Well, it has been a while since I have posted on here but I have been very busy of late – making final decisions on my degree courses, biting my nails waiting for A215 results and planning my first ever NaNoWriMo project (registering last year and then doing nothing at all doesn’t count!).
I passed A215 with a much-welcomed Grade 2, and that also meant I achieved my Diploma in Higher Education, so I’m very happy indeed with that outcome. I’m sure it has as much to do with having a brilliant tutor and loads of support from fellow students, as it does my writing ability! Congratulations to all of the A215 ‘gang’, and indeed to all the other OU students who received results this week!
I have withdrawn my registration for the Advanced Creative Writing course, however. It was just not filling me with excitement the way a course should when you are approaching the start date. Instead, I have gone back to my somewhat hidden love of Art History, and registered for AA315, Renaissance Art Reconsidered. It looks like a brilliant course, and I already have one of the set books to look through. I’ve also been reading my course books from A216, Art and its Histories, which I sadly had to drop out of some years ago. Really looking forward to the start of AA315 in October, although it may mean less creative writing for a while.
Less, that is, once Camp NaNoWriMo has finished. For those who are not familiar, it’s a bit of fun for writers, a challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. Camp NaNo runs in August, but the main ‘competition’ is in November, with another in June.
It may only be Day 4, but I am enjoying it enormously. It has been hard work – you feel as if you are writing under pressure and have to get at least some words done each day (over the month the average is just over 1,600 per day), but having said that, it’s surprising how your ideas come to the fore and demand to be written down when you do have some kind of incentive behind you. I’m writing a fantasy novel, the idea for which I had some months ago, and did actually start to write until A215 ‘took over’. I have kept the characters and the main thread of the plot, but changed some other things and made it much more complex, and – hopefully – more interesting. Of course, it is a novel written in a hurry, so therefore a rough draft. But as Alexander McCall Smith says, ‘just get the darn thing done’, and worry about the editing afterwards. And there will be a lot of editing. See you all sometime next year, perhaps??
graveyardmuse 