Weekly Wrapup - September 16, 2018
Or so I keep telling myself
Honestly, I still don’t know what days these are going to be on. Mid-week feels weird, and then poof it’s two weekends later. We’ll workshop it.
Things I Achieved This Week
I’ve spent the majority of the last four days off my cane! Still feels weird from time to time, especially late at night, but doesn’t feel like it’s going to collapse out from under from me at any given moment.
Took my first exam of the semester last night. I think it went reasonably well, though I’ll definitely need to refine my technique.
Still going strong on my 15-20 minutes of writing each night, with a streak of 41 as of last night.
I have successfully generated enough of a story to go from nothing to a serviceable first paragraph in less than three weeks! This is big!
I successfully reset after a chaotic series of days. I remade my bed, cleared my desk, straightened my floor, and am doing laundry as we speak.
I am currently 100% up to date with all required readings in my classes, which is huge.
To follow up on the goals from the last post, here’s a photoset from my planner:
I’ve assigned each class a color, and the check marks are for any time I worked for at least half an hour in any given class that day. I only got all four once, and I wasn’t feeling very well last Friday, but overall, I’m proud of the fact that I was able to do some kind of coursework each day. That’s absolutely a step in the right direction.
As for the other goal, I’m going to have to revisit that one. Even starting at 10:30 left me feeling pretty drained by the end of the routine, and it was also way too easy to lose track of time. But I was able to do pretty well at following the routine, especially the first week, and I’m proud of that.
Things I Want to Work On This Week
Morning routines. I want to try and shift some of the load of my evening routine into the morning, as well as structure the 30ish minutes of minimum-level homework time into the fabric of my day the same way that I’ve done for my creative writing. I’ll have to account for days like Tuesday and Thursday, which, for the foreseeable future, are my physical therapy days. Once I get those locked in, I can move my attention to supplemental activities, like studying art books, filling my sketchbook, making more detailed notes of my readings, etc. But right now, I want to just focus on the basics.
DESIL 358 - working on the active illustration assignment
ENGL 291 - doing the reading for the next class period
ENGL 320 - writing the rough draft of the manuscript
TMA 251 - writing the current scene
Evening routines. I want to bump the start time up to 9:30 on MWFSaSu, and move it at 10:45 on TTh. My last class gets over at 9:50 on TTh, and I normally stay after to talk to my teacher, since that’s my Character Design class and a lot of the more abstract principles are currently not sticking too well in my brain. I’m going to set up a series of alarms to make sure I know the time is coming, to make sure I can disengage from the task at hand and start the shut-down sequence for my brain.
Things I’ve Been Reading/Listening To
Honestly, this week it’s just been fun stuff. I checking out middle-grade fantasy audiobooks as fast as the library will let me, and I’ve been listening to them at work, as part of the research for my ENGL 320 project. So far, I’ve read The Graveyard Book, Coraline, and Crenshaw. I have to do write-ups for each of the books I read, so I might post those just for fun. I also, as you may have guessed from the GIF of the Week, binge-watched the entirety of Gravity Falls. It only took me a few days, and while I do think that there’s probably something I can extrapolate from it in terms of middle-grade research, I just enjoyed having something that could make me laugh while also being really cool. Sometimes, you just really need to laugh.
I think that’s all for this week. I’ve had a rollercoaster of a week, but that’s in the past. I keep reminding myself not to try and do everything at once. I can’t make every decision for every day for the entirety of the semester all at once. All that does is sap every ounce of willpower I have, and it’s a recipe for failure. All I ever need to do is to do the best with where I am in this exact moment. Right now, that’s writing up this and waiting for my laundry to finish. In a minute or so, that’ll be reviewing my planner and waiting for my laundry to finish, and so on.