Hey, munchkins. So, the…

Hey, munchkins. So, the exam went moderately well, but I think it could still go either way. I brought home a photocopy of the text and my translation for Kevin to look over (his Spanish is much better than mine), and he agrees. I was thrown a bit at the beginning when it turned out to be a critical post-co text rather than a piece of fiction, but actually, that made it a lot easier to translate; I quickly understood the sense of the argument (a basic post-co argument about the pereception of cultural studies in Latin America, the sort of the thing I could have written myself), which helped a lot, and a fair number of the words were obviously related to English words -- 'neocapitalismo', for example. Hard to mess up with those. The biggest obvious mistake I made was I somehow put a possessive in the first sentence where no possessive existed before -- it didn't change the sense of the sentence, actually, but still. And there were a few places where I couldn't figure out exactly how to idiomatially translate what they were saying, so my construction is a bit awkward. It'll all depend on how picky the grader is now -- we'll see. I think it'll likely be a few weeks before I get a response, so I'm just going to try not to think about it for now. There's plenty of other stuff to pay attention to.

The rest of yesterday was entirely goofing off -- I decided I deserved a reward. I had lunch with my cousin Nimmi (we ended up, surprisingly, talking some about the poly stuff, which she hadn't known about, so that was, ummm, interesting). It was all nostalgic, since we were eating in Cobb coffeeshop. Nimmi is also a U of C alumna. After lunch I walked over to 57th Street books and picked up a copy of Sherwood Smith's enjoyable YA fantasy, Crown Duel (a recent Firebird reissuing as one book of two earlier short novels). Fun, fiesty female protagonist. A little denser than she needed to be in some areas, but charming nonetheless. Very noble. :-) I also stopped at the little market next door and picked up some light red orchids and chicken shawerma sandwiches for our dinner. The rest of the day was essentially reading, eating, and eventually, watching three episodes of Deep Space 9. By the end of the day, I felt reasonably recovered from the exam.

Today, chores and errands I think. Laundry, dishes, sweeping. Answering e-mails. Picking up various stuff for WisCon, from spices to photocopies to office supplies. This evening there's a party for a friend, and I might have dinner with my sister beforehand. That's the plan. It's a good plan.

I've started thinking about both my possible books, and figuring out some more stuff about them. I might even write a bit more soon -- we'll see. For now, it's interesting just thinking it out. The threesome novel is going to be pretty closely linked to the dissertation novel, given the overlapping characters. I'm trying to figure out how structurally similar to make it.

I'm tempted to have another threesome situation in the past (probably someone married having an affair), a generation or two back, to parallel and illuminate the modern one. What I haven't decided yet is whether they would have an actual point of view of their own, that we'd go back and forth between the two stories, or whether our modern people would just get bits and scraps of them, in diary and history and family stories and the like. I'm leaning towards the latter idea right now, in part because it could potentially add a nice element of mystery and suspense to the book, as they (or, I think, maybe just Shefali, at least at first) try to uncover the truth of that story. Hmm. Interesting.