I wrote most of this back at the beginning of my Odyssey Journey and then got incredibly busy. Just imagine this from the end of May/beginning of June time period:

Now onto the true beginning!

After being accepted, and choosing to attend virtually on account of COVID, I had to send in two assignments. One was a newly written story (which ended up naturally falling below 4k words when I wrote it and immediately got ear-marked for Odyssey for that reason alone) and the other was a favorite short story written by someone else (I chose Playscape by Diana Peterfreund in case you were wondering because seriously, it’s awesome and you should read it).

Over the next two weeks I received a textbook and a bunch of emails for typical things you’d have for a class (schedule, syllabus, questions, assignments, etc.) plus a few that likely were specially for this year’s virtual alteration for the workshop (like how we’re going to communicate and upload documents, etc.).

Then, in the weeks right before class was to start I worked on readings with my trusty pink and blue highlighters (because yellow is just so…ugh), while cramming disagreements (and agreements) in margins (harder to fit disagreements though; so much more to explain). I ended up filling an entire small notebook with all my thoughts and had to move on to another, so that seems to be a setting stage for this workshop. Maybe I won’t have any free notebooks left by the time it’s over (unlikely, since I have a crass amount of them, but you never know).

My handwriting is already jumping between seamless and even to barely legible.

I already had a small office setup that I could use as my “lecture hall” so to speak, so I cleaned it up, set up one of the signs that Jeanne Cavelos sent me in the window and sat my kids down to explain that they were to NOT DISTURB ME UNLESS THEY WERE DYING, which I think may have gotten the point across.

And then…I thought I was ready.

<3 Marie C.