Well, my semester has gotten off to a very busy start. I am teaching a record number of students, rehearsing for an opera, and have my faculty recital coming up this Friday, which has left me very little time to do anything else, including read and write in journals! Once I get home and catch up on all my email, reading submissions from fellow writers, etc. it is bedtime, unless I want to inflict a very cranky voice teacher on my morning students.However, I did meet my deadline and got my next chapter off to my novel group last Tuesday. It is a bit longer and more rambling than I might have wished, but I hope at the meeting today, my fellow "bookies" can help me decide what to trim. This is what usually happens when I write the beginning and end of a chapter and then go back to fill in the middle!I have started the next chapter, but already know I will probably restart at a slightly later point to avoid it also getting longer than I want. It should be the next to the last chapter, so now is the time to wrap things up. I am not interested in writing a saga that never ends, and fortunately I wrote a first draft of the end of the book months ago.I think I am getting a better sense of what needs to be cut from the draft than I had when I started the novel. I had to edit down the first chapter for publication in a small literary magazine, and realized that there was a lot of material in there that was really "F.M.I." (for my information). I needed to know how the hero puzzled out how he was going to get around a certain obstacle, but I cut out most of the puzzling, because all the reader needed to know was how he put his plan into action.I am thinking about the novel every day but not having much time to write. I know that the thinking has helped, though, because I have one plot element I still haven't quite worked out yet and I can now feel it begin to take shape in my mind.I am excited about the meeting today because I really enjoyed reading the submissions from my fellow writers, one of whom has just submitted the last chapter of a wonderfully fun novel. After the meeting, we are having lunch and I'm bringing the notes I took at WorldCon so that I can share some of what I learned there.Well, off to teach a few students first.