Finding Time

Well I was going to post some of my short stories on this blog but Blogger Beta does not work with Google's document posting software quite yet. I don't even want to try to copy and paste the stories as that always leads to format headaches that I am not prepared to deal with. So until I can use that program that Google offers, I forget the name - probably Google Documents or something like that, I will get those stories up.

I've been keeping busy with school although it seems like no matter how much work I do, there is just twice as much waiting to be done. Lately the only two things I have been doing are work and school. I'm sure I've whined about this in a previous post but confession is good for the soul. If my course were purely news gathering, it would make life a hell of a lot easier. Right now though, school is about seventy percent news gathering and thirty percent academic work. It's tough switching back and forth between styles and staying on top of every assignment. You could walk into our newsroom and most of us would be sweating blood over the stuff we have to do. The work isn't hard, mind you, just abundant and often tedious. Having a job and being in this program is like working two jobs on top of going to school - but I still thoroughly enjoy journalism.

I recently watched The Insider and that got me really pumped for journalism. Before I started my course, I was all about going into investigative journalism. However once my program got started, a few of the instructors made investigative journalism look like a non-existent branch of news in Canada. The other day though, we had a guest speaker who happened to be an investigative journalist and he loves his job and made it sound just the way I had imagined it. Then I watched The Insider and that just sealed the deal for me. Now I have put in twice the amount of work if I am going to put together some investigative pieces as they are usually more time consuming and take much longer to put together.

Now that I'm finished ranting, I have about five assignments due this week that I still have to put work into. Back to the salt mines...

Balance

It's incredibly hard, I find, to balance work, school and my creative endeavours. If I'm working on my fiction, I feel guilty for not doing school work. If I'm doing school work, I don't feel like I am spending enough time writing fiction. And if I'm at work, there's not much opportunity to do either.

It would help if I knew which direction my life was going to take or which path I should choose to go down once school is finished. Although I suppose that knowledge is something everyone wishes they could have.

As far as my fiction writing goes, I need to have more opinion on my work than just that of my family. I'm sure they try to be brutally honest but I've caught them red-handed trying to avoid giving me honest criticism. So on that note, I'm going to post some work online here in hopes that at least a couple of people will read it and comment on it with whatever criticism they may have, be it positive or negative. Hopefully, there is no limit to how large a single post can be. I guess we'll soon find out.

Re-Ignition

I created this blog about a week ago and have only got to posting on it now. It's not that I have lacked the time but rather the inspiration. It was there a little while ago but then it just sort of fizzled out. For months I was writing short stories and posting regularly on a different blog but then I somehow lost whatever it was that was driving me. For the past couple of weeks, I have been trying to get back whatever it was that kept me writing with such fervour.

With the resolution to get my groove back at the top of my mind, I dug up all of my Writer's Digest magazines and Googled all of the short story websites that I could. I read article after story after article. After some time, I sat down to write a story and found myself giving up almost right away. I couldn't figure out what vermin had crawled into my head and sucked out my God-given will to write.

For a couple of days, I did everything I could to avoid thinking of writing. I didn't even pick up a pen.

Then, this morning I was driving to school early to get some work done before class. It was as I was in my driving daze that I realized I hadn't done the one thing every writing school/instructor/website tells you to do when in a rut - WRITE! I realized that I had thought about writing and planned on writing but hadn't actually written anything down. I was so concerned about not creating an instant masterpiece that I didn't write anything at all. I forgot how many revisions it takes to make a good story (however I'm sure there are some out there who can pen out a masterpiece in a matter of hours.)

So with my mission in mind, I hurried into the school and popped open my laptop and have been typing furiously ever since. I don't even recall how I started this post, just that I have finished it feeling a little bit better about myself.