the sound of the world
May. 15th, 2013 07:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aamcnamaraIn four days, I will graduate from college.
In the meantime, among other things:
- My last days at work. I shifted four or five ranges of books today, in order to shelve the lion's share of the previously in-processing books. Talking to my boss and another student worker, I realized how much I actually have put into organizing and neatening the stacks. It's been so gradual that sometimes I forget how neglected it was before I got here. I hope I get to go and do this somewhere else now, I really do. If I never work with old books again it will break my heart.
- The increasingly pressing need to go through my thesis committee's notes on my senior thesis. I keep meaning to do this, and keep doing other things instead.
(- Like look for jobs. Which is useful! But polishing my thesis and submitting it to the library ought to happen before I leave campus.)
- We are up to four mice caught. The problem with old pretty dorms is, apparently, that they are full of holes.
- Movies. Lots and lots of movies. We had a million senior week plans, and none of them really came to fruition except the "watch a ton of movies" one.
Also, I've been reading books. I got a cache of used ones recently: a Sladek mystery (entertaining), Jumper by Steve Gould (pretty good, though I had some plausibility problems--I do want to find the sequels), some Liavek stories by Mike Ford (more straightforward than other work of his I've read), and Sunbird by Elizabeth Wein (which I reread in a gulp, wincing for Telemakos all the way).
And I just finished A Stranger in Olondria (Sofia Samatar), which is...fascinating. It brushes past the edges of societies that could host entire novels. It is about death and life and religion and books and stories. I want it to be in the Imagined Worlds class I just took, except that that class mostly read lighter fare, and this book is very rich. (I dog-eared a page in it, which I hardly ever do.) Reading about it other places on the web, I can tell that I will have to come back to this book, and that I will probably get different things out of it next time.
(I can't tell if Samatar made the mispronunciation of her main character's name similar to the name of the main character in The Dispossessed on purpose. I hope she did. It made interesting things happen in my head.)
I've contemplated, recently, what kind of books I want to write--or what kind of books I have inside of me--as I've been emerging from the college cocoon. The inside of my head is a very different place than it was four years ago. Even over this last semester, writing my thesis, the way I think about putting words-onto-pages has shifted. I think I like the changes, but I am not sure what to do with them yet.
The nice thing is that I have time to figure this all out. Am I the kind of person who writes flashy adventure stories that happen to have queer characters (or whatever) in them? (The world does need those books.) Am I the kind of person who writes thought-provoking books that don't follow any pre-set patterns? Can I combine those? How can I combine those? How does my brain default to combining those, and do I want to do something different? The last couple of novels I've tried to write have been fairly surface-level YA urban fantasy things, and I think maybe I need to dig deeper for whatever ends up being my next big project.
One of the things I haven't had very much in the last four years is a solid aesthetic space (nb: what I mean by this is a little fuzzy even in my own head): it's all been equations and academic prose. When setting up my post-college life, I definitely want to figure out how to both build in time to write (get up super-early?) and to find people or a place to talk about this sort of thing. LJ/DW are a good place for this in some respects, so I might end up blogging some of my process here, but it would also be fabulous to have a not-online version.
...I think that's all I've got right now. I feel a little bit like I'm surfacing; hi, world. I'm still here. Somewhere.
In the meantime, among other things:
- My last days at work. I shifted four or five ranges of books today, in order to shelve the lion's share of the previously in-processing books. Talking to my boss and another student worker, I realized how much I actually have put into organizing and neatening the stacks. It's been so gradual that sometimes I forget how neglected it was before I got here. I hope I get to go and do this somewhere else now, I really do. If I never work with old books again it will break my heart.
- The increasingly pressing need to go through my thesis committee's notes on my senior thesis. I keep meaning to do this, and keep doing other things instead.
(- Like look for jobs. Which is useful! But polishing my thesis and submitting it to the library ought to happen before I leave campus.)
- We are up to four mice caught. The problem with old pretty dorms is, apparently, that they are full of holes.
- Movies. Lots and lots of movies. We had a million senior week plans, and none of them really came to fruition except the "watch a ton of movies" one.
Also, I've been reading books. I got a cache of used ones recently: a Sladek mystery (entertaining), Jumper by Steve Gould (pretty good, though I had some plausibility problems--I do want to find the sequels), some Liavek stories by Mike Ford (more straightforward than other work of his I've read), and Sunbird by Elizabeth Wein (which I reread in a gulp, wincing for Telemakos all the way).
And I just finished A Stranger in Olondria (Sofia Samatar), which is...fascinating. It brushes past the edges of societies that could host entire novels. It is about death and life and religion and books and stories. I want it to be in the Imagined Worlds class I just took, except that that class mostly read lighter fare, and this book is very rich. (I dog-eared a page in it, which I hardly ever do.) Reading about it other places on the web, I can tell that I will have to come back to this book, and that I will probably get different things out of it next time.
(I can't tell if Samatar made the mispronunciation of her main character's name similar to the name of the main character in The Dispossessed on purpose. I hope she did. It made interesting things happen in my head.)
I've contemplated, recently, what kind of books I want to write--or what kind of books I have inside of me--as I've been emerging from the college cocoon. The inside of my head is a very different place than it was four years ago. Even over this last semester, writing my thesis, the way I think about putting words-onto-pages has shifted. I think I like the changes, but I am not sure what to do with them yet.
The nice thing is that I have time to figure this all out. Am I the kind of person who writes flashy adventure stories that happen to have queer characters (or whatever) in them? (The world does need those books.) Am I the kind of person who writes thought-provoking books that don't follow any pre-set patterns? Can I combine those? How can I combine those? How does my brain default to combining those, and do I want to do something different? The last couple of novels I've tried to write have been fairly surface-level YA urban fantasy things, and I think maybe I need to dig deeper for whatever ends up being my next big project.
One of the things I haven't had very much in the last four years is a solid aesthetic space (nb: what I mean by this is a little fuzzy even in my own head): it's all been equations and academic prose. When setting up my post-college life, I definitely want to figure out how to both build in time to write (get up super-early?) and to find people or a place to talk about this sort of thing. LJ/DW are a good place for this in some respects, so I might end up blogging some of my process here, but it would also be fabulous to have a not-online version.
...I think that's all I've got right now. I feel a little bit like I'm surfacing; hi, world. I'm still here. Somewhere.