Writing for Me! And only for Me!

As of last Friday, March 28th, I handed in my absolute FINAL essay for my English degree -- it was an essay for History 297: History of Christianity. It was on the ideology behind the Second Crusade as expressed in The Song of Roland, and compared to the ideology of the Second Crusade promoted by St. Bernard of Clairvaux. But now I'm done - NO MORE ESSAYS! I am writing only for me!

Yes, yes, I still have that Comp Lit exam I have to write for my Romance class, but as my exam is going to be a work of romantic fiction that rewrites Chretien de Troyes' The Knight of the Cart (Lancelot), and it's turning out to be one of the prettiest things I've ever written, it's much too fun to write to consider it really work, and once I'm graded on it, I'll probably submit it hither and thither as it should count as both a fantasy and a romance.

Even though I'm finishd with that final essay, it certainly wasn't the easiest to write. It's as if God, or Fate, wasn't quite finished screwing with me and didn't want to left me off that easy -- the day before my essay was due (and at that point the essay was only half typed) the transformer on my old laptop that was a high school graduation gift abruptly died on me. I bought a thumb drive and managed to get most of my work onto it before the battery life on the old thing sank into Hibernation mode, but it was still terribly inconvenient. I now had only half a day to finish a 3000-word essay. For the first time ever, I actually stayed up until 1:30 finishing it. I've never had to do that before, so I find it kind of funny that this sort of stereotypical "university scramble" had to happen to me on my last essay.

The good news is, I handed it in on time, and today my parents decided to give me my University graduation present early: a shiny new laptop, which I am writing on right now! The keys are all in slightly different places so I'm going to have to get used to that, but I can make my windows bright pink if I want to and choose a new beautiful background and still write all of my stories. I have a feeling that transferring all my iTunes is going to be a chore, but I'll get it done.

My writing (for ME!) is also full-steam ahead - with most of my focus being on the CompLit exam and Reading The Willow King. I will make myself work on my screenplay, I will, but currently it's the hardest thing to work on nowadays because I'm still not 100% sure of the format and nothing I write feels right for it - it's just bits and pieces of scenes. That's probably because I haven't been focusing on it - I always need to write a few crappy sentences for my creativity to warm up and really get cooking - but with such a new format (and one that I plan on using to provide me with my career), I'm having less tolerance for those first few crappy sentences.

But I'll keep working on it -- my parents also bought me a beautiful pink bound journal notebook from Notables, so that's a huge encouragement for me to scribble my way through the tiny fat scribble notebooks I have now so that I can start writing in that one. It would be lovely to have all my longhand drafts collected in beautiful bound journals, don't you think? It'd be terrible for my budget, but once I start doing it for a living, maybe I can write them off as tax deductible, hmm?