I took off the entire first week of July. I have the great fortune of earning a lot of vacation time at my job but the misfortune of usually being far too busy to take all of it. This summer, I decided I would take some of that precious leave and take care of a few things.  As such I’m on leave this week and I have two goals:

1. Work on my manuscript/thesis.
2. Work on my tan.

September will start the last semester of my MFA program. I honestly have no idea where the time went, it feels like only yesterday I was accepted into the program and attended my first residency. But the time has moved forward, with my permission or not, and so this fall begins the last semester. I’ll graduate in January and while I’m very excited about it I’m also completely sad about it. It’s a bittersweet end as I’ve learned so much and have met such a wonderful community of writers.

One of the requirements of my program is the thesis: 60-80+ pages of poetry, a full length manuscript, is due prior to graduation. Thankfully, I’ve already written all of the poems and have them loosely organized. The first goal of this week is to do any final editing and arrange them into an order. By the end of the week I’ll forward the whole manuscript to Chelsea, a friend and fellow QU MFA candidate, who has kindly offered to be a first reader for me.

It’s true. This is my fucking manuscript.

The second goal for this week: get some pool time in and get a bit of a tan. I’m in need of some Vitamin D and this week is the perfect week to get started.

Pool time!

By the end of the week I hope to have the manuscript reader for its first reader and I hope to have a little bit of color on my skin — here’s to a week of my favorite kind of work.