The Damsel and My Worst Fear

Has it really been six months? My. I'm sorry, folks. I am still alive and I am still writing. Here's what I've been up to since my last post:

• "The Damsel" won first place in the fiction division of the OPUS writing contest. I was unable to make it to the awards ceremony because I had work, but my good friend Bethany was nice enough to accept the award on my behalf. She read the first few pages of the story and from what I've been told, the audience reacted quite well. One of my professors in attendance emailed me to say that the audience laughed and murmured in appreciation. We're printing the story in our school's literary magazine as well, so we're hoping that "The Damsel" might be a draw for students to pick that up once it comes out. It's rather killing me that I wasn't there to read the piece myself and see the reactions with my own eyes. The whole night at work all I could think was, somewhere out there, someone is hearing my story, and I have no idea how they feel about it. I suppose that's something I'm going to have to get used to at some point.
• I graduate in 3 weeks. 3 weeks to the day, actually. I'm quite looking forward to it at this point. This semester has been eating me alive, between 17 credits and two (and later three, sort of) jobs. That's one of the major reasons why I haven't posted here since late November. Soon, though, I will be done with school entirely and I will have time for these sorts of things. Even more importantly, I will have time for finishing Zenith and moving onto my next project (it involves time travel!).
• Another big reason I haven't been around is that I haven't had the strength. I have carpal tunnel and tendonitis in both hands/wrists and it's been really bad this year. Even with a brace, typing is hard and I was only able to do it in short bursts. Most of the time, I had to dedicate that to my homework assignments, and some of those I couldn't even manage. Thankfully, my professors were understanding and gave me extensions on the larger papers, but blogging was absolutely out of the question. So was writing. I was basically starting in on my worst fear: losing my hands. The absolute worst part about it was not that I was in constant pain, but that I couldn't write about it. That was all I wanted, to write about how it felt, and I couldn't. That pain goes so much deeper.