Dear Academic Gods,

I’m on my knees before an altar of textbooks and highlighted journal articles about Socrates and Plato.  My fingers are worn to the bone with typing, editing, and (shudder) making citations.  Paper cuts mare my skin in a bloody sort of hieroglyphics.  I’ve bended, molded and created a noose, err necklace out of paperclips. A bruise the size of Africa has formed on my forehead from repeated beatings on my desk.

Why – oh dear academic God – Why do your papers feels as if I am having my life sucked out of me with a straw? Can’t you please be more fun?

I beg of you oh wise deity, let some creativity into your life.  Let the sun trickle into the words, let themes and hypothesizes dance with life. Let’s make music instead of quoting statistics.

I beg of you dear academic God – Give me ten minutes to scribble down fiction, let me get lost in my world of characters, plots, twists, and arcs.  I need this — don’t you see?  I need to know in what wicked ways my heroine will make my heroes life hell.  Though I fear now, it will not be a blade that strikes him, or the past holding him back, no, it won’t even be saving his true love from a pit of deranged lizards.  No – I fear he will die without knowing his love, he’ll wither away from adventure and intrigue, he shall die a gruesome and terrible fate, a dusty drowning of literature, and writing essays on mindless dribble. I can see his body now, all hunched over his desk, dust from centuries lying stagnant in his hair.  Despair and sorrow on his face, because his story could not be told.

And, what of my heroine?  If I don’t write her story, she may be forced to marry the evil Duke of Grammar, and then I’d really be screwed.  Without my interference, her life will be destroyed.  Without the tippity-tap of my fingers on the keys, telling her story, she’ll die.  You, Academic God, will be to blame for these two innocent deaths.  If I hadn’t been trying to appease you to earn an A – they would have lived.  They would have loved.

Oh dear God of academics – don’t be so serious.  Let me tell you a story instead of barfing up the words of my predecessors.  Let me play make believe with the words, and still relay the facts.  Please – just give me a moment’s reprieve to write a little and then I will return.  I will be a good little student if only you’ll let me write for a few hours.

Love your ever dying student – Michelle

Novella Update –

Word count to date:  2165

School Essay word count – 5248

The win goes to school this week.  Maybe next week my characters will win a victory. If not it’ll be a battle to the death.  Writing on my novella will triumph!