What Now?

Guys, I have news. And it's exciting news.

I finished my Spring semester of college.

Can we please get some music and balloons and cake? Please cake. I would love some cake.

As ya'll may or may not know, this has been the toughest semester that I've ever had while at college, and I've been here a total of four semesters so that's pretty mind-blowing. Towards the end of February I even had to accept that, for this semester, I wasn't going to be able to successfully divide my time between writing The Hollow Men and writing my homework. While the majority of the reason was that I didn't have the time, another reason was that, when I did find time, my quality of writing was suffering.

So I made the painful decision not to work on The Hollow Men until summer came. And guess what? It's here.

Please, we need one more moment of excitement. *releases confetti*

Want to know a fun fact about this semester? I basically wrote a novel. Yup. Here's why:

Out of five classes, I wrote approximately twenty papers. Here's the class, number of papers, and word counts for each:

ENGL 251: Survey of American Literature I- 2 papers, 4,102 words

ENGL 310: Critical Writing- 5 papers, 8,505 words

ENGL 354: Form and Technique in Fiction- 1 paper, 6,810 words

HIST 390: The Holocaust- 14 papers, 20,996 words

HON 239: Medieval Understandings- 3 papers, 10,801 words

Total: 25 papers, 51,214 words

Seriously. Over 50,000 words written for classes this semester. I'm going to go crawl in a hole and sleep, now.

So, now what? Now, I'm going to write. And write some more. And re-read what I write and cry, and then write even more. And I'm going to read. Be ready for a lot more book reviews (remember all those lists I kept posting?).

Also, keep an eye out for something exciting on Monday, and if you haven't already check out my Twitter or Facebook accounts for more up-to-date information on my progress with The Hollow Men revisions.

One more thing. While I was perusing the Twitter-sphere yesterday I came across the cover-reveal for Gates of Thread and Stone, by Lori M. Lee. Can we just take a moment and appreciate how freaking beautiful this cover is? I legit almost had a spazz-attack at work in which a few very bad words almost came out of my mouth very loudly, in which I'm sure my boss would have asked me to leave. *drools* In order to further celebrate my release from my fourth semester at college, I shall be waiting impatiently until this book is in my hands.

Head over to YA Books Central to see what they say about the book, and *coughs* there might be a giveaway to enter...

Happy Summer!

Rae