thoughts on a late Thursday night

Or, you know, an early Friday morning, but let's not get too picky...

I haven't had much time or energy or brain power to work on actual book writing lately, so both Book Wolves and Game of Choice (and oh lord, I need to find a better working title for that second one, or else I'm going to start calling it Married with Mercs) have been backburnered for a long time. And I don't know if it's because it's spring (ha!) or just the fact that my stay in Wales is over and I'm almost done with the BA and I'm starting to get slowly sucked into the yawning pit of ohgodohgodwhatdoyoumeanIhavetochooseaschoolandaprogramandwritearesearchprojectproposal? pre-MA application anxiety, but my brain's creative bits have started stirring again, and I kindasortareally want to start working on the novels again (and possibly actually carry on with the work to some point other than that nebulous "I'm working on a novel" that so many people are at.

It's not that I haven't been writing, because I have! And it's original fiction, too, since I don't really write fanfic. But all those stories are of the pisanie do szuflady (Polish, literally "writing to the drawer," meaning not for publication or for anyone else) variety. Well, they get posted on the internet sometimes, but I write them for the pure fun of them, and I don't really have any interest in trying to turn them into something publishable.

Anyway. I started writing this post for a totally different reason, and as usual got distracted (but then again, tangents and digressions, hello): the always-awesome Chuck Wendig, whose writing posts always provide inspiration and some much-needed laughs, wrote a post about plotting: Fuck The Straight Line: How Story Rebels Against Expectation. It's a post about writing, but it really resonates as a post about living, too. And I think that's what makes it even more profound. Knowing that it's not just our characters who get to escape the straight line, that we can do it, too, that's a hell of an inspiration.

Writing advice is always tricky, because not everything works for everyone, and what works for me may make someone else dig in their heels because that's not how their process works. But the important thing is that through reading (notice I'm not saying "following") things like this, we can actually figure out what our process is. Because otherwise? We're really just flailing about and shouting into the void, rather than getting our shit together and doing something to actually achieve our goals.

sadly, I cannot kill anyone with my brain, no matter how hard I try

So I get money from my parents while I'm at school, right? My dad sends it through Western Union, which means I have to find somewhere to pick it up, and there just so happens to be several places within walking distance of my new flat, including a branch of the place I usually go to. However, the place I usually go to has some political connections I'm not exactly fond of, so I figured I'd wander a bit farther and see what else there was. So I walked into a bank I've used before to pick up the money transfers, and the teller helping me was so nice and so helpful, that when I complained that my bank's branch next door had been shut down, and hey, it's not like I could pick up money transfers there, he suggested that I try opening an account with them to see if I liked it better. And I know that it's standard to offer an account to a non-client, but he was just so damn nice about it that I ended up unable to say no, and consequently half an hour later, I walked out with a new bank account. Which, given that I've had twinges of dissatisfaction with various things my bank does, is perhaps not the worst of ideas.

I'm slowly acclimating to being back in classes here in Poland, and things aren't going too badly. There is a meeting regarding the translation internships in a little while, and while I already have the required hours (through the stuff I did for the translation company last year), I still need them to give me an officially signed piece of paper validating it, and then I can get the signature from the internship coordinator and get that out of the way.

I've been thinking more about the MA program, and I've realized that I'm not sure if I really want to do a translation MA. Chances are any thesis I wrote for a program like that would involve theoretical analysis of translations of... whatever, but the thing is, I don't really want to do theoretical stuff. I realize I have to learn the theory so I can be a better translator, but actually writing a whole master's thesis on it isn't something I'm particularly inclined towards. I suppose there is always the possibility of arranging an alternate MA project, and doing a translation of my own, but I have no idea how that would work and the prospect of having to fight through several layers of bureaucracy to get to someone who'll give me an actual meaningful answer is daunting. Once I get fully settled in, I'm still planning on setting up a meeting with someone who can give me more info about how the whole thing works, and hopefully I can sort out something soon.

All of that will have to wait until I'm not feeling like my insides are reenacting historical battles on an hourly basis. /o\