Making Progress - Halfway Through the Semester

Last month I did a mini-series on starting my third year at university. This next week is going to be the halfway point of the semester. Yeah, it happened fast. I was shocked when I realised, and naturally a little worried. Then I started thinking about how things are going right now, so I wanted to give a little update.

Things are going really well. I’ve done full first drafts of my assignments for my prose and screenwriting classes and the general feedback is it’s really good. There are some problems obviously, no one has a perfect first draft, but from what’s been said it doesn’t seem like it’ll be too hard to fix. I’ll be doing that within the next couple of weeks and we still have the chance for them to be looked at again before the deadline, at which point I feel confident I’ll be able to write them up well enough for a 1^st. There are other things that still need to be done for them but looking at how the classes are laid out for the next few weeks it seems that there’ll be time for everything.

I haven’t done quite as much for my Writer at Work project but I have done a lot of research for it and I have someone I have to contact about it on Monday. Hopefully then I’ll be able to write up a full first draft of my assignment within the next couple of weeks.

So I’m completely on schedule. So much so that I don’t actually have any work that needs to be done this weekend, aside from reading the books I’m using for research, but that seems significantly easier than having whole things to write out. There’s been a lot of work going into it and it hasn’t always been easy but I haven’t felt too stressed or overworked either.

That’s the work stuff. The classes themselves have all changed in layout slightly in a way that makes them feel better for me. For example, our prose workshops have split into smaller groups so we only discuss people’s works in groups of three or four at a time, which is a lot more comfortable and allows for more discussion.

Outside of class things are going well. I’m still loving the place I’m at and the people I’m living with, even more so than when I first moved in. My hopes of having a more social year have also been answered, not just with my flatmates or being back at anime society, but I’ve been talking more to the people in my class as well which has been great.

I realise a lot of this just seems like me going on about all the good stuff happening in my life, and I’m sorry about that, but I really wanted to give a halfway update for the semester. It’s not all great, money’s never good first semester and then there was the whole computer thing that didn’t help.

My plans for the rest of the semester are just to stay on schedule, try to develop things as much as possible, and try to keep improving my social life. If nothing else, my dear flatmates and I have some very nice plans for Halloween.

Come November I’m also planning to attempt NaNoWriMo for the third year in a row and succeed finally. I’ve had this story developing for two years now, I used it in two of my classes last year, and I’m going to try to translate it into the full first draft of a novel. If all goes well, I’ll use one of the chapters for my prose assignment next semester.