Keeping my head above water (just)

When I got home last week, I wrote a list of things I had to do before the 7th of June. It was a salutary list, and when I added it up it came to 31 thousand finely crafted words. After my head hit the desk a few times in despair, I got on with the first few bits and worked out a schedule. My initial plan (write 500 words...panic...write two hundred more words...panic...) proved unhelpful but taking out all the panics and rescheduling them for 7th June made it seem slightly more manageable. So far I've written and posted TMA06, sent a short story to the course anthology Litmus, sent a short story to the university creative writing magazine, Vortex, and written 1,500 words of the dissertation proposal thingy. TMA06 came back at 87% giving me a good chance of a distinction, which was more than I expected, so all I have to do now is write a fabulous EMA. The hardest task is proving to be 'write a couple of sentences about your plan for your dissertation', which we are supposed to email to our tutor. If I could condense a novel to two sentences I don't think it would be a novel. Filling in the form for the proposal first is helping, as did TMA06 which was about the novel too..

On a brighter note, I went down with the family to Woolacombe for a walk, as it was the first day I could stand upright in a week. The weather was stunning and the walk was lovely, even though I'm on heat pads and painkillers now. The beach was busy as usual, well, it is the Easter holidays.

I'm now slightly worried about the 7th of June, when I have to catch up on all the panics...