So, in addition to blogging about politics and software, I’m going to school more than full time over the summer. Full time for the summer is two classes and, being the over-achiever, I’m taking three. Ten weeks, three days a week, including ten hours on Thursday (which is better than a fourth trip and the gas involved). This is week four, so even though this semester just started next Friday will mark half of it being over. I could get used to that. It’s a little more than half the length of a normal semester.
Of the three classes, only one doesn’t fill one of the requirements for graduation. I’m taking it more because it fills one of the requirements for getting a job, which sadly, CS curricula aren’t too heavy on. I love it when the teachers emphasize the real world skills we need and base their classes on that. Even though there’s no way I’m going to get a job coding in assembly, that professor hammered us on the need to code properly and talked about the real world. You know, outside of the classroom. I don’t know if he’ll ever know how much I appreciated that, especially along side the Basket Weaving teacher that didn’t give anything remotely useful in seventeen weeks of class.
But, being an over-achiever will pay off this fall; I get to keep my three day a week schedule and will be finished with my major and minor requirements. That leaves just filling out the hours requirements next spring and the capstone for CS (Software Engineering II). So there is that. But other than school and blogging and personal life stuff that I’ll leave off because this isn’t a livejournal or myspace, I’ve also been doing a lot of writing.
Like, a lot. I hadn’t done much of any fiction writing since November, and I don’t even remember what I did for NNWM. This was after I finished my first novel last summer; after a nearly nine-month long embargo on creativity I opened up in June and just tore through that thing, finishing with an eleven thousand word day. But in mid-May, I started on the sequel. I’m now around 90,000 words in. It’s a weird metric but I don’t know what else to judge it by; NNWM got me used to using words, and chapter lengths vary so much. I can’t even say about what percent I guess this is because every time I get to writing it seems to expand. There’s so much world out there, and the characters have so much to them, that I just can’t say “okay this is going to be 150,000 words” or “40 chapters.”
Plus, if it’s anything like last time — I’ll go through a second time and see so much more I could explore, and do it, and even after I think I’m finished I’ll tell more story.
