First Blog Post - All about me and my procrastinator ways.

In December last year I started writing. Writing is something I never really delved into before, and at the time I was just copying what a friend was doing. But it didn't take me long to realise how much I enjoyed it, and that I could even get good at it--though that's a while away. After maybe a month or two of writing I decided that it was about time I went to university. I had to do an admissions test, and figured if I somehow managed to do well on it I still wouldn't make it in until the second semester.

Oh, how wrong I was. I managed to--miraculously--score an 85, then got accepted one week before school started. My life has changed completely. It's amazing, and... terrifying.

I was never what anyone would call academically minded back in high school. I graduated with horrendous grades and never looked back, that was five years ago.

This blog will be my story. It will be about jumping into a Bachelor of Writing with no idea what I'm doing. It will be about my adventures in writing, along with the major project of the year which is to write a book. I'm about 62000 words in, which is fantastic! But nothing stops productivity in writing like starting an arts degree.

It's so easy to make up excuses as to why I'm not writing more of the novel, like when I have assessment, or need to catch up on my reading and writing tasks. The reason I started this degree was to improve my writing. Whilst I'm certainly writing in a larger range of genres, I'm not actually writing as much as I was before I started school back in February.

My third lecture in intro to creative writing put forth the idea of writers keeping a journal as a very good thing. So that's what I'm going to do, start a journal, in this case, a blog.

My posts won't have a huge amount of structure--I'm somewhat of a discovery writer--and I can't promise you any of it will be worth reading. But hopefully for me it will be worth writing. It will be a place to openly sift through my thoughts, and maybe even get some advice from readers.

What are my thoughts today? Today I'm supposed to be working on a short analysis of four different readings for my lit studies class. Actually this is something I should have been doing for the last four days, but for whatever reason the Master Procrastinator has been, well, procrastinating. Which is unfortunate as I'm not one of those productive procrastinators. I don't get stuck on a hundred other little tasks while avoiding the thing that I'm supposed to be doing, I just wallow in a pit of nothingness. Wasting time watching TV shows, browsing sites like Imgur, and today, looking at old LiveJournal posts (I do not miss being a teenager). Which is probably how this blog came about.

Ok, so I'll try not to sell myself too short. I have written a fourth of the essay, and chosen all but one of the four readings for it. And considering how I've done at school in the past, I'm actually doing incredibly well. I got my first distinction on a piece of work (a distinction being between 75-84 where I go) and have not once turned in anything late. For me, that is absolutely an accomplishment. I can wish as much as I want to suddenly be a studious student, but those sort of things don't happen overnight. Good habits need to be built overtime.

So that's what I'm going to do, build good habits! And since I've written it down, put it out there, hopefully it will happen.

I'll leave this post with a short to-do list, perhaps that will spark some productivity in me:

• Finish my critical reflections essay--due on Friday--with a day or two spare.
• Write more of the novel. It's hard, the story is at a point where I'm not sure what's going to happen. But that's a part of the fun!
• Get in some more exercise. I'm stagnating a bit in this department since the Easter long weekend, but exercising generally keeps the rest of my day on track. So get on it!
• Bring back a sense of routine. Easter and this class free week be damned for killing my routine!
• Go to the library this week. No one will be at school, which is all the better to get some work done.

Novel word count: 62,294
Hopefully this number will rise along with the blog posts.