Entry #8

Hi all, sorry for the late-ish update! Things are going well with my project. This week I finished the outline for my short story and its theoretical companion piece (well, sort of finished--I've sent it to my advisors for suggestions and criticism, so it's highly likely I'll be making changes to it). I'll probably edit this post with a link to the outline in the next couple days, after I've gotten a chance to speak to my advisor Sarah about it. Or maybe I'll just save that for next week's post, I'm not too sure. In terms of helping Sarah with stuff, she's finished applying for grant aid so there's no more proofreading to be done (for the time being)! She's had me transcribing interviews in English which she recorded a while back for her Confluencecenter project. It's somewhat tedious, but it's alright, and believe it or not I'm seeing a lot of overlaps in subject matter with the book by Lejano, Ingram and Ingram on narratives in environmental networks, which I finished reading and mentioned in my post last week. Originally, as part of that Confluencecenter project, Sarah's plan was to produce a bilingual map of the AZ-Sonora border region, complete with interviews, narratives, and just general fun facts about various places of interest, and which whole thing she was hoping I could help her with (come with her to places on the AZ side of the border, take photos, etc.). However, she's put that on hold for the time being and has instead decided to contribute to a larger map being put together by another organization (I'm not too sure of the specifics at the moment; she just mentioned this to me the end of last week). Either way, I'm still hoping I'll be able to help out with a project like that, combining elements of geography and my recent knowledge of narrative analysis to put together some cool features. It's definitely not set in stone, though, and I'll have to find out more.

What's great though is that I'm right on track with the schedule I wrote, like, three months ago in terms of making on my final product. Starting next week I'll be working on the rough draft of my short story and companion piece--all the theory I've learned so far from my reading and working with Sarah these last two months will culminate in that, so I'm really trying hard to make sure it's my best work. I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to writing essays, slaving for hours over tiny details like sentence structure and word choice, so I'm hoping that carries over into my creative writing--obviously, though, not to the extent that I don't manage to finish! I have high hopes for this though and I'll be keeping the blog updated with my various drafts, if any readers are interested in taking a look at my progress (I know you're quite busy with your own projects). Alright then, have an awesome and productive week!