must it be? it must be.

Hello all. It feels like I've been gone from Dreamwidth forever, but in reality it's only been like...what... almost three weeks? That's not too long, but it always feels like a really long time when I take a hiatus from online communities.

My vacation was fun. I basically spent the bulk of it at my boyfriend's house, and we lounged around, each playing our respective video games (he binged on Valkyria Chronicles and Digital Devil Saga 2, I focused my heart and soul on P3P [which by the way, ugh, so good. SO GOOD. Can I just say that updating my weaponry and armory in any RPG, particularly a Persona game, is an unparalleled pleasure?]), being mushies, and feeding our various addictions. >_> I think my body hates me.

School has begun, and that's where I am now. Tuesday's are a long day for me. My first class begins at 10:50 and my fourth and last class of the day ends at 9:20. Mondays I have just one class, and Thursday's I have only three classes, ending at 4:30. So it's not a bad schedule.

My classes are pretty fantastic so far. My Monday class is on Middle Eastern Literature, including the book "Reading Lolita in Tehran" which I have wanted to read for a long while now. Pretty much anything concerning "Lolita" seizes my attention, but I am interested in the actual overall content and focus of the book as well. It's going to be an extremely rigorous class in terms of academic and scholarly criticism and what is expected of us, and although our teacher was young and seemed very cool, he made it very clear that he was expected to make us "run crying" in terms of what was expected of us for this class. But I am definitely up for the challenge because, although I have wanted to kill myself while writing certain papers in the past, I have confidence in my abilities when it comes to writing and literary scholarly pursuits, so... bring it.

Today I had my Children's Fantasy class with Veronica Schanoes (who I made a post about earlier, she's friends with Catherynne Valente and a talented author as well), who seemed awesome, very smart, very staunch and strict when it comes to grammar and just writing well in general (which I appreciate because despite the fact that I know my journal entries are probably littered with terrible sentence structure and syntax, I am actually extremely anal and thorough when it comes to my academic or creative writing).

My poetry class seems fine too. I'm not a big poetry person, but my professor was laid back and actually made me appreciate the one poem we went over today, so that's always good.

Thennnnnn I had a Graphic Narrative course, which just speaks for itself. We're reading things like The Sandman by Neil Gaiman, Watchmen, Persoplis, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, among other popular and critically acclaimed graphic narratives, so... yeah. Awesome.

And in a bit I will have my Short Story Workshop with John Weir, who I googled and read some of his work online, and was pleased to find that I enjoyed his prose. :]

As for personal creative endeavors, I have two little writing projects happening that I'm excited about. I get frustrated extremely easily and am a huge procrastinator, but I am really trying to change that about myself because what it comes down to is basically... 15% lazyness and 85% fear of just trying and writing things that fall below my standards. But I can't be afraid to write those things and fear editing crap later. That's writing. I need to learn to deal with it.

One is currently just titled "z0mbie.doc" on my computer because I'm horrible at naming things so anything that isn't initially conceived with a title is given some bullshit one until I'm finished with it. Since I've been reading up on interstitial fiction, I've found that this is the easiest way to categorize my creative ideas, so I think that's what this is. I would say it's a mix of horror (loosely, more in theme than anything else), romance, fantasy, magic realism maybe... I don't know. I suck so bad at genres. But I hope it works out because conceptually I have high hopes for it.

The second is in very beginning stages, meaning I barely even have an idea of what the story will even be. I just have vague ideas on subject matter and construct. This was conceived with a title in mind. In fact, the title was what I thought of first, so the title will be what governs the piece. The title is "The Comedy is Over" so if anyone actually got this far and is thinking, "Hm, what? What the hell does that mean?", feel free to Google it and you'll get an idea of what what the subject and theme may be based upon.

Anyway, I will soon get to reading recent entries on my friend's list and commenting because, of course, I got a Dreamwidth so that I can not only be completely self involved and ramble about myself, but offer insight on all of your entries as well.