Saturday, May 24, 2014

I'm pretty amazed at how much I didn't blog during the two years that I was here.  I thought I knew who I was before I got here.  Perhaps I just sketched the blueprint. One thing I know for sure is that I love writing. I truly love it.  I loved it before I came here and I love it more now. I had so much to learn and I'm grateful that I wasn't so self righteous in the process. But if I must be transparent- I will say that emotionally I have aged tremendously. To the naysayers and haters in the world, a MFA program is not a cute little two year writing workshop. I had the loveliest cohort, but to surrender your pride and soul to workshop and take criticism everyday is a beautifully painful thing.

I'm in the last quarter of my graduate program. My field of study is in one of most competitive and stressful industries known to most and conquered by few. I'm in the field of screenwriting, television writing, and playwriting. A part of me is eager to get out there and work, but I'm also anxious and depressed as I prepare for the level of ego degrading experiences ahead of me. There has never been an easy route to any success of my life. This next phase will not be any different. Even at looking at this blog, I realize that I have gotten rid of many of the superficial things that I used to love so much.

At this moment, as I approach the last month before graduation. I am so tired, exhausted, drained .... done. I am done with this journey. I don't even have an escape plan in mind. I'm just done.  I don't want my work to be under the watchful eyes of teachers anymore or the snap judgements of what it is I'm trying to write. Yes, I know it comes with the trade, but for at least two months after graduation I just want to write prose and build again.

Some great things I'd like to share. I wrote a full length play that became my thesis.  It had so many struggles that even my grade my deducted for it. After a million meltdowns which included no eating or sleeping for a time, I finally created an opus- an ode to the pain that I experienced before this journey began. It's etched in the dialogue. It's layered in the characters. I'm showing it to you but you can't see it. Booyakasha is all I can say. I wrote a play bitch.

I'm attending two amazing conferences this summer. One of them being the Sewanee Writers Conference and the other being the Long Beach Digital Edutainment Conference. Again, Booyakasha.

I'm happy.