Decisions, decisions!

In less than three weeks I'll be a happy graduate! There are only two official weeks of class left. This is mildly terrifying.

But! I have good news. I made my decision on where I'll be for the next three years of my life.

Last week the Director of Graduate studies at Florida International University called me personally to tell me that the school has accepted me and said I was eligible for an assistantship, but it wasn't 100% because they weren't sure what their budget was. I declined their offer as I had already gotten better offer at UCF.

Then, Friday morning, the Dean of Graduate Studies at Savannah College of Art and Design called me personally to tell me that he and the Board were very impressed by my phone interview the day before, and that they wanted to award me with the prestigious Dean's Fellowship. As appreciative as I am of this offer, I had to tell him I respectfully decline. I made my decision the day before after the interview, based on the fact that even if I got the Fellowship I still wouldn't be able to afford to go to school there. Tuition-only does not give me a place to live or food to eat.

So I am pleased to announce that I has finally made her decision, and accepted the school of my choice. Starting in August, I'll be a Knight, at the University of Central Florida. I couldn't be happier with my decision. I'm currently waiting to see what I'll get for my Graduate Teaching Assistant position (I'm really hoping for an editor position at The Florida Review), and I need to start figuring out what classes I'm going to take in the Fall and send in the request the day after I graduate. :)

In other good news, my thesis is finally completed! As promised, here's a sneak:


I ended up titling the work "Pancakes and Parallel Universes."
The whole work is drawn in that style... with a few extra surprises. :] Throughout the process I could tell it was going to be a much larger piece of work than I anticipated, so it is more like a "chapter one" of something much bigger. I'm really liking playing with this idea for a graphic novel, so I will probably work on it more over the summer.

Speaking of the summer, I went to a part-time job fair and filled out a few applications for seasonal employment... I also have an interview for Monday morning, so I'm excited. I hope I get the job, it will be something fun to do and help pay the rent.

Until then, I just need to finish the last three essays of my undergraduate career and take two final exams... and that's it. I'm done.

And onto the next step in my life.

Interesting Predicament

This week has been ridiculous. I had an interview for a prestigious award (which I didn't win), won a science fiction writing contest, sent out four new submissions, and got accepted into another grad school. Oh, and I've made some decent headway on my thesis.

Basically, everything in my life is going to converge on April 15th. That is THE day. And it is two weeks from now.

I have two awards ceremonies to attend that day, my thesis is due that day, and that is the day I have to accept or decline my invitation to UCF. I wanted to make my final decision by next week, but I got an email from SCAD stating that I am in the running for a full-tuition fellowship; my phone interview is on the 14th. So I'll have to wait. And today I got a call directly from the Graduate Director of FIU, stating I was unanimously accepted, and I was highly recommended for a teaching assistantship. I should know by the end of the day if I got it or not. All of the sudden, I have incredible opportunities. UCF is still the only one set in stone, but if FIU and SCAD go through, there's going to be some heavy competition. This is a good problem to have, but still, it is nerve-wracking.

I need to fill our all of the financial aid stuff for all three schools now. Soon. On top of all of the rest of the things I need to do... Homework, projects, extracurriculars... It just never ends. I am excited, but also mildly terrified. We'll have to wait and see how things go.

Spring Break

So my last undergraduate spring break was not nearly as awesome or productive as I would have liked. I wanted to get at least 6 more pages of my thesis done (to total 10) and I got like 2 pages done. Sorta. And by that, I mean I've been working on it mostly just all day today. I am rather pleased at how it is turning out. it has taken forever but I think I'm finally getting back into the hang of drawing on a regular basis. the only issue is that coloring things in, too, it making the process a million times longer. :/ When I think I've got a good scene to show what I'm doing, I'll be sure to post it here so you all can sneak peek. :)

Ama and I have been keeping dream journals as a part of an extra-credit assignment for a class we are both a part of. The results, on my part, have been... interesting, to say the least. At worst, the dreams are just strange. At best, they're awesome story ideas. I woke up one particular morning and I thought--finally. This is it. This is what I'm waiting for. I've been struggling with how to balance a character-driven story in a science fictional plot... and my subconscious gave it to me in the form of a post-apocalyptic dream. :) I look forward to pursuing it more once I graduate and have more free time.

Speaking of writing more, I didn't really get to work on any of my upcoming submissions, and I was once again rejected by the undergraduate literary magazine run by my university. Ugh. And I still haven't gotten any new acceptances, in terms of MFA programs. I decided not to go to Denver this year, and got the good news that I can defer my enrollment to next year. (Yay!) And as for more good news, I was just notified that I will get to present two works (one being literary criticism on Shakespeare, the other being magical realism flash fiction) for an Undergraduate Symposium held this Friday by my chapter of Sigma Tau Delta. :) I wish I had a little more time to prepare (I need to figure out how to correctly pronounce some stuff in the lit crit paper) but I'm still rather excited. :)

As one more down side, my spring break is over, and I haven't started any of my homework for this upcoming week. I am also missing a book that I need for a paper. :/ Hopefully I find it soon; the paper is due next week. Getting back into the swing of the semester isn't going to be easy (I'm definitely suffering from senioritus) but the semester is already half up. :] There's less than 2 months between me and my degree, and then onto bigger and better things. :D

Plans.

So, in the wake of the devastation in Japan, Boyfriend and I are seriously considering going up there to help with the relief efforts after we graduate. We'd love to go sooner, but right now we'd just get in the way. I'm hoping we can volunteer through an aid organization like the Red Cross and stay for two weeks or a month or so--maybe longer if we can spare it. I'll be sure to take notes while I'm there. I would stay all summer if I wasn't planning on going to Denver for the Publishing Institute. I did some number crunching and it looks like it's going to cost about $6k total, with a nonrefundable $1K deposit due in a week. To go, I'm going to have to take out a loan, which I'm not happy about at all, but I should be able to pay it all off within a year thanks to the Stipend UCF was so generous to offer me. I am just waiting to hear back from UCF that my assistantship is renewable, and then I'll go ahead and decline everywhere else.

Things are falling into place and it is really rather bizarre. It's a good thing, I guess. For now, though, I need to focus on the task at hand. It may be my Spring Break, but my Thesis is due in a month and I do not have nearly enough of it finished. So I'm going to work on that, and hopefully get 70-80% done this week. I realize that's ambitious, but I really don't have the extra time to spare. :/

The Waiting Game

Shame on me, but I still haven't notified the schools that I applied to of my recent publication. I have a nice spiffy letter drafted, I just haven't emailed it yet. I keep trying to get ahead on my homework for classes so that I can dedicate large portions of time to my thesis.

I still haven't done too much on the thesis, and I realize that I seriously just need to get started and write write write. My thesis director is expecting a draft on Thursday, and so far, I really don't have much to show him. Hopefully in two-days' time I can turn that around.

Back to grad schools... Everything is in, and now its just up to waiting for some sort of response. It'll be at least a month before I hear anything. Hopefully at least one school lets me in.

Long vs. Short

So my thesis director posted a link to an essay regarding the absence of the novel in academia. It's a brilliant essay and I highly suggest you read it.

I personally have always had issues with keeping my writing short. I like to ramble. And I like to make things complicated. I just add layer upon layer and before I know it, I'm way beyond the scope of wrapping things up quickly. I know I'm good at creating conflict, I just haven't figured out how to create a nice happy resolution at the end, where the reader feels like all of their questions have been answered. But as a contemporary writer, do I even have to provide that service for my readers? I don't want to piss them off too much; then they'll never read any more of my work. But this is an issue I haven't really been able to work on in my creative writing classes because all we ever workshop is short stories or first chapters. :/ Even in my first thesis, I know my ending was weak. It was an extended personal essay, a string of anecdotes put together to analyze FIRST robotics as a religion, and in the end, it all kind of fell apart. It wasn't the best ending. I knew it. My director knew it. But still, it stands. :/ I'm still not happy with it, and I find that unacceptable. But rather than trying to beat that work to death and fix it, I'd much prefer to work on something new.

For this new thesis I'm working on, I already have kind of an idea of how I want to end it. End with the beginning. Circular kind of thing. It sounds lame when I reread that, but it makes more sense put into context. I know I'm being vague, and I'm sorry. I'm still trying to figure it out. But I want to try and like all parts of my life in this endeavor. Science Fiction. Creative Nonfiction. Writing. Science. Math. Music. Drama. Art. I'm going to try and make this work, but I need to make sure I don't bite off more than I can chew. I don't have a lot of time to get this finished, and since it's going to be a graphic novel, I really need a lot of time for the art part. It's sooo time consuming.

In both theses, there is a common strand. Rather than being long single pieces of work, they are collections of shorter works strung together in a way that makes sense. So maybe all of this training in writing short stories is actually rubbing off. The common string in the first one was a definition of religion, in which each bullet point was a segment I discussed in my anecdote. In the second one, I don't really have a common string. I have a theory that binds them together, but I don't have my story yet. The human aspect. The universality of it all.

I'm working on it. But I don't have much time.


In other news, the website that is supposed to be publishing my work has been down for about a week. :( Hopefully everything is okay, and they're just having mild technical difficulties.

Oh, I turned 22 last Thursday. I didn't really do anything exciting, just painted pottery with a few friends, and the day after, my mom came by and took me out for dinner and strawberry shortcake. One of my friends in aikido got me a cake (which we all shared after class yesterday), and Sensei was reminded that in all my 4 years at this dojo, I have still never had to do my Birthday Breakfalls. (I am expecting them tomorrow, and I am not excited about them.)

For those of you who remember Zombie Apocalypse Training, I've kinda started again. Besides going to aikido on a more or less regular basis, I've also been to the gym twice this week (going to try for at least 4x a week) to work on cardio, because my cardio sucks. So far so good, though. No passing out or anything. Hopefully by the summer I'll be able to graduate to a treadmill from the elliptical, and actually work on running. We'll see.

Backlogging, and Life Update

So after having a discussion with Boyfriend and thinking about it for some time, I've come to the conclusion that I should start putting up some old entries that I deleted, and writing a bit more about my personal endeavors than just simply criticism and strict discussion. That makes this blog a bit less "professional," but it will at least be more "interesting." I hope.

I haven't put any of the old backlogged entries up, but I'll mention it in a new post when I do.

In other news, I've already started on my new thesis. I'm very excited. So far it seems like it's going to be mainly graphic, but I'm really going to try and push some boundaries with regards to craft and form. I finally have a good, strong direction to work in, and for the first time, I actually feel like I'm creating a book, or something akin to it. I just hope that it is completed in the span of this semester to an extent that both my thesis director and I are happy with, and that I can maybe extend in graduate school to an actual publishable work. But no getting ahead of myself.

And speaking of publication, I still don't have any new details regarding my most recent one. I can tell you it's a snippet of flash fiction, and it will be published on an international online journal that showcases student work. (Yay!)

There are a lot of contests open that I'm considering submitting to, but I haven't had time to go through my work and pick anything out. :/ Classes haven't been very demanding this semester, but I've been really busy with extracurriculars and helping with my mom's wedding that's taking up a lot more of my time than I thought it would.

Graphic Novel & My Second Undergraduate Thesis

So, I completed my first graphic novel this week! Its really more like a comic, only 8 pages long, and I need to tweak it, and maybe add an extra page of dialogue, but still, I drew, scanned, outlined, colored, added text, and submitted it for workshop, so I'm very pleased with myself.

The entire process took about 30+ hours or so. Extremely time consuming. The easiest part was just laying out the panels and what I wanted where. What took the longest was reformatting the panels on the computer (turns out I can't draw straight lines to save my life), and coloring. Even though I drew everything in stick figures, it still took an obnoxious amount of time. Its not perfect, but still, for my first full-length comic, "it's pretty damn good," as my professor stated.

Speaking of which, he suggested I draw a creative nonfiction one, and I got excited and asked if I could do that for my Departmental Honors thesis. When I first signed up for thesis, I was told that I could use my old thesis from Honors College for Departmental Honors, by when I inquired last week, I was told that I still needed to earn my three credits and that I should expand my original thesis or prepare it for publication.

Frankly put, I am completely sick and tired of that piece of work. I don't want to touch it, I don't want to deal with it, I'm done. So is Ira. So he's agreed to be my Director again, and help me work on completing another graphic novel, this time in creative nonfiction.

(You know, I have more pages of CNF than I do of F, and yet I'm still applying to grad school in F. It seems strange... I guess I write more CNF because it's harder and more of a challenge... but I do enjoy F also... I dunno. Whatever gets me into grad school. From there hopefully they'll let me take classes in CNF as well as F.)

I'm excited. :)