In the Next Month

Belated post. XP
Mostly I've been trying to gather the energy to write it.
On Wednesday, I met with my two main advisers, to figure out what I'll need to do to graduate this semester.
Here's the scoop.

By the second week of October, I need to:
1. Complete my graduate exams, which other students don't have to do, but I do because I'm doing a project instead of a research paper.
2. Address all the comments of my teachers on my project so they'll sign off on it. In addition to my grad story, I also need to review environmental literature in a separate paper.
3. And finally last of all, plan and do my thesis defense. (It's not a thesis, but I still need to talk about my genre and give a reading as a final presentation).

So, there are a couple things which will be most frustrating.
1. The main thing they want me to change about my Ashes story so far is that they want me to pack it full of environmental facts and descriptions. I've always learned to not do info-dumps, but I guess I'll have to ignore that temporarily. Plus, all of that will make my story a lot less of a young-adult book. Teenagers aren't usually going to be interested in reading big hunks of scientific info. That's something I see in adult environmental fiction, but not YA environmental fiction.
2. There's one book in particular that one of my teachers wants me to read (He brought it up during the meeting, and in a separate email this evening, so I guess he's serious about it). It's called The Road, and he says that it's like my story. Now I've seen the movie. And I hated it.
I'm not one to jump to conclusions, but I'm 95% sure I'll hate the book even more than the movie. I haven't seen very many similarities to my Ashes story. No more than a lot of other books, at least. And it's very very different than what I'm trying to do. I actually want to have some positive stuff in my story, and some hope. There doesn't seem to be any of that in The Road.
(I might not feel this strongly about The Road usually, but I am currently reading two books which I thought would be really helpful for my project, and I thought I'd like them because I liked another book by the same author. But not so. Both of these books are completely dark and depressing and gruesome too...)

(I seem to have gotten into lists today. I don't know why).

Anyway, the next month will have me very busy. Tomorrow I will have to devote mostly to it.
Wish me luck!

But I also have some really cool news! I'll write about it when I have more to show you~