My first full day of gainful unemployment went well. Not only did I get a few hours of teaching in, but I also hit the 44k mark in the novel. I'd been wandering a bit in the storytelling, worrying that I'd lost my way, when suddenly the loop closed itself and I found myself deposited back where I had left off in the action, with a perfect segue. I have to keep reminding myself that I'm writing a novel, and that it's not at all unheard of to go off on a multi-page tangent. And considering that this book is set in an imaginary world, it sometimes takes a few tangents every now and then to fill in enough backstory to clue in a reader who hasn't inhabited this place for the past ten-odd years of his daydreams...

Anyway, it felt good to realize that I was still on track. Sometimes you just have to keep the faith and keep writing.

Speaking of keeping on keeping on, my new student has hit a wall of sorts, and isn't all that sure she's going to make it through the summer course she's taking (for which I'm tutoring her). Her experience is making me flash back to the summer of 1995, when I learned two years of Ancient Greek over just ten short weeks in pre-Disney, pre-9/11 Manhattan. I remember not sleeping much, stalking the hazy, humid mass of humanity that was Times Square every night in search of cheap and plentiful iced coffee, which I'd gulp down in a feeble attempt to stay awake a few more hours and memorize a few more principal parts, a few more vocabulary words, a few more irregular forms. Even under the best of circumstances, learning Greek is no picnic, although it's by no means impossible. It's just a lot of work, and at times the sheer volume of material to be learned and assimilated seems daunting at best, impossible at worst. But then you break through. It's a lot like my writing experience above - one moment you're convinced that you're hopelessly lost, and then you're inexplicably exactly where you wanted to be, a little further down the road, feeling a little more confident about the whole thing.

I hope she sticks with it.