My first tutorial

Tomorrow I have my first tutorial for the Certificate in Creative Writing program at the Graham School. I’m looking forward to it, but I’m also a bit nervous. This is my seventh quarter of the writing program, but previously, the classes have all been small group workshops. I am at the end of the program, trying to turn my 118-page jumble of words into a full-fledged manuscript. The due date is April 22, 2013. By then I’m supposed to have at least 75 (coherent) pages, which will then be reviewed by my tutor and another reader, who will decide together whether it’s worthy of the certificate, and then I will march in graduation in June.

            

Frankly, it’s about time. I have been working on this thing since November 2009, when I did NaNoWriMo and wrote the first 50,000 words. Since then, I’ve been adding and rewriting sections, and I have almost 150,000 words on this topic. Since starting the certificate program, I have been trying to rewrite sections of the book, but I haven’t made progress in adding much in the way of new material. The 118 pages I sent to my tutor last week represent the most coherent version of what I’ve been working on. I took the sections I have workshopped and pasted them in the right places, together with the most developed sections I have written but not workshopped. Then I have one-paragraph summaries of the other chapters (similar to those in the Sex Lives of Cannibals).

Hopefully I can use this tutorial section to really plow ahead with the project, adding in the sections that I know are missing, cutting out the redundancies, and getting the book finished. Then it’s on for the next phase—finding an agent and eventually a publisher and getting my work out there. Wish me luck!