I'm Free At Last

Though I still have one final paper to surrender on Friday, I am officially free from classes until the end of August! So here's what I vow for the summer:

I will post book and film reviews, writing updates, Doctor Who speculation, and (hopefully) humorous anecdotes on a more regular basis.
I will do some creative writing every day.
The freelance writing will come to fruition and I will update you lovely people when it does.
Travel. I must. Just a little.
Reading books I have chosen which I will update you with through aforementioned reviews.
I will spend ample amounts of time outside.
I will go mad in a good way.
Though the amount of coffee I consume will be considerable, I will eat healthy to balance it out.
I will actually get to go fishing this summer.
I will get up the courage to start looking into literary agents.

This is going to be a more spontaneous summer. I don't have a reading list or an hourly job. I have some tentative travel plans and the style sheets for several periodicals. Most of my income will be from writing and selling soap at farmers' markets and on Etsy. So it will be low. But this leaves me with time. Time to write and work on finding my voice. Time to have the adventures I'm always talking about having. I'm getting too old to have many opportunities for such madness left. Before I have to settle into respectable responsibility (as settled as I'll get anyway) I'd like to be distinctly unsettled.
Maybe I'll find a literary agent. Maybe I'll finish another novel. Maybe I'll fall in love with a stranger. Maybe I'll get a tan (biologically nearly impossible). Maybe I won't be so devastated when my best friend moves away in the fall as she's planning.

I almost forgot: Everything Austen Challenge

Whoops, I've neglected this challenge for a while. I can't remember if this is my 3/6 or my 4/6 project. As this challenge is for everything Austen, Austen inspired crafts and such are fair game. Well, I made this reticule a little while back and forgot to post it. It's sort of my interpretation of those bags all such heroines carry their necessities in in every film adaptation. The tapered bottom and drawstring/wrist strap is a pretty standard look, I made it my own by making a knit overlay I wove out of some lovely purple yarn. It's fully lined and up on one of my Etsy shops here. There are more pictures on the site.
I swore I would finally finish Mansfield Park for this challenge... guh, I haven't yet. It's the one novel of Austen's I've never been able to get into.

NaNoWrimo Day 26

I'm almost caught up to my suggested word count! Now there are only about 8,000 words to go until I reach 50,000. Yay.
I can't believe I was such a downer the other day. Unbelievably I still have a little bit of plot to write and have written very little word count padding crap so far this year.
Truthfully, it was a gamble this year, I picked my plot only a week before starting but being a planner with a new story has proved to be better than last year's story even though the characters had been brewing in my head for a while- I was still mostly a "pantster" in terms of preparation.
I'll be revealing my killer soon. Again, it's probably wrong, but I'm very excited. In fact, this deserves an epic and mysterious image:

In the Words of Mark Twain...

"A Classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read." (Here's looking at you Epic Book Blog)
Even though my reading has been sporadic this summer between moving, working, trying to write, my cat having a bladder infection, I have conquered my shameful secret of never having read The Great Gatsby and it was rather enjoyable. I'm almost finished A Farewell to Arms now, though it's depressing me greatly. Still there are so many other classics I really ought to read. None of them are as shame-making as Gatsby, but still. Here are some books I'd like to tackle soon:
Moby Dick by Herman Mellville
Lolita by Vladimir Nobokov
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell
The Dubliners by James Joyce
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
Possession by A.S. Byatt
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
Middlemarch by George Elliot

What is your list of unread classics (shameful or otherwise)?