count down

I have seven days until I have two four-six page lit papers due.  I have six days until my final draft personal essay is due.  I have four days until a second draft of my personal essay needs to be done.  I have three days until I have a short literary analysis due.  I feel like I have been reading The Canterbury Tales in Middle English forever.  I also feel like I have been saying "I feel like I have been reading the Canterbury Tales in Middle English forever" forever.  But I am over the hump.  The Wife of Bath and her ginormous prologue is done.  Two more (much) smaller tales, and I can start that essay (if I can decide what I am going to write about).  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is longer, but it isn't in Middle English, and I have read it before, once upon a time, so it should take as long to read.

I am worried about my personal essay.  It started off in my head really cool, and what came out in the first draft was pretty much crap.  Some good ideas, I think, but it ended up being more personal than I intended.  Maybe more personal than I am comfortable with.  The problem is that my readers say they want more of something that I'm not sure is there.  The original purpose of the essay was to show, in sort of snapshots, how books have been not necessarily instrumental in the way I have developed as a person, but present in the way I think and see the world.  If I focus on the couple of aspects that my readers seem to like, I feel like it will be making a correlation that I don't believe in, which would be misleading the readers, and I don't like that idea, not in this essay.  One major problem that I will have to fix regardless is that there is no common thread other than books.  It was noted, and accurately, that each couple of paragraphs felt like entirely new essays.  But I am not sure how I am going to fix that...