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"Spunk & Bite: A Writer's Guide to Punchier, More Engaging Language and Style."

Also, anybody still looking for summer plans? Take a trip with NYTimes op-ed man Nicholas Kristof -- but be aware that "boring" times lawyers have already "nixed the idea of us all hiking through Afghan minefields, riding a camel through Darfur, or sneaking illegally into Zimbabwe. So no war zones. And no purchases of Cambodian sex slaves this time."

My major accomplishment this week was organizing all of my thesis notes into a big-ass binder. I have yet to do anything productive with said organized notes...but that's okay. My time will come.

The main task at the moment is writing an article for the Mt. Holyoke News about The Skriker, which goes up next week. I may not be working on the play (...technically speaking, I did act as a substitute stage manager at a J-Term rehearsal), but I'll do my best to get people to come see it. It's one of the more obviously design-heavy shows we've done -- "spectacle" doesn't happen often on the Rooke Theatre stage, not even when we do musicals. Skriker is going to look incredible, no doubt about it.

Interesting use of the collective "we" there. You'd think I could extricate myself from the theater department, but no. In many ways, I'm more connected there than I am with either my major or minor departments. I feel oddly possessive of this show, for all that I didn't intend to work on it. This proves to be problematic when trying to write a compelling article about it: is there a better way to entice people to come see it than simply saying "it has pretty masks and my roommate gives a kick-ass performance of the title role"?

Maybe I'm too close to it to actually write about it. Maybe I'm cowed by the pressure to make this piece really good, since it's likely one of my last for the News...which makes it one of the most important in my portfolio, as it'll be the most recent piece of non-thesis writing I do. Maybe I need to stop overthinking it and just write the damn thing, so I can move on to thinking about my thesis.