35,000 words on the novel. I've just finished Chapter Six, and am still seriously considering the idea of turning this into a smaller "first" book in a serialized epic. I've come up with a great way to end it, if I decide to do so; and the more I think about it, the more the story opens up and the more I want to get inside the heads of these characters that I originally intended only to be bit players to my first-person protagonist. At any rate, I'm aiming to make this first whatever it is - be it a book or a major subdivision of a larger novel - eleven chapters long. Which means I'm past the halfway mark! Already I'm starting to feel the lines of plot and personality draw taut, after allowing them oceans of slack in the beginning. I can't wait to see how it all comes crashing together.

That being said, I think I'm going to noodle around with a short story while I catch my breath and get ready for these last five chapters. In a perfect world, I'll have a collection of stories to shop around at the same time that I'm done with the novel. Writing is one of those fields where it never, ever hurts to be prolific. And I have a huge backlog of tales to tell. They're all lined up like the souls of dead heroes in Homer's underworld, each hungrily his turn waiting to lap up the lifesblood of a sacrificial animal that Odysseus has brought as an offering.

Yick.

The segue into Greek was intentional, however. Although I'm officially graduated from Boston University as of two Sundays ago with a B.A. in Ancient Greek and Latin - finally capping a 13-year slog in the wilderness as an on-again, off-again college student - at the urging of my former advisor I've decided to go ahead and take the History of Greek Literature Exam required for the Master's degree anyway. You see, many moons ago I had enrolled myself in B.U.'s B.A./M.A. program, thinking that to make up for lost time during my last educational hiatus I'd try and kill two birds with one stone. Big mistake. An unforseen financial crunch and urgent family matters intruded upon my final semesters of study in the Fall of 1997, and so I left college with neither the Master's nor the Bachelor's, despite the fact that I'd completed all the coursework for both (something I didn't quite realize myself until I was able to settle my debts with the school and look at my transcript with some very helpful administrators), and passed all but one comprehensive exam for the M.A.. Eventually my life started to make sense again, and I began the long, arduous process of getting back to zero with Boston University's bean-counters; after which the B.A. was mine for the taking, if I wanted it. The only trouble was, the way B.U. does its combined degrees meant that if I walked with the undergraduate degree now, I would lose the M.A., so if I wanted both degrees, I would have to wait, make some petitions, and pass that History of Literature Exam.

Waiting would have been fine, if I weren't actively looking to leave the Med School library. But being that the only people who'd notice an M.A. in Classics are people in Classics - who incidentally aren't exactly hiring right now - just having any degree at long last seemed more important than hanging in, boning up on the Greek canon, and waiting for the next round of exams. So I took the sure thing, with no regrets. Only here comes my advisor, whose faith in me (not to mention his determination to get me the things I may not think I deserve but in fact do) continues to astound me, telling me that he supports my decision to take the undergraduate diploma 100%, but at the same time promising to find a way to retroactively award me the graduate degree as well, should I take the Literature exam after all and pass it. So why not take the test?

We'll see how I fare next Friday...