Looking forward
I am now officially among the ranks of the unemployed. My last day at the News-Miner was July 24th; then I was traveling, and now I am back, taking stock and figuring out what the future holds for me.
It's a cool, brisk sunny day with a taste of fall (and a frost warning for tonight, zounds) -- a good day for making a cup of tea, taking stock and thinking about the upcoming semester and beyond!
*makes tea*
*returns with tea, and chocolate*
My plans for the immediate future are to finish my degree and start seriously working on getting published.
Classes start on Sept. 3. I still need something like 20 credits for my degree, give or take a few depending on how many of my old credits are still good (I've already discovered one freshman-level class I'll need to retake or test out of). I'm not planning on pushing especially hard; my "jobs" right now are to finish up my degree and to focus on my creative work, and right now, I want the latter at least as much as I want the degree, if not more so.
So I'm taking classes part-time this upcoming semester. I've registered for the two remaining art history classes that I still need -- the first semester of World Art History (I've already taken the second semester, Renaissance to modern day; this is the one that I'm more interested in anyway) and Advanced Seminar in Art History, or as I call it, Art History Surprise, because it will be focused on some ultra-specific topic, but as of when the catalog was produced, they didn't have a specific course description yet. Hopefully it's something I find at least vaguely interesting. Then I'm wait-listed for Sculpture I, my one remaining studio art class (those were always the fun ones for me, so I have the entire art curriculum out of the way except for this one class). If I can't get in, I'm not too worried; I'll take 6 credits and possibly add another class via Distance Education, i.e. correspondence/computer. Either way, I'm looking at about 6-9 credits this fall.
On the creative side, there's Sun-Cutter, of course. I'm actually all out of my backlog of pages, because this summer was so ridiculously busy with overtime at work that I wasn't able to keep on top of it. So, um, yeah; I need to get cracking on Monday's page. I'd like to go up to 2 pages a week now, but I don't plan to change my schedule 'til I'm able to get comfortably ahead on pages. Sun-Cutter pages are nicer-looking than my HM pages typically were, but they really do take forever. I know it didn't used to take anywhere near this long to finish a page for HM. I need to figure out some ways of speeding up the process.
I'm writing a novel. I've plotted out my daily writing goals to have it finished by the end of the year if I can keep up with it. Once I'm farther along, I'll talk a little more about it; I'm always in extreme "do not rock this boat!" mode when I'm just starting out on a project, desperately afraid that any little thing will derail me or cause me to lose interest. And I've tried to start this one at least three or four times. Maybe this time will be the one that will work? Ironically, I know exactly how it's going to end, and have the climactic scenes all blocked out in my head. It's the 300 previous pages that are giving me trouble ...
I'm in talks with a local publisher about Freebird, and I plan on doing something with Hunter's Moon; right now I'm torn between doing a small press run, or offering it as print-on-demand plus a downloadable PDF version.
The novel and Sun-Cutter are the big priorities for the immediate future, though!
(This entry is also posted at http://layla.dreamwidth.org/164802.html.)
It's a cool, brisk sunny day with a taste of fall (and a frost warning for tonight, zounds) -- a good day for making a cup of tea, taking stock and thinking about the upcoming semester and beyond!
*makes tea*
*returns with tea, and chocolate*
My plans for the immediate future are to finish my degree and start seriously working on getting published.
Classes start on Sept. 3. I still need something like 20 credits for my degree, give or take a few depending on how many of my old credits are still good (I've already discovered one freshman-level class I'll need to retake or test out of). I'm not planning on pushing especially hard; my "jobs" right now are to finish up my degree and to focus on my creative work, and right now, I want the latter at least as much as I want the degree, if not more so.
So I'm taking classes part-time this upcoming semester. I've registered for the two remaining art history classes that I still need -- the first semester of World Art History (I've already taken the second semester, Renaissance to modern day; this is the one that I'm more interested in anyway) and Advanced Seminar in Art History, or as I call it, Art History Surprise, because it will be focused on some ultra-specific topic, but as of when the catalog was produced, they didn't have a specific course description yet. Hopefully it's something I find at least vaguely interesting. Then I'm wait-listed for Sculpture I, my one remaining studio art class (those were always the fun ones for me, so I have the entire art curriculum out of the way except for this one class). If I can't get in, I'm not too worried; I'll take 6 credits and possibly add another class via Distance Education, i.e. correspondence/computer. Either way, I'm looking at about 6-9 credits this fall.
On the creative side, there's Sun-Cutter, of course. I'm actually all out of my backlog of pages, because this summer was so ridiculously busy with overtime at work that I wasn't able to keep on top of it. So, um, yeah; I need to get cracking on Monday's page. I'd like to go up to 2 pages a week now, but I don't plan to change my schedule 'til I'm able to get comfortably ahead on pages. Sun-Cutter pages are nicer-looking than my HM pages typically were, but they really do take forever. I know it didn't used to take anywhere near this long to finish a page for HM. I need to figure out some ways of speeding up the process.
I'm writing a novel. I've plotted out my daily writing goals to have it finished by the end of the year if I can keep up with it. Once I'm farther along, I'll talk a little more about it; I'm always in extreme "do not rock this boat!" mode when I'm just starting out on a project, desperately afraid that any little thing will derail me or cause me to lose interest. And I've tried to start this one at least three or four times. Maybe this time will be the one that will work? Ironically, I know exactly how it's going to end, and have the climactic scenes all blocked out in my head. It's the 300 previous pages that are giving me trouble ...
I'm in talks with a local publisher about Freebird, and I plan on doing something with Hunter's Moon; right now I'm torn between doing a small press run, or offering it as print-on-demand plus a downloadable PDF version.
The novel and Sun-Cutter are the big priorities for the immediate future, though!
(This entry is also posted at http://layla.dreamwidth.org/164802.html.)