I've been extremely busy with my course since I started it. I reckon I am averaging 50 hours a week on it. And I have developed a nasty habit of persisting on a problem until I have solved it, eg, staying up to 2am, or waking up in the middle of the night with a possible solution to a problem, and turning on the computer to try them out - eg at 12pm one night and I kept at it to 4am,
I am learning a great deal. One subject has me creating a website from scratch using html and css code. The other is more theory about social media, but the final assignment is all about creating a web presence, in my case I am creating a blog on Wix with connecting Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Wattpad accounts. All these connecting social media have to be new and not existing accounts and all have to be viewable by someone who is not a member of those applications, and all have to have a similar appearance, ie the header photo and title, and all have to based on the one theme.
I was wondering about how good the Curtin University course is. Recently a newspaper article said that the communications department at Curtin, which runs the course, is rated in the top 100 communications departments in the world. That' should give you an indication of the challenge the course is. I have a Master in Creative writing, where I wrote essays, but for this course, I have had to learn how to write a proper essay.
I am doing surprisingly well considering the challenge, but not so surprising considering the work I am putting into the course. My three graded assignments so far have been a distinction and two high distinctions. In the web design subject I now only have to get 0.1 marks for the final assignment as I now have 49.9 marks out of 60. In the other subject I am sitting on 13 out of 15.
So I have not have much time for writing. The most I have done recently occurred when I put an old story on the website I am building. I wrote it about 15 years ago. It hasn't dated because it is about time-travel (haha). It is one of the few attempts I've made at humour and I really enjoyed it (yeah laughing at my own jokes), but I was fixing up things as I formatted it for my website.
Otherwise, my writing is going so slow only a time-lapse camera would show some movement. Every day I spend a few minutes redrafting my novel, just so I can feel like I am still a writer. I am currently about a fifth of the way through the redraft.
One of the huge ironies of this course, with its emphasis on the web and social media, is that I now have very little time to play with social media and check out what my friends are up to. So please don't feel neglected, I am neglecting everyone and everything not course related, except for my exercise program.
Hopefully when I get into a routine and get an idea of what is wanted is required to do well at this course, I will have more time to spend writing and engaging with others online.
A blog about writing, science fiction, the future of publishing, books, and me.
4 comments:
Sounds like it's going great. I wish I had an excuse like that to explain my own miserably low productivity ;-)
So you've only written four novels this year instead of ten ;)
I wish! The reality is that I write painfully slowly. Some of my books have taken a decade or more to write. I've just been completing and publishing a couple of decades worth of work over the past few years. At the moment, I'm managing to finish off maybe one new book per year. Once the backlog is all gone (next year), you'll see my output become a slow dribble - a book every one or two years, maybe.
I was wondering if that was the case, you seemed to be very prolific, Australia's version of Asimov. But at least you have a fair few novels out there, and good ones at that.
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