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Okay, I’m not normally one to brag, but I really want to this time. I’m in a creative writing class, a junior-level workshop, and my second story – which I’m currently working on revising – was written in a span of 2-4 hours, late at night.

A majority of the comments were talking about how solid my writing was. Yeah, there was some goofs, but it was a solid piece of work. It appeared that I had spent a LOT of time on it.

And I’ve talked to some people in person, and when they find out that it was done in a matter of hours, the night before it was due, they are all shocked.

So, yes, I’m a fucking KICKASS writer. When I wanna be. :)

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Mi NaNiWriMo no es muy bien… yo no puedo escribir mucho. Es muy dificil. Yo he empezado tres historias, pero no me gusta mucho nada.

tl;dr I fail at NaNo. Oh well.

I met up with some peeps at a coffee house, and we had an epic writing deal. I got one thing I kinda liked out of it, so I posted it up here, entitled “Dodo Bird“. It was a prompt. :)

zzz

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Remember, back in like 2007, I had the idea of writing a longer story based off of the lyrics to Savage Garden’s Affirmation? Well, I’m actually trying it this time, for my NaNo.

I made it through the first line, and part of the second, and came out with 2284 words. I figure it’s a good, solid start and that I’ll be able to continue working off of that.

I’ll be honest and say that my goal isn’t so much to have a SINGLE story that’s 50,000 words. I am aiming for probably 2 25,000 novella deals. It’ll be a lot more manageable for me, and it’s something that I think I’ll be able to accomplish much easier.

According to my NaNo profile, I attempted 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. ~_~ 2009, as I recall, was my Potter kid story, which I still work on occasionally. I’m not quite sure what happened to the other two stories… maybe they’re sitting on a harddrive somewhere.

“Potter Party” as it’s called on Google Docs is a whooping 9459 words. >_> Not exactly NaNo winning material. But I still really like the idea… it’s just a matter of making it GO somewhere. That’s where I always seem to end up. A fun beginning, an interesting subject, and then it just plops out.

So! Wish me luck! You can find me on NaNo here.

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Very imaginative title, eh? But that’s what this post is, I guess, as I kinda just feel like talking about my classes…

Right now, I’m taking five English courses, and one Spanish one. Which equates to eighteen credits. A full load, and I’ll tell ya – I’m having a blast.

My Mondays start out with The Short Story, an English literature class that focuses on – guess what? – the short story format. We’ve read a bunch of Anton Chekhov, Raymond Carver, and we’re in the middle of our horror unit, where we’re reading a variety of horror stories. We have a few more authors that we’ll focus on later in the course. It’s a discussion based course… meaning that we read a few stories every night, and then there are class discussions about them. It’s relatively disorganized, I feel, but it works for me. I tend to do Spanish homework during it >_>

Our big assignments have been writing stories in the “style”. I posted my Carver story up here (a few posts down) but I wasn’t really pleased with my Chekhov one. I should just post it anyways, it’s interesting if nothing else. :3 I have two more stories to write as the semester wanes on… a horror one (O_o) and then one in the style of Joyce Oates. Sounds like fun, eh?

After that class, my Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays continue with Phonetics & Pronunciation, Spanish 325. It is just as it sounds – a Spanish class based in linguistics. Which makes it pretty much amazing. :) Though it’s a LOT of busy work… we’re basically transcribing how real pronunciation works, with words all melding together and stuff…

On Fridays, that’s the end. However, Mondays and Wednesdays, I have a 75 minute class Introduction to Theory and Criticism or something like that. It’s part of the “core” English program. To be honest, I don’t really know what the class is about. We’ve looked at a variety of critical viewpoints and written some short assignments… not really sure what the overall point of the class is, though. It’s okay though. We have read some interesting books, which is good! We read a Walt Disney biography, which was helluva interesting, and just recently we went through a memoir, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. Both very good & interesting books. But like I said, I fail to see the overall arching themes in the class.

My Tuesdays and Thursdays have similar structures. They both start with my English linguistics class, Topics in the Structure of English which this semester is focusing on Semantics & Pragmatics. It’s pretty cool, though a lot of the material has been going about ten feet above my head. It’s okay though, I get it at a basic level… after we’ve discussed it in detail. :P I also really like my prof. I took her for a class last semester, and she’s really smart and knows what she’s talking about.

After that, I always have a ~3 hour break. On Tuesdays, it’s 2 hours and 45 minutes, and Thursdays it’s 3 hours and 15 minutes long. After these breaks are my two workshop courses. Remember, I’m undecided between doing a Creative Writing emphasis or a Linguistic one.

Tuesdays, I have Intermediate Story Writing. It’s a workshop class… for writing stories. Yar. I’ve had two go through workshop now, and now it’s a matter of fixing them up. The first one, you should be familiar with, it’s the Airplane House one. ~_~ The second is a ghost story, which I need to really work on before doing anything with it…

And on Thursdays, I have Intermediate Poetry Writing. I know, poetry. Urgh. But that’s been the source of all the poetry I’ve been posting up, so I guess it’s not bad. Just not my favorite thing to write…

All in all, my semester has been going pretty good. It’s 18 credits, and there sure can seem to be a lot of work at times, especially when profs seem to get together and decide that EVERYTHING will be due the same week… I had one of those weeks two weeks ago. I was ready to ~die~ during that, but made it out okay afterwards.

But this is all leading up to next semester… when I shall be in SPAIN!!!! :D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D

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Durante este semestre, yo estoy estudiando y escribiendo poesia. Que divertido. -_-;

Erm, in English: During this semester, I am studying and writing poetry. How fun. -_-;

Every other week, we have to write a poem. And I’ve done that. Plus a few others… like the first week, I wrote two sonnets. One was just me messing around, and the other I turned in… and this week, we had to write either a pantoum or a sestina, and I couldn’t decide which one I liked best, so I actually did both. My pantoum made its way around the room, so we’ll see what people think…

I added all of these to the poetry work bench page, as well as mucked around with it [a lot]. I’ve decided to do the Google docs deal, at least for poetry now, and have thusly converted all my poetry to that, and added the iFrames to the posts. It looks ~brilliant~. But if you’re lazy, here’s the new stuff (which has been for class)

Lift Off
How high in the sky can your little wings fly?

Crickle, Crackle
Crickle, crackle, I flare up in the night

Sick Day
The stars begin to exit just as you leave

Whirlwind
Do you feel it now? The lick of the wind

Twilight Rain
Kiss me in the falling rain

So I heard Superman’s going bankrupt
So, I heard you could fly

Another thing – I changed all of the “summaries” to the first lines of the poem. The summaries were dumb… except a few, which I ended up keeping. :P
Urgh. I have to write a free verse poem in the style of Frank O’Hara for next time. URGH I tell you, URGH.

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I decided to change the theme, since the old one got messed up somehow. Fixing it requires doing some insane amount of work (or, at least unzipping a file and uploading it) and I don’t really care enough to bother.

This new one is kinda cool looking anyways, wouldn’t you say? :)

I’ll continue the customization as time goes on… maybe. :) I could totally turn it PURPLE! :D :D :D

ps: So many random options on the post page now. O__o

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So, I’ve always had an issue with uploading my stuff online. I end up with multiple versions across multiple sites and it bugs me majorly. I’ve tried remote hosting stuff on like, LiveJournal but that never worked out great.

So, I’ve got something new here I want to try. Can I get some feedback on what people think of it? To test, here’s two pieces that I have written for classes:

Lift Off (a poem)

The Importance of Vacuuming (a story)

My issue is that, at least with the story, the linewraps aren’t within the style. -____-;; so you have to scroll for every line.

Suggestions would be welcome :)