I Want to Do Something Stupid...

A friend of mine wrote a poem that stuck in my brain.

I want to do something stupid
While I can still blame it on being young -

I want to go to New York to study literary translation.  I'm not good with strange places and strange people, I grew up in the suburban Midwest and went to school in a medium-sized town - I don't think I can handle New York.  I have been assured by my professors - as well as the program director at NY - that I will not be able to make a living with literary translation.  Not to mention that it is a dual program in Translation AND Creative Writing - and while last semester I proved to myself that I can handle a Creative Writing class, it's still not my favorite thing to contend with.

Really, I should just forget about that program as impractical in every way, and just go to Kent State, like my professor advised.  (I told her I wanted to get out of Wisconsin - believe it or not, there is a translation school in Milwaukee - and she gave me Ohio.  Well, perhaps I should have been more general.)  The program there is technical translation, legal and medical and computer, all sorts of things that people actually pay translators for, and while it's certainly not the best field, I will likely do as well as can be expected.

But that's the safe option.  I've always taken the safe option, and frankly, I'm sick of it.  Not many people know this, but I almost applied for UAA - the University of Alaska, Anchorage.  If I'd done that, I'd probably be looking at Applied Linguistics and native language preservation by now.  And I'd probably know how to dogsled.  It was a pleasant dream my junior year, but when I actually started applying, I thought of so many logistical and practical barriers, that in the end I never even applied.  I went to safe, 90-minutes away, whitewashed, Midwestern Eau Claire.  And I met so many wonderful people here, and have enjoyed myself immensely and grown so much, and I have pushed my boudaries, really.  But Eau Claire is not Alaska.

I almost went to Graz, Austria, for my semester abroad, instead of Marburg, Germany.  But no one else was going to Graz; besides, the Austrian dialect is so thick it's hardly even German.  There, it is a complete immersion experience, and you take classes with native speakers in the native language.  Marburg, on the other hand, gives you German-for-foreigners with other foreigners.  Safe.

That was a mistake.

Long story short I was bored out of my mind and depressed for about six months straight.  That's what comes of taking the safe option.

Granted, I haven't even applied, much less gotten in.  The New York program is very competitive, and I'm going up against people who are already professional translators and want to expand their horizons a bit.  There is, however, another translation school with a good reputation in Monterey, California.  Monterey, from what I can gather, is the Eau Claire of California - there's nothing to do, and you're only there if you're a student or retired.  Monterey is the compromise option.  Monterey is the Eau Claire between the U of M and Alaska (though it is a bit closer to Alaska than the U).  So I can safely go there without feeling like a coward.  And I think in typing this I just convinced myself to go there after all.

But I'm going to at least try for New York.  I have to.  If I don't get in and end up at Monterey, that's fine, but if I never even try...well, that's just pathetic.  And if I do get in, and end up going there, and it ends up being a horrible mistake, at least I made an interesting mistake instead of a boring one.

Re-emerging Into Reality

You may have noticed that I have been somewhat less diligent about posting in this month of November.  That is because I have been participating in a cult group madness challenge called NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month.  50,000 words.  30 days.  One writer.

Okay, not one writer.  That is what is so wonderful about NaNo.  Writing is by nature a solitary activity, and sitting in a group of people all absorbed in their own laptops writing their own novels does not sound like a party by anyone's standards.  Still, it is a great way to stay motivated.  I tend to write in creative spurts, but I have a hard time finishing.  I get about half or two-thids of the way through, and the story starts to sag, and I start to see all the places I went wrong, and I want to start over and fix things.  And I get to a point where I don't know where to go next and I don't really care.

But with NaNoWriMo, every word counts.  Rule #1 is DO NOT DELETE.  Rule #2 is DO NOT GIVE UP.  I was up to being seven days behind, but I made up the difference in the last few weeks and pulled across the finish line with hours to spare.

I have done NaNo several times in the past, and this was a year of firsts for me.  It was the first year I made an outline the night before from a story I thought of that day.  It was the first time I threw out that outline on the first day and started with a story that had been smoldering in my head for a while.  And it is the first year that I re-started on the second day with a completely new story that had been gestating but I had not considered ready to be born; but it was my most viable option.  It is the first year I had no idea where the story was supposed to go.

That is another thing about NaNo.  It forces you to be creative.  For the first 20k or so I was writing myself in circles.  Then I added witch hunters.  I never thought I would until I realized that I needed something new.  And there they were.  That got me close to 40k before that arc came down.  The rest was a first person account filling in the gaps of the first arc.  Note:  First person in lovely for wordiness.  You can throw in so much opinionation and asides and rants.  It's wonderful.

Then I was still about a thousand short and spat out half a bonus scene with the witch hunters.

Every year after that first one I have told myself that I won't do NaNo - I don't have time, I don't any good ideas, I'm in the middle of another project - and yet somehow I always do.  And I don't regret it.  Any of it.  Even though all my drafts so far have been shit, and I don't very much think this one is any different, I wrote that damn novel.  I have proven to myself that I can can overcome my creative barriers.  It does not take skill to write, after all.  Skill can be learned.  It takes determination and persistence, and I definitely leveled up in that area this month.

Now for a rest. This is also the first year my wrist actually started twinging (at the 47k mark, when I was starting to think I might actually make it).  That has not stopped me from starting a new crochet project.  I want to get back to my translations - I've been making trips to the career center to see what the heck I can do with my life, and translator is still one of my options.  I also want to start reading books again.  Am halfway through the third Temeraire book and also for some reason have a strong urge to re-read the entire Chronicles of Chrestomanci.  Oh yeah, finals are coming up too.

Blah blah words blah oh wait, I don't have to count them anymore.