This week was writing week, and writing is my jam. This week was also a hard week for me with my other classes, work, and trying to get my anxiety under control, so this was a good week to be something I’m already familiar with. My writing wasn’t anything groundbreaking this week, I don’t think. It wasn’t some masterpiece, it wasn’t dripping with creativity. Still, I think I did fairly well given the circumstances. “Stressed Out” was definitely a good release, more for me than for any audience. “Captain Never-Itchy” was a parody poking fun at some of my favorite tropes of one of my favorite ways to tell stories, but it wasn’t anything unique that no one else could have come up with, you know? “I’m Just So Tired” was way overdramatic. I meant it to be silly, poking fun at the dramatic “woe is me” type monologues you see in theater every so often, but I don’t know how well that came across in the piece itself, and it may seem more like I was serious. (If I was serious, it was not so good. But I wasn’t. It was a joke. I know it was cliche.) “Love, Hook” was a diary entry by Captain Hook. It was also fairly silly, painting Captain Hook as the good guy. I could have/would have/should have written something on the more serious side, but I didn’t. It’s not what I was feeling or needed this week. I found it was more difficult to bring in Bob Ross and The Joy of Painting, this week, but I explained how I did in my write-up post. I also wrote an analysis of the story of The Mariner’s Revenge Song. I love the song and the tragic story it tells. I feel like it’s a good example of telling a story from the point of view of a bad character who believes they’re justified in their actions, believes they’re doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, that sort of thing. I struggle to write those sorts of characters because I always either make them justified in their actions or make them so evil it’s hard to believe they don’t realize how bad their actions are. There was also the outline for the long-form story. In the GroupMe chat with other students in the class, it seemed to throw people for a loop. I just used a story I’ve been meaning to do something with for a while, so I just wrote down what I’ve been formulating in my head. Since what I have is individual scenes rather than a full plot, outlining really helped me put it together in a way that made sense and connect it to the song that shares a name with the setting and the story. I did four daily creates this week. I felt like some of them were harder because I felt like I needed things (like clothes from half a century ago) that I didn’t have access to in my dorm room, but I did my best with the resources I had. Finally, I wasn’t able to comment as much as I could last week, but I still did here, here, and here. I clicked on things from the class website that had titles that caught my eye, not for any particular reason about the work itself. I’m realizing that the titles matter more than I’ve been giving them credit for, so I’ll have to put more effort into my future titles.

The biggest things I did this week were the daily creates and the assignments from the assignment bank. The daily creates threw me at first, but as I started doing them and getting into the swing of it I got more comfortable with them. The queen one with the eels was hard because I had this whole fairy tale I wanted to tell but got cut short. I feel like the one with the really big book didn’t make a lot of sense, but I committed to it anyway (the joke was the author wrote down every accomplishment that has ever been attributed to “Anonymous” but I feel like it wasn’t clear). Because of the format of a tweet, it lends itself to comedy rather than drama or horror or other genres. It’s the perfect length for the punchline of a joke, since the setup was already done for you. There was also the works from the assignment bank. I do a lot of writing in my spare time, so I picked a fanfic assignment and a writing assignment. That made the writeups a little more difficult because there wasn’t much to explain. There wasn’t much of a process because I do this all the time, it’s just second nature. I don’t know how to explain it any better than a professional musician would be able to explain how they play their instrument. It just… happens. I get a vibe, I write the vibe, and the vibe exists. Not to say I’m some great writer, I’m not, but it’s the same idea in that it’s second nature. I don’t think about what I’m writing or how I’m doing it, so I couldn’t begin to explain it. When you write about a thousand words for fun on a more or less daily basis, you just do it. You don’t overthink the process. The audio assignment wasn’t hard, but it was more work and I had to troubleshoot things like my noisy neighbors or the white noise from my heater. I also don’t think the final product was as good as the other two, but that may be because I don’t produce that kind of thing like I do writing. It made the write up easier though. The writeup was the hardest part of all of this because I don’t think about how or why or what I’m making as I’m making it, and once it’s done and I come out of the creativity trance, I have no memory of why I made the decisions I made. It’s like asking someone to explain why some article is the way it is after they’ve read it a few times. I can speculate what I was thinking, but really, I have no idea. I had to write down what I was thinking while I was doing it so I had something to refer back to later, but the interruptions meant that I feel like the final products suffered. I also tried interacting with the class more. I’m naturally a very shy and reserved person, so writing things like comments with a defined audience is anxiety-inducing, more than something like this where it’s vanishing off into the void. I did try to comment on someone’s creative work for every day here here here here and here. I viewed/listened to/watched/etc. more people’s stuff, but I had too much anxiety to say anything. I also contributed once to the Discord but that one felt weird because I don’t think too many people are on there and those that are don’t seem to say much. I’m not very experienced with Discord, though, so I might just be missing something.