Cliche Manifest

Chapter 17: Thank God It's Over

On December 1, both Anna and Yulia sigh when they realize their respective stories are finished. With NaNo now over for them, Anna and Yulia can now move on to the next stages in their life, just with a lower coffee intake. After breakfast ends...

"Good luck, Anna, you're going to need it" Yulia wishes her, while she goes off to buy groceries.

"I know, I just need a seventy-five percent to get reciprocity, but the test being open book is not an excuse" Anna, with only two afternoons of studying the legal part of the jurisprudence test, prepares to take it, confident she can score the required 75%.

Applicants have 2 hours, 40 multiple-choice questions to answer, and the passing score is 30. And some security precautions must be made. If Yulia hoped that the code of conduct and ethics questions would carry me, I will prove her wrong here. However, I don't expect it to be perfect, and I don't need to be perfect, unlike my doctoral grades. After all, while some clients, or maybe insurers, could care about where I got my PhD, no one cares about jurisprudence test scores beyond whether you pass, not even insurers. I'm pretty confident that the other two references I got are good enough for it not to be a problem for reciprocity, a train of thought traverses Anna's mind before she logs into the system for taking the jurisprudence test.

"Prepare for battle!" she shouts while closing the door of her bedroom and the jurisprudence test starts.

Yet, somehow, the code of conduct and ethics questions were so similar to Maryland's that the impact of PSYPACT on ethics and codes of conduct was not even funny to her. So much that she may as well be taking the psychology equivalent of the Multistate Professional Responibility Examination in law. And, far from approaching this like an aspiring lawyer would have for the bar exam, Anna stuck to the essentials of Louisiana law in studying for the jurisprudence test she was taking. Yet it seems that she comparatively spent more time per question on legal questions than she did on ethics and code of conduct questions.

Two hours later, with the raw score on her screen, she lets out a sigh or relief. And she can then get started in building her own website that, for now, will only mention her Maryland practice information, and she will not take new clients until further notice, except for emergencies. And, of course, write her own blog articles about giftedness in both children and adults, the special needs of gifted children, and what that implies for parenting gifted children. Fortunately, on that count, she could always count on AI for these items.

Getting to the minimum viable prototype of a website for her future practice ends up being very quick; Anna is able to build one in about two hours. Once that MVP is finished, she takes the time to review the state's leaderboard, with the winners being in a list, and the remainder of the leaderboard is split into 5000-word bands. Oh boy: this state just doesn't produce a whole lot of Wrimos anymore. There's a total of 97 Wrimos this year in all of Maryland, and only 8 winners. I have the feeling I met all of them at one point or another! In chronological order of victory confirmation: Douglas, Rania, Yulia, myself, Samantha, Vanessa, Dutton and... Zhou? Zhou somehow wins by writing 50,000 words of what he calls wordwang? An astonished Anna realizes that she is part of what she has come to regard as a dying breed of artists.

Once Yulia returns from buying groceries, which took the entire morning, Anna is told about a "Thank God it's Over" event in the afternoon, even though NaNo is already over.

"What about we go to Thank God it's Over; it deals in the post-NaNo world for us" Yulia suggests Anna.

"Where is it?"

"College Park. The Department of English at Maryland is hosting it"

"Last month was full of word wars, and we only went out for write-ins and groceries, outside of work of course" Anna sighs. "I really hope this is the end of the writing journey"