Hey everyone! As we all know each other I will save a formal introduction and jump into how I’ve been and what my hopes are for my project this semester.

If you want an introduction you can check the homepage of my E-Lit site here.

How I’ve Been

Life has been…eventful. Back in April, my hope for the summer was to jumpstart my thesis and make significant headway; however, that did not happen. Family became a huge priority and obligation and that was my focus for the entirety of the summer.

As fall came into view, I moved into an apartment and, while it has been exciting, that within itself was full of challenges. Some of those challenges included family and work obligations on top of internet issues and laptop issues (I am now split between three different laptops at the moment as one does not work with my apartment internet, one can only do minor projects and nothing substantial and the other has the only working camera of the two that can function on the internet).

I am happy that after this weekend work and family obligations will be scaling back and I will, hopefully, get my main laptop fixed.

So, that is how I have been, recently.

My Thesis

My thesis is a YA novel. However, on top of that I will be applying to MFA programs whose deadlines fall in November and December. So I need to have 40-60 polished pages by those deadlines to submit for the grad applications. My plan is to write 5-10 pages per week (not including this week) and start editing/polishing pages after 20-25 so while drafting the last half I will be polishing the first half and hopefully be finished with all of that by the Thanksgiving break and I can turn my focus to the rest of the grad applications (I still need to do a little research about all the requirements which is why I am not including pages this week as this is all subject to change at the moment).

I am excited to start focusing on this as well as to learn and support each of you and your projects.

Since May, I have been relaxing, working, and writing. I picked up a Summer internship at a bookstore that wasn’t really a bookstore thanks to Hurricane Ida. I got to work on my photography though and got paid for it! I also worked at Kean, filing papers and writing whatever ideas came into my head. Then in June, I did the writer’s retreat and loved it!

Since then, I tried to hold myself accountable for working on my novel. It didn’t really work and that’s upsetting. But I’m learning from that failure. I realize that I need to change where I write. Thanks to my internship, I learned about this place called The Write Space. I have yet to try it out but I know exactly where it is and I’m putting money aside to go one day.

Next, I made a plan to just stay on campus all day every day just to write. Partially because The Organization was born there and I feel like it should be finished there too, but also because I get my inspiration and ideas from people and things I see.

So with that said, on to my thoughts about my thesis. (I kind of can’t believe I’m writing/saying that and how excited I am about this!)

Wow, Thesis Time Already

It feels like I just started and I’m already looking at the light at the end of the tunnel.

That’s because you did just start. You knew you weren’t going to be doing this forever. It wasn’t going to take you 6 years like you A.A. & B.A. did.

This is true. But I still don’t really want it to end. I mean I want it to end but not. Ya know?

Anyway, I woke up this morning feeling three ways about starting my M.A. Thesis.

Over the Summer I joined the writer’s retreat, which you can read all about by clicking “writer’s retreat.” And it was amazing. I began working on my thesis there and have since tried to work on it more afterward, but it didn’t work out that way.

Thankfully though, I did manage to get organized in a way that I know will help me in the long run and I know what I need to work on during the semester to get me to a finished novel by May.

A quick recap of my project:

• The Organization is going to be a magical realism novel
• It is based in New Jersey in a made-up town called Zorshall Creek (zore (like sore but with a z) sh – all)
• The main characters are Anixa Nettle and Traxel Litespire, they will be the good vs. evil sides in the novel (along with their teams)
• The main idea is doing bad for good reasons and how different perspectives change how people view them. i.e. robbing banks to fund the community or doing illegal things to catch fugitives.
• I am still in the planning phase but have a few things written.
• I’m using Bibisco to help me write this novel and it is going amazingly. (I did end up paying for it, but it is worth it!)

My hope for the semester is to have a fully fleshed-out outline where I can just pick a section and write it. And to have at least 8 chapters done. Ideally, that would be two chapters a month and I know I can do that. My main concern is time. During the retreat, we had close to 6 hours a day to focus on our writing and I got a lot done. So, I’m taking that knowledge and giving myself a rough estimate of how much I can expect to be done by December.

I’m really excited for this class, to see what we all produce. The ideas we’ll have. We are all writers and I can’t wait to read what we write!