New Saturday

I love when I wake up feeling the newness of a day. I woke up a little earlier than I wanted to--around 9AM to my mother's loud voice on the phone. But I did slid right back into a great sleep and woke up a little more naturally not too long ago. I feel reenergized--cleansed from the ugliness of yesterday--looking forward to the great promise in today.

I greatly appreciate Texter for pointing out an important component of my diss abstract that was missing. I must have been thinking about it in my sleep because I woke up with a sentence in my head that I had to put down right away. Of course, now the abstract is a few words too long so I'll have to spend a little time editing today before I can print out the final diss--for good.

While I do have an itch to do some home shopping today, I'll probably stay in and get this final draft ready to go and enjoy another book or a movie. I also really need to finishing rereading Things Fall Apart. I don't remember when I read it the first time, but having taken a class on African women writers since, the images of women are so much more striking to me during this read-through. I think I must have read it for the first time during high school when I was really getting into Africana literature (on my own time of course--we didn't read any Black books in school). I was soaking up everything I could. I do remember feeling impressed by the emotional responses I had to the characters in this cultural context that I really knew nothing about--I wondered how a writer "did that." Now I still wonder the same things, but I try to pay more attention to the writing. I'm particularly cognizant of this now that I'm done with the diss and thinking about ways to revise it for publication. On the one hand, I want to put it in a box, mail it off, and not look at it for a while. On the other hand, I want to go back again and read it over and over again as a reader--to figure out where it really works and find the parts I really love--and then rewrite it as a writer--to strengthen my voice and ideas in the work and to continue to shape it into a compelling narrative for my audience(s).