understood Hindi. Almost all the other folks in my group got to do fun stuff, like pass meds, hang IV lines, and two of them even got to try an IV stick on a patient! Lucky... During post-conference, we got to hang out in the hospital's simulation lab and practice more IV sticks on the dummy arms. An ER nurse came by to talk to us and give us pointers on IV stick technique. I hit the dummy vein every time, so I've cleared my shame from our first sim lab day.

Still waiting to hear about the nurse extern position. From what I hear, there were over 100 applicants, so a lot of us haven't heard anything.

I'm writing again--or more precisely, revising/editing. Though that always comes with new writing, doesn't it? I don't know--it's really my first time at the ballpark, and I'm not sure what to make of it. I've written lots of massive emails to CPs with ideas and been making big notes in Scrivener--and yeah, I'm trying to use Scrivener, because it just seems like a great tool for revision. I think I'm about 95% on track for revision, in that I've figured out my biggest plot holes and smoothed some big wrinkles. Now I just have to figure out some smaller details, and then I'll be good to go.


For now, I'm going to sneak some more book time as I procrastinate studying pharmacology, and daydream about my Spring Break plans, which are basically this:

(Translation: alcohol, every day and as needed.)

Coming up for air.

It's been a month since I posted "like a bird on the wire." Everything I said in that post is still resonating with me, and it's a good thing too. Friends who have received whiny emails and any poor soul who follows me on Twitter knows that February is being brutal to me. I've overcome all but 2 of my obstacles this month, and I pwned the hell out of them.

Tomorrow I have my last skill check-off of the semester. In case you're wondering what exactly that means, skills check-offs are when you demonstrate all the steps to a certain procedure under the eagle eye of an instructor. You are pretending that you are in a real patient situation, so you have to do everything to that dummy as if it were a patient, including asking them questions, explaining your procedures, et cetera. It's incredibly nerve-wracking. If you mess up and don't catch yourself, the instructor has every right to completely fail you on that check off, and if you don't get your single chance to try again, guess what? Just like Heidi Klum says: I'm sorry, you are out. 

Out of the program. Doesn't matter if you have an A average. You're done. Trail, derailed.

So you can see why it's so stressful. Not to mention the fact that it's important that we understand these procedures, because they are real procedures that we will do in the hospital, on real people. Tomorrow's skill is medication administration, and boy howdy does it have a lot of steps. You are constantly verifying that you're giving the right amount of the right drug to the right patient at the right time via the right route. In fact, that's called the "Five Rights of Medication Administration" and it saves lives. You also perform "three checks" of your medication before you give it, meaning you're checking the order against what you're drawn up: once when you take it out of the cart and assemble it, once before you leave the cart, and a final time before you actually administer it to the patient.

It's a lot of steps, but it's vital.

And then there's the IV drip rate, but I won't get into that. Let's just say that even thought most of hospital equipment is mechanized, nursing students still have to know how to do things by hand (such as calculating and then adjusting how many drops of IV fluid the patient receives per minute.)

So.

I'm alive, but just barely. I have Spring Break in 3 weeks, and I absolutely can't wait. My house? It's really dirty.

like a bird on the wire

It's funny how you can learn important lessons from the most trifling things.

Evan and I have been watching the show Sons of Anarchy for the past two weeks. We're halfway through the third of four seasons right now, and last night I started putting together some pieces in my life.

One of the show's main themes is recognizing what is most important to you and then doing anything you have to do to maintain it, achieve it, protect it--whatever. And these characters willingly put themselves through hell, throw themselves into gun fire, sacrifice their lives to keep that one thing sacred and to keep it going for the others who care.


I started writing books when I was 9 years old. It was the thing I did above all else, the thing that lurked in the back of my head at all times, the thing I would do after dinner: lock myself in my bedroom scribbling in notebooks. I wrote through puberty, through high school, through the turmoil of college, and through my early twenties up to where you know me now, on the precipice of 26. Almost two-thirds of my life, devoted to writing. The older I get, the dimmer my memory, I'll only remember that I was always writing, always thinking about writing.

And yes, during all that time I always had the far-off thought that one day I'd like to see my name in print. But first, I needed to do this with my writing, and I needed to improve my dialogue, or strengthen my word choices. Always something. As long as I was still writing, still coming up with stories, I was happy. I am happy.

Then I started blogging. And I saw how many people wanted to be published. And I asked myself if there was something wrong with me, that I didn't really think about being published--just writing. Did that make me less passionate? Did it make me a coward, because I hadn't thought about being published yet because I felt like I still needed to improve before I tried to put myself out there, still needed to write a better story, with better characters and better plot and better everything. Was I a coward?

Things started to change. I started finishing novels instead of just starting them. I saw massive improvements in my craft, felt them in my planning process. Saw maturity emerging in my words. So then I thought, yes. I can do this. I am close. I am ready. No more fear: just desire to make myself presentable, to make my words sing, to make them the best I am able.

When I finished my most recent book, I thought: this is the one. I'm going to shine it up and send it out. I'm going to be querying by April, at latest. I'm finally going to do it.

And I thought about that constantly. I thought about the drive to publish, I imagined writing query letters, getting the call, telling my husband that I had a book deal. Fantasy overrode reality.

In nursing school, nearly any student you talk to will tell you that s/he (but mostly she) is going into nursing because of her passion. She feels called to be a healer, to be this profession that is more than just a profession. They all walk around with this enormous depth of drive and well of desire that keeps them going when the cards are stacked against us. When the knowledge seems crushing and the skills are overwhelming and there are three tests around every corner, and everything is pass or fail--they have their passion.

And me? Nursing isn't my passion--I already have my passion, have had my passion since I was nine years old. The thought constantly presses against me: what am I doing in this field where passion is queen, with my passion at home in old notebooks and on hard drives?

This thought was truly giving me a crisis last semester. I finally overcame it by remembering that I will always need a day job, and I chose nursing through the sum of its parts--not the title first. I managed my time a little better so I could write a few days a week, and all the crisis went away.

But then I got the new bug, the publish bug. The query bug. And suddenly nursing school was in the way again. Last semester is a joke compared to this one. I'm learning skills that are honest-to-god life and death, medication administration, starting IV lines, inserting Foley catheters, learning everything I need to know about all the medications I will use in my practice.

In only two weeks, the crisis was starting again.

And then we started watching Sons of Anarchy, and I saw these characters who said: yes, I will go to prison for this thing I did. I won't be in there forever, but I will serve my time as long as I must, and when I get out, things will be back to normal. My passion has been saved because of this sacrifice, and I will live to fight for that passion for many more days.


The understanding started pawing at me pretty quickly, but it wasn't until yesterday that I let myself look at it and feel it and acknowledge it.

Writing isn't the only passion in my life--it's just my doing passion, if that makes sense. It's the thing I'd rather do instead of play video games or play the guitar or paint or photography. I also have passion for learning and knowledge. I crave knowledge. I savor every scrap of new information that I learn and I horde it. It's like those old ESPN commercials: "my knowledge...is greater than your knowledge!"

And most of all, I have a passion for my husband and for our life. Getting into nursing school was a year-long process. School itself is a two-year process. I make a pittance with my day job: he's our real bread-winner. He's the one who's said, "yes--I will put my own soul-searching on hold because I want you to do this, to find yourself through this new adventure." For that, I owe him everything. I owe him my full attention on school, I owe him paying attention to the other elements of my life that can give me happiness besides spending 8 hours a day in front of my manuscript. I can "go to prison" for just one more year, because when I get out, everything will still be here. I will still love to write. I will be a year older, and I will have read hundreds more books that will inspire me and teach me and improve my craft. I will have done my best at what I'm doing, and I won't live with the lingering guilt of I could have done better, if I'd tried harder.

I'm not saying I'm not going to write. I'm saying that the publish bug has been put into stasis. It was a foolish thing for me to obsess about the end, and not the means. I still want to revise and edit my manuscript, but I'm no longer holding up arbitrary words for it like "April" or "by the summer."

I guess passion is meant to burn bright and consume us. I'm not blowing out the flame, I'm just trimming the wick so my other candles can also contribute to the light of my path.