A Mauritanian Dance

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

(1895)

“Every bad sentence you write trails behind you like a monster.”
- Paul Valéry

My bedroom looks like a fallout zone today. Amongst the wreckage you might find a stack of ungraded papers literally two-feet tall, billions of bite-sized Snicker wrappers, clean clothes in piles next to dirty clothes, books stacked haphazardly everywhere, but somehow, amidst this cluttery confusion, I have completed my MA thesis.

Yes. It is done.

The first 77 pages of my novel is ready to be given to my committee, ready, for the first time since the project began three years ago, to be shown to an audience. I feel good about it. The work is complete and I’m satisfied. Hopefully readers will enjoy it.

Of course, this is only the preliminary hurdle. It satisfies the requirements for my degree, but the other 230 pages have yet to be revised. The complete text is due to the Summer Writer’s Conference by the end of March. So I have about four weeks to fix up the rest of it before I can fully begin to celebrate.