The Rollercoaster

Yesterday, I strapped myself in for the final rollercoaster ride of the semester and my undergraduate career. If I go a little insane over the next three weeks here is why:

I am writing a fiction manuscript about a cantankerous older woman in Nebraska who refuses to evacuate during the threat of a propane explosion. She is convinced that this fire is God’s judgment coming for her, and somehow it is my responsibility to convince her otherwise (through the use of another character of course), without making the whole situation sound cheesy, ill-written, melodramatic, or unbelievable.

Secondly, I just signed my life away to Fringe Fest. Next Thursday and Friday my playwriting class will all be producing the ten-minute plays we’ve been writing this semester. There are nineteen of us. So in the course of the next week I will be rewriting and producing my own play about an abused woman and her sister. I’ll be directing my classmate’s play about friendship and the perils of miscommunication. And I’ll be acting in another classmate’s play, taking on the role of a fairly wild woman who has dumped her illegitimate daughter into her older and more responsible sister’s care. But of course, we are all rewriting our plays through this process, so who knows where we’ll all be in seven days.

So if you try to call me in the near future, I might not answer. Mostly because I won’t be able to hear you over the multitudes of characters living, breathing, and talking inside my head. Some people think being a writer is a boring life, but it only appears that way to those who don’t know any better.

I’ll also be finishing a literature course, studying Chinese, mailing out graduation invitations, researching grad schools, writing a curriculum vitae, planning a menu for an open house, saying goodbye to friends, and packing to move. And we’re off.