When we last saw our heroine, Caroline, she was still at home, waxing poetic on (what else) the subject of time passing too quickly and her neurosis. Following a traumatic (yet scheduled!) break-up, she was deeply involved in the worlds of bridal-shower planning and Law & Order re-runs.

If you didn't tune in last week, or the week before, or the week before (and by "tune in" I mean, you'd actually have to have picked up a phone and called me and demanded to know what was going on with my life, because I've been very bad at calling people myself, or writing emails, or doing a whole heck of a lot of things (i.e. updating this site) that I ought to do) I've been busy.

Since June I have: moved to New York, where I will definitely be until August, and hopefully be after that. I am at what we'll call "publishing camp." The first week and a half, we sat in lectures for roughly nine hours a day with annoying two- and three-hours breaks in between. While great important people in the world of book publishing spoke, we schmoozed, drank some wine, and ate some cheese. We wear our name tags at all times, sit alphabetically, and eat meals together.

Then came the book workshop and publishing camp turned into boot camp and our nine-hour days turned into 18-hour long idea-generating sessions (fabulous book titles such as Suck: The True History of Vampires came out of these).* Basically, we form fake publishing companies, came up with hypothetical book ideas, and then actually go about writing tip sheets, marketing plans, production specs and other such nonsense for these fake books. Except with real numbers, and real authors, and they really were very harsh to us.

Life was not made much easier by the fact that the cafeteria has no idea how to create "matching" food items. I for one, am not very good at this, and think I actually wrote about these challenges sometime during my freshman year (these archives, tragically, don't seem to be online anymore. Perhaps that's for the best though, I don't know that I need to be haunted by the spectre of my freshman self for all of digital time). But I know enough to not serve spaghetti and meatballs with spinach and cream cheese crepes. (Actually, I know enough to never make a spinach and cream cheese crepe.) Or they just don't get vareity. One night last week, dinner consisted of two kinds of cous-cous (one hot, one cold, both with questionable-looking vegetables and some sad tofu) and rice. I'm very glad I'm not on Atkins.

Anyway. After six hellish, sleep-deprived days (and I am one who knows about sleep deprivation—recall first semester: mono victim and newspaper editor) the book workshop came to a conclusion. We got our evaluations just this afternoon, which were amazingly, very positive. (Not "amazingly" as in I thought we did an absolutely terrible job, but amazing in that I totally expected them to tear us a new one. But maybe I've got weird expectations about these things.)

Things, mostly, are good: I like the people, I am learning a lot even if I have to work hard. I am still poor, my wallet continues to spit out money like it was allergic to it, and I have no idea how I will afford a New York apartment on something like $25K a year, nevermind pay off my credit card bills by New Year's (my self-appointed deadline for erasing my debt, which is not utterly insane, but increasingly unsettling considering I HAVE NO INCOME).

This leads me to the next topic: jobs. I won't say much about it, because the subject causes a big ball of anxiety to form in my stomach and well up in my throat. And I don't want to talk about it. But anyway, that's it for now, and I've spent a full FORTY MINUTES writing and you should be very grateful that I'm not ignoring you anymore, faithful readers.

And I'l write something better soon, I swear.

*Suck did not make it past the first day of idea-generating. Sadly.