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Posts Tagged ‘chapbook’

Window Closed, Window Open

My application is in, and hopefully complete. Now I get to play the waiting game. (Insert epic scrabble game here, final scores 259 to 442, I win- ok, now back to the entry). I wish dearly there was some information on how many people apply and how many they accept. I couldn’t find any numbers. None. Grr. The only thing I have to go on is that the max number of people who can register for many of the graduate level writing courses is 10-15. Which says that they don’t have very many grad students. Now, most of those classes aren’t full either, which means even fewer people. I’m freaking out, just a little. Sigh. It’s always been very hard for me to let anyone read my stories, much less strangers who are deciding my academic fate. and yes, I know I’m being a tad dramatic. If I don’t get in, I have other options. But they are far less convenient and more expensive.

Speaking of expensive, it isn’t exactly going to be cheap if I do get in. But I have some ideas for how to offset the costs. One is applying for aid, obviously. But loans are loans, and I’ll have to pay the monies at some point. My other ideas are along the lines of trying to come up with some of the monies by self-printing a chapbook of my poetry and seeing if I can’t get people to buy it as a nice donation thing towards my schooling. Bel had the idea that I should do this and print out an expanation of what I’m doing and what this book is for the back cover and then leave some copies in places with a “Free” sticker on it to try to draw in strangers as well. A chapbook is fairly cheap to self-publish, and my poems are things people have liked in the past. It’s something I’m considering, since I have a pretty large body of poetic work. We’ll see. Like I said, I have ideas. First I have to get accepted. Which means waiting. Did I mention I hate wait?

Fortunately, I have a great novel idea I’m fleshing out to help tide me over. It’s going to be novel number 1 of the 10 novels in 10 years personal challenge I’m giving for myself. It’s a psuedo fairytale set in Ancient Wales (sort of). I have a degree in Medieval Studies, and I took medieval Welsh as a language during that time. So I already have some feel for the culture. I’m not going to make it historically accurate, however. It’s supposed to be fantasy. As long as I get it consistent, I’m not going to worry too much. I’m excited though. The plot is pretty much there, the characters are fairly defined in my head, and I have all kinds of ideas for things to research to give it that extra bit of credibility and sense of the fantastic. Plus Welsh fairytales are notoriously more gory and strange than the better known Irish ones. Which will be a blast to write, I’m sure.

The insane part of this is that I’ve decided to write the novel by hand. I used to do all my writing by hand pretty much right up until my last year of college. It was how I ever got around to editing anything. I’d write it up by hand and then the first rewrite would happen as an incidental part of typing the story/poem/academic paper. I’ve never written anything by hand that was more than 30 or so pages, however. I want to make this novel at least 400 hand-written pages, which will end up being around 250-300 typed pages. I bought a fresh pack of moleskine notebooks . And I bought a neat little book on early Medieval Wales which has some sweet maps. So I’m ready.