Hunkering Down (or, The Calm Before the Storm)

Hurricane Sandy is on her way, and for the first time in nearly 30 years, classes at my school have been cancelled due to inclement weather. We are preparing accordingly. My roomie and I stocked up on food this afternoon, and one of our friends is camping on our couch tonight so that he doesn’t have to leave his dorm to come hang out with us tomorrow.

There’s little about the current weather to suggest that a hurricane is headed this way. The wind did pick up in the late afternoon/early evening, but at the moment there’s barely even a breeze, and no precipitation to speak of. Outside my window, a few drunk randos are yelling and horsing around like it’s a Friday night.

It feels strange to not be taking the whole thing seriously. Or rather, it’s not that I’m not taking it seriously. It’s just that, given where I live, I seriously doubt that I personally will be in any danger, so it’s hard to feel more than this general sense of excited anticipation. Like the gradual build at the beginning of an exciting movie.

Which then makes you feel like an asshole when you realize that other people have had to leave their houses and evacuate to shelters while you get to stay curled up in your dorm room reading books and watching movies. And I know from our experience with Irene last year that just because my campus was spared doesn’t mean the surrounding area was.

So maybe Sandy will give us all a thorough pounding. Or maybe she won’t be so mean after all.

For now, though, there’s nothing to do but sit tight and wait.

Ohai there

Yes, it’s me.

Yes.

Shocking, I know. I don’t think I’ve ever had an unplanned blogging hiatus this long before. I honestly had every intention of blogging regularly while at school, but the truth is that doing so is more challenging than it was last year. There are lots of reasons for this; I won’t bore you with them. The point is, I’m not going to make any guarantees about how often you’ll hear from me, but I’ll do my level best to be more present than I have been in the past couple of weeks.

I had these grand plans for writing a proper blog post this evening, and I tried, but I think the feelings I’m sorting through are a bit too personal for teh interwebz (at least not without a veil of anonymity). And there’s nothing else I really feel inclined to write/think about at the moment. So for now:

Ohai.

And the seasons, they go round and round…

Today, I packed up my belongings, handed in a manuscript critique, and walked out of the office for the last time on the last day of my summer internship.

Holy crap.

How did that happen? Wasn’t I just arriving in NYC, getting settled, meeting my new housemates and coworkers, learning to navigate the subway, reading slush for the first time? I’ve made so many new friends this summer, and I’ve learned a ton about publishing in the past few months. It’s absolutely surreal that tomorrow I’ll be getting on a train and heading back to school.

But that’s what’s happening. So tonight, I’m doing laundry and packing and trying to fill out an application for a creative writing course. (No more than ten pages for a writing sample?? GOOD GOD MAN. YOU’RE ASKING THE IMPOSSIBLE.)

Anyhow, I’d best get going. Goodbye New York! Goodbye friends! I’m so glad to have met you, and I’ll see you again soon, I hope.

In the meantime, we’ll always have Twitter. Here’s looking at you, kids.

Sick Day, Camp NaNo, 100 Posts, and Curiosity!

This is a short post and comprised of four points:

1. This post is short because I am not feeling well. Bit of a headache, bit of a stomach ache, and a very spacey/unfocused mind. I’m hoping it’ll go away soon.

2. In case I forgot to mention this, I’m doing Camp NaNo this month! One of my housemates is taking on the challenge with me, and we’ve been having “wording sessions” (as we’ve taken to calling them) every night. I’ve never actually lived with another person doing NaNo, and it’s great fun having someone around to bounce ideas off!

3. We celebrated my blogiversary recently, and I’m not really in a mood to do a big splashy celebration right now, but I feel it bears mentioning that this is officially my 100th post on A Fuzzy Mango With Wings. YAAAAAYYYY!

4. The Mars rover Curiosity will be landing tonight in less than an hour! My friend Hali and I are all set to watch the livestream of the event. If you’d like to see it for yourself, you can do so here. It begins at 11:59 PM EDT/8:59 PM PDT today (August 5th).

ETA (8/6/12 1:59 AM EDT): OH MY GOD OH MY GOD CURIOSITY LANDED! SAFELY! WITHOUT A HITCH!!! I am so incredibly excited and grateful that I got to follow along via the @MarsCuriosity Twitter account (i.e. the most adorable Twitter account in existence) and the NASA JPL livestream. Such a joy to watch this success unfold and to see how excited everyone was by it. CONGRATULATIONS, @NASAJPL!

In the meantime, I’m off to drink some tea and write some words.

G’night!
Ari

Blogiversary Eve (or, Angst, Contests, and Submissions)

I want to write a proper post, but tomorrow is BLOGIVERSARY. So this will be short and rambly.

Last night was sort of a weird night for me. Mostly, I was feeling some publishing-related angst, but it was magnified by everything else going on in my life and basically I ended up drinking tea and eating chocolate and feeling glum and mopey, which really isn’t my gig at all (cheerful optimist that I am). But I figured, as I usually do in such situations, that things would look better in the morning.

And in the morning, things were indeed better. Things were a lot better, because I found out that I’d been picked as a runner-up in an agent contest I’d entered on a whim a couple of weeks ago. I maaaaaay have done some squealing and a bit of a happy dance. So that was awesome. And on a related note, I got an honorable mention in another contest last week, which also made my day. In both cases, I honestly hadn’t expected anything to come of it, so I was really surprised and really pleased to see my name show up on those lists.

All of that has made me think that it’s high time to get my butt in gear sending things out, whether that means queries or short story submissions or contests or whatever. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in editing endlessly, convinced there’s always something to improve. And there IS always something to improve, but there’s also a point where you just have to put down the pen and put yourself out there.

Now, if I can just bring myself to push the “send” button…

(EDIT: Also, remember that drawing to win an ARC from BEA is only open until 11:59 PM PST tomorrow, July 16th 2012. In order to enter yourself in the drawing, just leave a comment telling me which books you’d like to win.)