I have multiple chapters of reading to do; I have tons of stuff to list on ebay (yeah, still!); my updates here have been scattered; I haven't baked anything in a month and a half (which my coworkers are starting gripe about!); and assorted other stuff.
Of course, the good news is that I am in no danger of failing any classes! French is going quite well, although I need to make some flashcards so I can get a little bit better with the masculine/feminine articles--I always struggled with that. At least there aren't neutral ones too, like in German! I'm actually planning on going to the French club's conversation group tomorrow again, because even though I've usually done alright with the writing part, I've always felt shy about the speaking part.
My two history classes are okay; world history isn't my favorite, mostly because these two classes are such a broad, general overview--I've always preferred going into detail on small points, rather than shallowly addressing lots of points. Still, c'est bon--strong C's in both, with assignments and exams to go.
The most vexing one is the creative writing class--largely because she has yet to assign point values to anything except one quiz! It's all very vague. I also have the bulk of a story still to write for next week; it's just not something I've done in a long time, and so I'm really struggling with it. When you combine being out of practice and yet having editing/revising habits from when it was a daily thing, you get very little in the way of results. There's also the fact that when I did write, it was in two forms: poems and very open-ended stories of whatever length seemed appropriate. It's quite a challenge for me to work within the framework of 12 pages--that's hardly enough time for anything to happen.
The workshops we did on Tuesday didn't help me much, either. We were a group of five: a grad student moderator, a very quiet girl who said very little, a girl who obviously is only taking the class to fulfill an English requirement, a guy who's ridiculously pretentious, and myself. The second girl said almost nothing; between the other three I got totally conflicting opinions. Essentially all of them said both that they liked dialogue because it was realistic, and then proceeded to tell me it was too realistic. What? Also, one of the girls' notes on the draft refers to a character's weight as her "sickness", too, which makes me want to just ignore anything else she said!
This class actually brings up a lot of weird confused feelings for me, too. For a long time, I thought writing was going to be it for me, my career. I actually have a 50k word novel/novella on my computer--it's horrible, really, like Harlequin romance novel quality, but it's finished. I used to write all the time. And then I sort of stopped. There were a lot of reasons for it, none of them particularly good; and now when I do try to write I feel ... stunted or something. It's strange that something that was so important to me for so long has faded away, especially since I do still like to write--which is why I have three blogs. I think a part of me is just convinced that it's pointless to creatively write.
