sense of peace

I feel a sense of peace at my center, and it's unsettling because I'm not used to it quite yet. I have some sort of plans for every weekend from now until the first weekend of December, and I'm hoping that this will allow me to work extra hard during the week. I'm going to try to finish two papers, one proposal which is also a paper, two annotated bibliographies, and a fellowship proposal by November 1. I then have another paper draft due a week after that. I've decided that it may be impossible to do all of this in that amount of time, but I'm going to give it a try. We'll see how much I can get done when I have concrete goals and a concrete deadline.

Some of you have said that you like the writing here, and that means so much to me. More than you'd probably think. I would love (LOVE) to write essays for magazines or literary journals (the kind of things you'd see in Best American Essays), and I see some of this as practice towards that goal. I've got a ways to go--I think there are elements of my personality that don't come across here (like humor, for instance), and I think I need to do a better job of connecting my personal stories to feelings or situations that would resonate with a number of people. The best kinds of essays, I think, are the ones that richly describe some local or personal situation in such a way that the reader can entirely identify with it or feel deeply moved by it. This takes a lot of work, and I wonder if I'm capable of doing it. I may not have the knack. But I'd like to try.

I am so happy to be alive right now, and I hope this feeling maintains for a while.