Musings

Northern Coast of Taiwan

#fbf “Losing Grip” 10 Years Ago in #Taiwan

Images, Musings

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As I tweeted earlier this week, I will be visiting Taiwan for the first time in 10 years at the beginning of September. I thought I would take this opportunity to throw it back to the summer of 2005 when I took that last trip because so much has changed since then. In doing so, I also got to look through all the photos I took during that trip (with my cumbersome 3.2 megapixel digital camera, I might add) for the first time in years. I plan to take many more on this upcoming trip.

a plane takes off from some airport in Taipei probably

I flew to Taiwan from Houston mere days after my high school graduation. I did not walk at commencement, a personal decision of mine that everyone told me I would one day regret. To this day, I do not regret it. If anything, it made my college graduation, which was one of the happiest and proudest days of my life, that much more meaningful. At that time, however, it gave me a strange feeling of being in limbo, as if I had never actually graduated at all.

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While I was in Taiwan, I wrote a short essay about that feeling. I don’t think I ever read it again afterwards — maybe once, long ago, but certainly not recently. I think I was honest with myself in a way I very rarely am, and it’s also worthy mentioning that I wrote it by hand in a blue notebook. (Now that notebook has been dismantled because the covers were always falling apart. I used to carry it everywhere, though I never wrote anything substantial in it because I so disliked writing anything longhand.) Here is an excerpt of that essay, which I am just now reading again:

I’m writing this essay by hand because I feel that that’s the way it’s meant to be. I always had trouble with my fingers moving my pen fast enough to keep up with my mind the way they could on the keyboard of my laptop. My typed words always seemed to fit more perfectly together. But maybe they aren’t as real. And maybe that’s kind of the point. Maybe everything in my head isn’t worth putting down on paper and my pen can filter out those useless words. Or maybe not. I guess it doesn’t really matter just so long as I write what I’m feeling. I’ve always felt that I feel things too deeply. Or maybe the trouble was that I didn’t feel them deeply enough. It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes.

[…]

I’ve seen that so much in the past couple of weeks. They’ve been hard, I guess. Too much change happening too fast. Graduation was kind of what made all my thoughts on the matter. Everybody was walking onto the floor and I was crying before they’d even reached their seats because I was already at my seat but it wasn’t where it should’ve been.

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Frankly I cannot share most of the essay because it was rather angst-ridden, and most of what I was angst-ridden about is no longer worth revisiting. But I think it was rather an insightful look at my state of mind at that point in time and I’m really glad I wrote it. I stopped journaling in the middle of college because I just found it exhausting and I was very busy. I stopped journaling on real paper way before that; it was during my freshman year of high school, I believe. I miss being able look back on a specific year and remember what exactly was going through my mind in those days. I wish I’d kept it up.

taiwan sunset

One of my goals this fall is to start blogging more often. It always feels so daunting. I do not like writing long things. I do not like it, Sam-I-Am. I do not like it sitting in a chair. I do not like it sitting on a bear. That’s why I started tweeting in the first place, and that has been great. But sometimes 140 characters can be a bit limiting. I vow now not to feel intimidated by a non-existent page quota! I can write a 3-sentence microblog if I want to! This is not college! I do not have to have perfect grammar! I don’t have to write filler! I don’t even have to sound coherent if I don’t want to! This is my blog! And I can do what I want to, do what I want to!

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Whew, I feel much better now that I’ve gotten out all the inane children’s books quotes and 1960s song lyrics that are forever bouncing around inside my head. Anyway, assuming I can get decent wifi in my various hotel rooms, I will be blogging throughout my trip. These will most assuredly be brief microblogs because I will be writing them on my phone.

Colonel Mustard in the Hall Closet with the Traumatic Childhood Memory #FLASHBACK2SCHOOL

Musings

Essay Prompt: “Write an essay somehow inspired by super-huge mustard”

As students of writing, we are constantly reminded that we should try to write an hour each day. And if we can’t manage an hour, we should still write a little bit each day, even if only in the twenty minutes that exist between our alarm clock and the breakfast table. The best reason I’ve ever gotten for this advice (thanks Aaron Reynolds!) is that we sometimes, without even realizing it at first, find inspiration in the most mundane, everyday moments: that routine trip to the dentist, the leaky bathroom faucet that needs to be repaired, a freeway traffic jam on the drive home from work. Over time, I’ve come to realize how true this is. Because many of my best stories were indeed inspired by major life-changing events, like international travel, natural disasters, and hospital stays. But sometimes these stories—including the novel that I’m currently writing—are stitched together from much smaller details. Sometimes we even find inspiration in containers of bulk-size mustard.

Allow me to explain. In May 2012, two separate “everyday moments” happened. Those led to the beginnings of a complex novel-in-progress, which then branched out to a comic series and a trio of short film scripts. But first, I went home for a couple weeks after my first year in grad school. One afternoon, I was having a conversation with my mother about smoothies when my dad misheard us (as he often does) and thought we were discussing movies (as we often do). I went scrambling for a pen and a piece of paper, and the seeds for my hybrid invention known as the Smoovie were planted. Fast-forward another week or so, when I was back in San Francisco for the summer. A few friends and I decided to head to Golden Gate Park during the 75th anniversary celebration to participate in the festivities.  As the evening wore on, we decided to buy food at one of the booths. The cheapest item was an extremely overpriced hot dog, which I purchased and then topped with condiments from the self-serve table displaying bulk containers of ketchup, mustard, relish, and the works.

Another week later, my summer class (the now-retired “Brevity,” taught by the incomparable Cooley Windsor) began. For my first piece, I wrote about a Smoovie that featured two dinosaurs fighting over a single foot-long chili cheese coney. It’s a fragmented, non-linear narrative that reawakens a boatload of childhood trauma for our protagonist and ends in a sinister shot of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, teeth-bared, a smear of mustard on his chin. This short piece, combined with a flash fiction piece I had written a year earlier, was the basis for this novel, which spans the course of 21 years in one boy’s life and has now grown to 65,000+ words and counting. Never mind the fact that I started such a project in a class called “Brevity,” though the story’s humble yet defiant beginnings do continue to amuse me. (Thankfully, my professor was equally amused.) The realization that a simple container of mustard could have started it all is even more intriguing. And what if I hadn’t ordered a hot dog that night? What if my father hadn’t made a comment that gave birth to an idea, which then gave birth to a disturbing, prehistoric progeny with a penchant for carnival grub? It’s likely the novel would still have existed in some shape or form as I continued to be inspired by uneventful occurrences that happened to me later that year. But it’s likely that it would’ve been vastly different in many respects. Would it have been worse? It’s impossible to say. Maybe I would’ve been hit in the head by a golf ball that summer and been inspired to even greater heights.

Nevertheless, it’s in anecdotes like this where we realize that art does imitate life. All these random, inconsequential moments lead into other random moments, causing greater moments that branch off and later prove to be life-altering—the collective whole adding up to more than the sum of its parts. Writing consistently every day ensures that we don’t let these moments slip by undetected, that we look more carefully at the things we initially deem as unimportant or uninteresting, that we allow ourselves time to be inspired by the ordinary before discarding it from our brains at the end of the day.

I know all this. I know now why the daily ritual exists. And yet, full disclosure: I still don’t write every day.

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Note: This is the final essay in a 3-part blog challenge inspired by this NYT article about the new wave of creative college admissions essay prompts. Read more about the rules and logistics of the challenge and my reasons for taking it on in this previous post. There, you will also be able to find links to my other essays and those of my friends when they become available.

* Find out how Ren and Elizabeth were inspired by super-huge mustard, and thanks for following along with us this week! I have more blog posts planned for the end of the year, including some Top 10 lists (who doesn’t love lists?), so keep on keeping on.

So Where is Waldo, Really? #FLASHBACK2SCHOOL

Musings

Essay Prompt: “So Where is Waldo, Really?”

This is a trick question! I call shenanigans. Obviously “Waldo,” who answers to several dozen variations of his name across the globe (can we say assumed identity? On the run?), has the ability to pop in and out of random scenes amidst the strangest crowds of people with just a blink of his bespectacled eyes. He can be everywhere at once. Wining and dining on one page, while riding a mechanical bull on another. (I made those examples up—has he done these things before?) Like the Charlie Browns of the world, he also seems to possess a very limited wardrobe. Needless to say, this is the real question we need to ask: Who is Waldo? Yes, what exactly is the deal with this mysterious Waldo/Wally/Willie/Walter/Ali/Charlie/etc character? Just what is he guilty of? How many candy cane-striped shirts does he own anyway? And most importantly, does he want to be found or not?

With such an elusive character, it’s impossible to know for sure—at least until one of the members in his similarly clothed entourage decides to talk. But humor me for a minute. Allow me to speculate. I’m sure it would be fun to imagine that Waldo is wanted for a long laundry list of nefarious deeds, teasing law enforcement officials in a brilliant game of cat-and-mouse as he trots across the globe. But I don’t personally think he is guilty of any terrible crime(s).  I think he’s just a kid—just trying out different names and locales until he finds the one that fits. Like the kid who grows up in the same small town from which no one ever seems to escape, Wally wants to travel, to find his corner of the world. He wants to be noticed, but a part of him remains afraid of the attention. He’s a contradiction, like so many of us are as we are still coming of age.  We haven’t quite figured out who we are, so we experiment; we do things that don’t seem to make sense in conjunction with each other. We don a wacky trademark outfit so we’re easily recognized. But then we negate it by hiding in the company of other people, people who are even louder and wilder so that we can still remember what it’s like to get lost.

I can relate. During a recent classroom discussion, a professor of mine said that you have to watch out for a kid who decides without warning to up and change his name. I neglected to mention then that I’d done that very thing twice—once in sixth grade (Sandy) and another in ninth grade (Suzun)—so I’ll cop to it now. Here’s my full confession: I didn’t fully understand back then why I was doing it, but suddenly it makes sense. It’s probably worth noting that those were both years in which I had just started a new school (middle school and high school, respectively) and in many ways, just beginning a long journey into the unknown. The landscape had changed, and with it, a new sea of faces awaited. I wanted to be one of those new faces. Likewise, I understand what it’s like to wish to be both lost and found, all at once. I grew up dreaming of fame and fortune, aiming to shock and intimidate at every turn. But at the same time, I valued the idea of privacy and the need to blend into the crowd. There were times when all I wanted was to be ordinary and unseen. A contradiction…maybe.  But one that is both natural and understandable.

Waldo, Waldo, everywhere. Indeed.

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Note: This is the second essay in a 3-part blog challenge inspired by this NYT article about the new wave of creative college admissions essay prompts. Read more about the rules and logistics of the challenge and my reasons for taking it on in this previous post. There, you will also be able to find links to my other essays and those of my friends when they become available.

* Read what Ren and Elizabeth had to say regarding the age-old question, “Where’s Waldo?”

Robots, Dinosaurs, or Aliens…? #FLASHBACK2SCHOOL

Musings

Essay Prompt: “If you could be raised by robots, dinosaurs, or aliens, who would you pick?”

This may come as a mild shock—because it’s something I’ve never discussed openly before—but I was raised by humans. (I know, right? Humans? Like, who does that anymore?) I can’t say that I had a particularly unique childhood; in fact, aside from a few aberrational occurrences, it was downright ordinary.  I was your typical ‘90s kid in America: I grew up watching The Simpsons on T.V. and wishing I were a Mighty Morphin’ Power Ranger (I had the lunchbox!) so I could communicate with a floating head and a perpetually high-strung robot by talking into my wrist. I wore troll doll barrettes in my hair and had a small collection of pogs, even though I had no idea what to do with them (they were just cardboard circles with pictures on them, right??). I thought Goosebumps and Animorphs were the “bomb diggity” as far as book series went, and yes, I even owned my share of toy dinosaurs. And yet, despite these shared experiences, I know a great number of other ‘90s children who were also raised by humans but had vastly different upbringings.

The problem with the essay prompt at hand is that it seems to assume all robots, dinosaurs, and aliens are created equal.  This is simply not true.  If pop culture has taught us anything, these three categorical groups of “species” really come in all shapes, sizes, and temperaments—more so than even humans. Can we compare the irreverent and alcoholic Bender of New New York (Futurama) with the sleek, Peter Sarsgaard-voiced robot helper in the film Robot & Frank? How about the slimy aliens in the sci-fi comedy Men in Black with those angst-ridden heartthrobs that appeared on the WB/UPN teen soap Roswell? Not to mention the dinosaurs in a horror thriller like Jurassic Park versus the anthropomorphic ones in the children’s animated feature The Land Before Time? This is, of course, just my personal speculation, but I’m guessing their respective parenting techniques just might differ.

Robots. Dinosaurs. Aliens. Oh sure, we all have our preconceived notions about what these terms might mean—a free-association snapshot that immediately comes to mind despite any differences that might exist. A robot might be nice to have as a legal guardian, for example. They might be smarter than your average human counterpart, able to compute complex and difficult calculations in a fraction of a second. They could double as appliances or electronic devices. You might even be able to program it to do exactly what you want! However, there is also a good chance that the robot will be emotionally stunted and unable to think outside the ol’ circuit board.  On the other hand, an alien might also be nice to have as a guardian. Think of the intergalactic travel and the ray guns and the alien powers! But an alien would likely have its own languages and cultural customs. It might be difficult to assimilate back on Earth someday. And I can’t honestly think of any pros when it comes to being raised by a dinosaur, but I can think of many cons: dark ages, cannibalism, sheer intimidation factor, not to mention the difficulties of communication. (Just how many things can “RAAWWWRRR” possibly mean, anyway?)

But at the end of the day, if I had to choose one, I would probably choose to be raised by aliens. I’ve always wanted to know what it’s like to be abducted by a strange beam of light emanating from an unidentified aircraft. Preferably one that is commandeered by Kang and Kodos because them two aliens have got it going on. (I just hope they don’t decide to eat me.)

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Note: This is the first essay in a 3-part blog challenge inspired by this NYT article about the new wave of creative college admissions essay prompts. Read more about the rules and logistics of the challenge and my reasons for taking it on in this previous post. There, you will also be able to find links to my other essays and those of my friends when they become available.

* Whew! I just barely got this in on time! (Just like high school and college!) Read what Ren and Elizabeth had to say about the robot/dinosaur/alien debate!

This December, My Friends and I Are Going Back to School!

Musings

You heard me. My friends (Ren and Elizabeth) and I are hard at work on our college application essays—our creative college application essays.

Inspired by this New York Times piece on the increasingly whimsical and thought-provoking questions that elite colleges employ to stretch their prospective applicants’ imaginations, we (writers in our late 20s to early 30s) are challenging ourselves to take on some of the REAL essay questions being pondered by current high-school juniors and seniors.

We’ll be answering the same three questions and posting our essays here. Follow along—or better yet, join us.

Dec. 16: “If you could be raised by robots, dinosaurs, or aliens, which would you pick?” 

Dec. 18: “So where is Waldo, really?”

Dec. 20: “Write an essay somehow inspired by super-huge mustard.”

Here are the rules:

  • We write as our current selves, not as 17-year-olds.
  • Work in personal elements where possible (these are personal essays), but be as creative as you like.
  • Upper word limit per essay is 750 words. No lower limit.

Logistics:

  • We post our essays to our writer blogs by 5 PM Pacific on their respective due dates.
  • Link each essay back to this challenge info.
  • Once each person has posted her essay, share the direct link to that essay with the other challengers, so that we may link to essays on the same topic.

Before the fun officially starts, I have a confession to make: despite being a college graduate, I have never written a college admissions essay!  Why? The only university I applied to when I was a senior in high school simply didn’t require it as one of the application materials. I did also apply to the Honors College within the university, but their requirement of a generic “writing sample” allowed me to submit an excerpt of a retrospective short story I had been writing about a girl who drops out of a high school. It was written in the first person like a personal essay and I made sure to include a note that made it clear the piece was a work of fiction. To this day, I have not finished that story, but it wasn’t the only piece of fiction I wrote back then with a dropout as the protagonist.  I guess you could say it was somewhat of a fantasy for me back in those days—even my contribution for the writing portion of our TAKS exam* was about someone who had dropped out of college in her freshman year but couldn’t bring herself to come clean to her parents. Once again, I had to preface it with a note stating that the best way I felt I could answer their prompt was through this imagined scenario. This pseudo-essay was ultimately deemed “highly effective” and given a 4, the highest possible score.

To add to my clearly complicated memories of high school, popular culture in America has always treated The College Admissions Essay as some sort of rite of passage for teenagers transitioning into adulthood.  There is so much focus on it—not only in the news but also in the fictionalized stories we discover in YA novels and teen soaps.  Everyone is struggling to figure out what to write, how to define him or herself, and how to stand out from the rest of the pack as they vie for acceptance into their so-called “dream school.” As school was certainly not something I dreamed about with anything resembling positivity in those days, this very notion was foreign to me. Of course, when I started applying to graduate schools six years later (this time around, I applied to 8 separate schools and got into 4), I wrote plenty of personal essays. But by that time I was no longer a teenager—I was a completely different person at a completely different stage of my life.  It was not the same.  And for personal reasons I won’t waste time delving into here, I also refused to walk at my high school graduation. So yes, despite (begrudgingly) completing all the necessary credits and passing the exit exam with flying scantrons and #2 pencils, a part of me did feel that perhaps I never really graduated from high school.

I was personally inspired by and a bit envious of the situation described in the New York Times article because some of these newer, more delightfully bizarre essay prompts are exactly the type of thing that invite and reward creativity and innovative thinking, one of the few things I excelled at in high school. While my friends and I were conceiving the idea for this blog series, we did briefly consider writing our essays as our teenage selves. The idea appealed to me; however, I was such an unbearable and obnoxious person back then (as I am constantly reminded of any time I read a blog post written back in those days—some of these things still exist online!) that I felt such an undertaking would be counterproductive. At the same time, I make the promise to approach my essays with a certain amount of innocence regarding the future and what it might mean for me as I go “back to school.”

* The TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) is the 5-part exit exam everyone had to pass in 11th grade to graduate from a public high school in Texas back when I graduated from high school in 2005.  It replaced the TAAS test that most of us had been raised with, and is currently being phased out by the STAAR (State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness) test. I believe the writing prompt for that year was about the ramifications of keeping secrets.

As Seen on TV

As Seen On TV, Musings

I’ve decided to start blogging again.  Posts may initially be short and somewhat irregular, but I’ll be working up to what is hopefully a more reliable schedule. My goal is also to write more posts that are informative to a wider audience and not strictly personal.

I just graduated from California College of the Arts with my MFA in Writing this past May, and in the weeks since then I’ve had a lot of time to think about where I want to go next, both in terms of my writing and my overall career.  I’ve always wanted to work a TV-related job, but I think what held me back in the past was not knowing how to make that happen.  Now that I’m living near L.A. and have some more experience with screenwriting under my belt, I finally have a chance to start making this happen.  In the coming weeks I’ll be reading a teleplay from a current or past show that I admire on Sunday and spending the rest of the week analyzing its parts, (re)watching the final episode it spawned (if at all possible), and figuring out why it works well and what could be better.  I hope to blog about this weekly.  For the first week, I’ve chosen an early draft of the pilot episode of Supernatural, written by Eric Kripke, which was first included in the season 1 DVD set.  The first five seasons make up one of my favorite television shows and I’m looking forward to exploring it on a deeper level.

What is it about writing for television, particularly cable television, that appeals to me?  Strangely, although I’ve always loved television and dreamed of having a job in the industry, I didn’t think I would enjoy a job behind the scenes in the writers’ room.  Why?  Because as a fan and active participant in various fandoms over the years, I’ve seen how crazy the rabid fans can get.  It’s impossible to please everyone, and the ruts that happen every once in a while are often blamed solely on the writers, who get all sorts of hate on various modes of social media.  Not only are these writers trying to please the fans, but they are trying to please the network and keep the ratings up.  Not only that, but they are trying to create an organic and continuous story that appears in that magic little light box for a short time once a week, never knowing when the plug might get pulled before they have a chance to end the narrative on their own terms. Not only that, but they must compromise and work well with a large group of other writers.  And yet, I find that these seemingly negative points are challenges that I can learn from.  Not to mention that I love to work collaboratively with other people; writing fiction is far too solitary.  Ultimately, there is something fragile about writing in a serialized format that you can’t get with writing films or novels, something special about viewing the ever-fluid and unfinished product as it plays out on screen.

A lot has happened since my last post and I intend to write about those things as well: the projects I’ve completed, the ones I’ve only started, and the ones that are planned for the near future.  Until then.

Gonna Make It Through This Year

Inspiration, Musings, News

(This is why people like me should not be allowed to start blogs. I now have at least 7 or 8 and I hardly ever update any of them.)

The One Thing That Stays Mine

I saw this boat named Possible Dream in Santa Barbara on New Year’s Day and it seemed like a sign of good things to come.

When I was younger I always thought New Year’s resolutions were somewhat lame.  After all, the break between one year and the next is a rather arbitrary one that doesn’t really mean anything.  Nevertheless, I made two resolutions in 2010: to start flossing every day & to get published.  I accomplished both.  In 2011, I made one resolution: to finish my novel Touching the Morning.  I can say that that didn’t really happen, although I did get halfway there and I ended up writing about 100,000 words last year, which I’m sure shatters all previous personal records to put it mildly.  On the downside, I didn’t get any new publications.  To be fair, I hardly submitted anything, but that’s kind of the problem–that you either have time for one or the other, and not both.

This year I again make one resolution, which is to try harder to be my real self around other people.  I hardly recognize myself when I’m in a public setting, and I need to work on that.  Aside from that, I guess I would just like to get some serious work on my other novel (not that aforementioned one, frankly I don’t have much hope for that one anymore) and to take advantage of all the opportunities that are presented to me.

I might or might not be in grad school now.  I didn’t want to say anything about it when i was applying, but you know, these things happen faster than you can say WTF.  I love my new school almost as much as I love food!

An Education

Inspiration, Musings

Yeah, I changed the theme again.  I like this new one a lot (rainbows!) and I might actually keep it for more than a month.

Teachers and professors always have a word or two to describe what they think I am: “taciturn” or “reticent” or something else that means basically the same thing.  I once had an instructor tell me that I should talk more in class because if I didn’t, I was letting others control the direction of the workshop and I was getting someone else’s education, not mine.  It was good advice.  But as soon as he put it that way, I understood that that’s how I like it.  That’s how I want it.  I already know what I’m interested in, what I see when I read a story.  I’m interested in discussing what other people discover because for whatever reason, I might be blind to it otherwise.  It reminds me of the Beth Waters song, “Sweaters.”  There’s a verse (and the chorus) at the end that goes like this:

and it called to mind how I’d always felt
like I’m the last one to hear of things
I’m in the back of the room watching all of you
I go unnoticed but I notice everything

but I believe I can change the world just give me time
I believe I can change the world just give me time
I believe, I believe I can change the world
I believe I can change the world
just give me time

Anyway, he told me I should work on that in future classes.  I told him I was graduating next week.

1,000 Words A Day

Musings

There I go, not updating again when I didn’t even finish my post from last time! If you’ll remember (or just scroll down to the previous entry) I had ended with a quote from something I’d written when I was fifteen. When I first went back to read this journal about five years later, the summer before my senior year of college, I think I recognized that entry as a defining point in my life as a writer. Because as I recall, I did not “write my heart out” that summer. As I recall, it was actually long time before I wrote anything substantial again, outside of a class assignment. As I pointed out so astutely eight years ago, something had changed about writing for me. I was hypercritical of everything, and I only saw the flaws. When I was a child, I could fill notebook after notebook of scribbled stories that made no sense, paying absolutely no attention to grammar or spelling. I was just getting those words on the page as quickly as they came to me, and they were always coming.

Needless to say, it isn’t like that for me now. I have always prized quality over quantity, and prefer books and stories with sparse but evocative language. Such is my style, which is why I write short-shorts and prose poetry and novellas. However, there is something to be said of banging out a certain number of words per day, whether or not they’re complete crap. To this day, I cannot understand how some people do it. Am I insanely jealous? Absolutely. Even if their writing isn’t that great? You bet. I’ve attempted NaNoWriMo 3 times in my life. Once was in 2002 when I was fifteen. I got about five pages into my story before I lost interest. The second was in 2009 when I was twenty-two. I believe I lost interest after two pages, which was rather pathetic, although that story did wind up being the short I published in Rougarou last fall. The third time is still ongoing this month (I was busy last November) and while I’m doing okay, it has still been a disappointing exercise for me. The month is almost over, and I’m currently sitting at around 11,750 words. Compared to my first two attempts, I suppose this is an accomplishment. However, I promised myself 1,000 words a day, and that clearly hasn’t quite been happening. Well, I guess change doesn’t happen overnight. Something I can perhaps take pride in: The longest continuous work I’d ever written was around 16,000 words, for some horrible sci-fi comedy I wrote when I was 10-11. Sad, right? Yes, but I’ve officially surpassed that now with this current story as I already had 5,500 words written before now. Add that to the 11,000+ and perhaps I really am capable of finishing a full-length novel someday. Small victory, but I shall take it. Another thing to take into account is that I’ve actually written 15,000+ words this month, because I’ve been working on another story at the same time. Let’s not even get into how many words I wrote in January and February. Math is no longer my forte.

But my point is, regardless of whether I’ve reached my goals, things might finally changing around here.