Here is the opening of a short story I started at the beginning of the semester. If any of you Creative Writing People happen to read it and have any tips/suggestions/comments PLEASE e-mail me (I think Cindy has a e-mail list, if not I have sent stuff in for workship so you can find my address there!) I suck at writing short stories, so I need HELP!

The dark hallways terrified most people, but for some reason Sara enjoyed the solitude represented by the absence of the yellow fluorescent beams that bounce off the bright white linomun tile. Only the faint red glow streaming from the exit signs was present to illuminate Sara’s path to the laboratory door. The red cast to institutional brick made the whole building sinister and foreboding. Many people, disturbed by the glow, just turned on the hallway lights before walking down the corridor, but Sara had long ago ceased to flip on the switch and the inviting lights. To her, the absence of light from the long corridor was comforting because it epitomized peace and solitude. In a few short hours the lights would turn on and the calmness of the morning would be lost to the chaos of the lab. At this time or morning, the all that was present to keep her company was her thoughts and her work.
After unlocking the door, Sara quickly glanced at it to see if a new tidbit of information was present. Instead she was greeted by the same comforting Far Side cartoons, modified to be an inside joke between the members of the group. “I am going to miss those cartoons,” she thought to herself as she breezed by to get started on her tasks for the morning.
Task one: turn on all equipment. Wandering around the waylaid desk chairs and carts, Sara made her way to her “home” for the last seven years, her lab bench. Without even thinking Sara made her way to the biological safety hood and flipped the four switches. Instantly the stillness in the room was destroyed as the hood began to fulfill its purpose, sterilizing the air within its stainless steel confines. The noise was deafening, but after a while a person got used to it. The world within the hood became all that matters, as the loud hum of the HEPA filters drowned out the outside world. The noise once made Sara miss a fire alarm, which was not very entertain for the firefighters sweeping the building. Sara often worried that the hood would damage her hearing, but was too afraid to express these worries out loud. The laboratory environment is one boarding on paranoid. As soon as a health or safety concern is expressed, seemingly thousands of mundane and inefficient rules and paperwork bombard the room. Everyone had to deal with hood noise, so Sara kept her concerns to herself and made a point of having the hood on only when necessary. Today, Sara needed the hood to complete her final laboratory task. After today she would be confined to her cubicle, chained to a laptop writing her thesis. Hesitant to start her task, Sara sat and watched the thermometer climb as the water bath heated the water to a perfect 37˚C: body temperature.
When Sara entered graduate school she never imagined how attached to one place she could become. During her tenure in the lab she had spent more time at this bench than she had in her small apartment four blocks away. Late nights became early mornings, and early morning turned into long days, and yet Sara never regretted a single minute. She had lost two boyfriends, both because she saw her mice more than them. Now, four months shy of completing her thesis and achieving her goal of a doctorate, Sara was finding her motivation quickly waning. Questions, such as “Why can’t I just move on?” “Why do I want to stay so badly?” “Where am I going to end up?” constantly ran through her head, keeping her awake at night. Two months ago the sleepless nights were very productive for Sara. She was able to, in a matter of a few weeks, complete her oral and written exams. Now, with the adrenaline rush ending, Sara was faced with the most tedious and arduous task, fitting the last six years of her life neatly into a thesis. But first, the task at hand! Her concentration snapped from her internal musing by the click of the cell culture incubator, Sara jumps quickly organizes her materials to get started on her project for the day: destroying her cultures.