It's my MFA summer semester and I'm locked in 🍃 | WRITING VLOG

A summer MFA sprint is colliding with a looming debut-novel revision, and the result is a tightly managed writing schedule built around finishing a thesis draft fast enough to defend on time. In the summer semester between year one and year two, Jaylen is funded to do self-directed thesis work, aiming to complete as much of the manuscript as possible before September. After restarting in early May and getting momentum, she wrote all of Part Two out of six and is now pushing through Part Three with a clear chapter-by-chapter pace—seven chapters per part—using that symmetry as scaffolding to keep the draft moving.

The thesis itself is described as literary fiction with folk horror elements, loosely outlined at the “major beats” level rather than scene-by-scene. That approach is paying off: by the midpoint, she reports being unusually confident that plot and structure are essentially where they need to be. She’s already logged just over 43,000 words at the halfway point, projecting a roughly 90,000-word manuscript, with the expectation that revision will focus more on fleshing out scenes and layering in detail than on rewriting large plot mechanics. She also credits speed with keeping her connected to the story—she’s been able to draft quickly because the plot feels solid, even if the prose sometimes needs richer scene-level work.

But the schedule is complicated by “The Animal Sense,” a separate manuscript she’s edited heavily before and now must revisit after an agent call. That call triggered a major priority shift: the agent believes the book needs significant work, including a second round of feedback from another reader. Jaylen says she has little memory of her earlier “fugue state” revisions, aside from cutting roughly 15,000 words, and she’s bracing for a large, time-consuming edit. The emotional pressure is real—she’s “hungry for the sale”—yet she’s also trying to protect thesis momentum by delaying immediate revisions on The Animal Sense for the rest of June.

Her plan becomes a balancing act: finish Part Three and Part Four before a cluster of back-to-back camping trips in July, then take a natural rest point at the end of Part Four before shifting to later revisions. After hitting a wall at the start of Part Four—partly due to time pressure and the looming Animal Sense edit—she took about ten days off the manuscript, re-entered by reworking early pacing (including splitting Part One material into two chapters), and then regained a stride. She’s now down to two chapters left in Part Four, targeting completion before July 8 so she can rest without leaving the thesis mid-scene.

Across the draft, she’s also refining craft choices: she notes that her scenes can come out underbaked, especially in third person, and she wants to add complexity and richer detail during revision. She’s particularly attentive to structure devices, including a rare “same scene from two POVs” technique used only twice in the whole book. By the end of the vlog, she’s wrapping Part Four with confidence, projecting that Parts Five and Six could be written quickly once she returns—while acknowledging that The Animal Sense revisions will likely consume one to three months after late July, pushing some thesis-related work into fall. The throughline is clear: finish the thesis draft strongly enough for committee feedback and defense, then tackle the debut-novel overhaul with a renewed, more informed plan.