I spoke to my roommate Melissa last night and told her I was excited by the shift in my routine that this class is providing (and forcing). I like the idea of getting up on Fridays with a 5 pm deadline because it gives me a large wedge of time to begin working on my thoughts and ideas. Of course, my plan is to write as much as possible the rest of the week- in fact, the number one external issue on my plate the past week has been my hunt to locate and buy a small laptop that I could keep with me constantly. The idea was to get myself to sit down and write more than once a day, with no technological issues to set me back. Write, learn, write, learn, repeat.
As I spent the better part of a week thinking about this intermittently, my focus shifted and dragged me onto a more pressing issue, that of dipping the initial toe in the water with this class and creating a new project. I considered a few things, in this exact order, between 7am and 4pm today:
1) I realized I was already overspent and thus, don’t NEED a new laptop right now, even if it only costs a hundred bucks. My current one will have to do, issues and all. I will keep saving all of my work to dropbox so I don’t have to be paranoid about losing everything if it crashes, and I will make use of the computers conveniently located EVERYWHERE on campus.
2) I needed to re-read the syllabus for this class and spend some time making loose plans/documenting ideas and maybe a little more research. I began doing this two hours ago (mental note- edit this entire post later on and address tense issues).
3) I realized that increasingly, my research time has involved me looking around at MFA programs online and asking students for advice. I need to ask some folks in the creative writing department (henceforth referred to as the department) if this is a task I should be investing time in now, or if I can put it off until this coming spring/summer after the semester concludes.
4) I feel like I will have much better odds of getting into an MFA program if I do some inspired writing this semester through the Fall of 2014. This seems to be as close to fact as anything else right now; present tense important.
5) Upon further reflection, I still felt a bit overwhelmed by the course work for the semester, but only in the sense that I was hoping to spend more time writing original work and less time writing papers. I haven’t had much time to go through them, but it’s a safe bet that the four assigned books aren’t going to magically read themselves either! I went through each assignment and decided that the one that pissed me off the most was the annotated bibliography (I despise bibliographies but don’t want to get off topic so I’ll just leave it at that.)
6) So I stewed about all of this for a good five minutes before I took a deep breath and reassessed things once more. I realized that the bibliography wasn’t really a hard assignment and that I should do my best to deal with all of the assigned writing enthusiastically. It’s the only way to do this, and I know that by now. I had four writing classes last semester; I can handle this. Around this time I realized at least one or two of the other assigned papers could be written in a hybrid form- falling somewhere between academic and creative writing in style- hopefully…
7) On this positive note I left the house to go write, with all of these ideas taking turns running across my consciousness. Oh, yeah, somewhere in the middle I practiced guitar for 2 and 1/2 hours, the relaxation of which probably helped me regain focus. Now I’m sitting here in the middle of the moment, with my stress on one line and my enthusiasm on the other. I think I’m going to TRY to do things this way:
I’m going to trust that if I do a good amount of quality creative work every week that maybe I won’t have to spend as much time writing introspectively (like this) and can lean enthusiastically into the course in such fashion. I’m going to keep placing faith in the department and the course program- in fact, I’ll likely continue to mentor younger students with advice about the higher level courses and writing habits, a role I accidentally stepped into occasionally last semester. I feel more at home (at Eastern in the Creative Writing program) than I have in many, many years. When I worry or start to falter, I will remind myself of this. Something came over me during the Capstone Presentation last semester and a thought landed in my lap, unbidden: I belong here, in this program, at this school.
It was an actual epiphany, a life-changer, and I was able to smile as I recalled my CRTW 201 teacher trying to get an unruly class to reconsider using epiphany to describe all good ideas or breakthroughs.
So I ‘ll square my shoulders, I’ll press send, and I’ll walk through the doorway.
My Postmodern Swell by L. Hyland 
this kind of writing is often really useful, productive, helpful…I always have a hard time focusing because I am trying to think too many things at once, or do too many projects simultaneously… writing it down and focusing myself helps…
Yep, that’s how I felt when writing it. And the best part is that I was able to find a starting point for further exploration on several of these ideas. Sometimes you can move forward without clearing a little brush first.