For all the warnings about how hard this would be, how sleep-depriving, I didn’t really grasp it until I was talking to Gary this week, and we figured out that even if you skip breakfast, your day runs

9-1: Critiques, lectures, lunch. Often this runs to 2.

Then at some point, to do a really good job on the critiques, you need to spend three serious hours on them. If you do them right after lunch, then, it’s time for dinner, which takes an hour.

So every day, assuming that you want to get eight hours of sleep and showering/etc takes an hour a day, you have six hours a day to research and write your next story for the week. Tuesdays you lose a couple of hours to the reading, and Fridays you lose an evening to a social event. And this ignores the ever-ratcheting pressure to write something that measures up to the increasingly good efforts of everyone else.

I brought some books with me for reading material. I’ve barely read a page.