New ideas and an update

The urge to put an update on me applying for a writing workshop makes me wonder, why? No one currently reads this. It's really only for my own use. Maybe my creative writing prof reads it every once in awhile. Although I doubt that with all the treadmill journals she has to do. BTW I'm a firm believer in treadmilling now. I will most definitely continue it on into my professional career and make my students do it too. Even my lit students. You could kind of tweak it for lit students and instead of writing, reading or if they have papers to write, writing too, but for reading you could change #4 to a reflection on what you read. It would be very helpful I think. Plus then I could see if my students were actually reading or not. lol. YES! Another strategy to ruining my future students lives. Really just enriching and helping them out in the end. But yeah they'll love and hate me all the same. :D I get goosebumps just thinking about it. hehe. Yes I do think I will take too much joy in being a mean ole professor who tries to make people learn. RAWR! hahahaha. ok enough of that.

SO! I didn't make the Clarion. I seriously doubt I had a chance of getting in but I tried. I'm now applying for Odyssey instead. This one seems more beneficial even in a professional way (although meeting Neil is still a life goal now) because its run by a former senior editor for Bantam Dell. HUGE publisher known for its science fiction and fantasy titles (its an imprint of Random House if that means more to you). Her critiques of your work they say are typed and about 1,000 words. How incredibly life movingly helpful will that be! Anyway I only have to submit one story for that under 4,000 words and its due to them by April 10. I'm planning on mailing it WAY before then. If I concentrate just on the Merlin story I should have it done in no time. I plan on staying in town to work and write all Spring Break. How nerdy and lame am I? lol. Oh well. I really think this all worked out for a reason because if Neil hadn't been an instructor for Clarion I never would have even tried for it. But now that I have and have the beginning of two great stories plus a butt load of confidence about myself as a writer I really might be able to do this other one. They say on the website they have around a 50% publishing rate for their graduates. But when you're getting comments from an award winning editor that's not surprising. You'll learn to write better and write to actually get published.

The story ideas I wanted to record for future use are as follows:
A shepherd boy (16-17 in age I think) who becomes an unlikely hero when his village is pillaged. He's shy, relates better to sheep then people and has a smart ass sheep dog who talks.

Also an Amazon woman who doesn't want to be a warrior but a housewife. I thought it would be funny because I'm writing an academic paper on characters who are all warrior women/heroines and don't want the home life. What if it was opposite, where the societal norm was to be a warrior and instead someone wanted to be a housewife. Also my mom is a housewife and people think she doesn't do anything. This would kind of be a tribute to my mom. :D Kind of a parallel to our world where the modern working woman is respected more than the housewife because she's helping contribute monetarily to the household.

Anyway that's all I got for now. More ideas will come to me I'm sure. I think I might do my exercise from creative writing on here later. The making a list thing. I want to make a list of things I'm passionate about. It helps inspire things to write.