Oh my. How good it'll be to study Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising Sequence for a semester! Or Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quartet. Or Diana Wynne Jone's Chrestomanci series. Or Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials.

7 books, 4 books, 5 books, 3 books. 7 or 5-book sets could make up a 12,000 word HT, I daresay. And the 4- or 3-book series could make a 5,000 word ISM. Only snag is that I'll need to read them all--and most I haven't touched since secondary school. How to polish 4 books in a week and conceptualise stuff, on top of all the readings?

Kid's lit is no mean feat k. Maybe I'll do Enid Blyton, ohoho. 6 mystery books, or 5 adventure stories? Alternatively there's Oscar Wilde, and maybe 8 short, witty, depressing stories.

I don't know why the draw of children's lit, when I haven't officially been trained in that before. It's just the draw of... something we've lost, I suppose. As a kid I used to read these stories and be so glad there was an adult writer who remembered what a child wants in her world, and I kept telling myself I'll remember, too, what's it like to be a child, how it felt, that faith, that easy internalising of fiction, where complexities are simplified in crystal clarity, because we are aware of our ignorance (and the fact hasn't even begun to bother us, yet) and trusted in infinite possibilities.

And for a single, heart-stopping moment, I realised that maybe I have forgotten, somewhere along the way. Would I be able to write, not just about children, but for children, now? Prissy academic training aside, pretty fluffy decorative words aside-- could I still construct a world for the kids today?

*pause* Then again, kids today are rather scary. Nothing like what I read or what I used to recognise. But then again, the twenty-first century is scary. Darnit, I'm so early-nineteenth-century, obliging and docile, almost. What am I doing here? I should be strolling around manors, having high tea and scones, reading and writing, playing bridge daily with my lady companions, and learning to play the piano and sing. Other than the fact that my natural clumsiness might destroy a couple of fragile artifacts around the home, I should do fairly well in that era, methinks.

Okay, -bump bump- reality beckons. Before I went into the pointless digression, I was gonna say, I'm almost excited with the notion of kid's-lit, if not for the terror of deadlines looming ahead. Maybe I should start on another essay first.

Would tear hair, except that I don't have that much hair to spare, and hot as the weather is, I don't want to risk going bald. As if the brain is not already fried internally--if I expose it to additional external elements it'll explode, or something.

Speaking of which, my mummy pointed out quite severely that there's no point getting an A/B/C graded essay if the brain degenerates into a D/E/F grade, as exhibited by my increased spurts of hysteria and drama before each paper is completed. Gah.

Okay, rest time! Write again.