Starting Graduate School, struggling with routines, and other things.

Near the end of the month and I still struggle with sleep and tiredness issues. Reading and writing can still get slowed down or stalled by the issue. For writing, it can become an endless “Yes or no” about editing choices and that caused such stress that I felt a pinching in my stomach and I decided to take the rest of a week off. That amount of stress is away for now but I still can’t get rid of the tiredness that comes when I read. My mom suggested staring at my laptop for much of the day might be the cause but I’m unsure. I’ve been staring at a screen for years and it hasn’t been effecting me like this before. Maybe it’s my new laptop? I’ve dimmed the screen a bit to test if that might help and the eye strain has gone away a bit. Last Thursday night/Friday morning, I couldn’t sleep, so I slept around the clock again. It didn’t help, as I read and wrote even more slowly, but I didn’t like the thought of sleeping even less to stay on schedule.

Starting school again might help in some way or complicate matters. I went to orientation to get some basic information straightened out and read through the syllabi, intimidated by the work ahead but reminding myself other syllabi have intimidated me before yet I was able to handle classes fine. I’ve begun both classes, Writing Portfolio and The Creative Process, on the 30^th and it was a rather anticlimactic setup. For one, Writing Portfolio was about posting introductions on a forum and I was only one of a few others who posted on Wednesday. Granted, the class only has nine people total including me but it was a sluggish day. I also got an email from the professor for The Creative Process and wrote to him to clarify how long daily writing journal entries should be. He graciously said they needn’t be long, and can just cover about one subject per day. I’ll make my first 500 word online journey entry summarizing what led me to become a writer first, since that’s due tomorrow. I don’t know an exact reason but from assigned reading, Stephen King’s “On Writing,” I don’t believe that’s the point. Just to describe your experiences on your way to writing.

Then I need to critique a sample of someone’s work for Writing Portfolio, an echo of writing workshops at Quinnipiac, but fortunately we’re only going through one a week, so the workload mightn’t be huge for that until I submit and then revise my six pages of prose. With the nonfiction and poetry that would be also on display, it’s hoped our critiques from different subject areas would bring unique and valued feedback. Reading the forum, a few of my fellow students are those who are older and/or have families, so that’ll be a interesting experience I might explore. I might respond to some of the forum introductions and comments out of courtesy and to get to know them.

( Talk of fic, juggling my free time with school, and spoilers for War for the Planet of the Apes )