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This creative writing workshop. It’s interesting, twenty or thirty of us crammed in a tiny room around a table. All of us looking for a reason for our madness, seeking other people who share our big dreams. Many of us can’t finish a story. Some of us are writing novels. Some haven’t written much English at all.

Each week we have a short story or a novel excerpt to read and discuss, and then we “workshop” three peoples’ work. You submit your work a couple days before, so people can read it ahead of time and have constructive criticism and …

The other night, I went to an American Grill/Irish Pub called Shawn O’Donnells and thought it was worth comparing to the pubs I’ve been to in Scotland. Not that I’ve been to an Irish one, but there must be similarities.

It’s a pretty Americanized place, for all its advertisement as an “Irish Pub.” I don’t think it’s typical to have shamrocks everywhere, and a countdown to St. Patrick’s day by the bar. American football was on TV. They had mac & cheese on the menu, which I’ve come to understand is an American thing, despite the fact the menu says …

Today the plan is to visit West Seattle and go back to Easy Street Records, which I talked about in this blog post back in June. I have a few CDs in mind that I hope to find in the used section, namely the self-titled album Miike Snow and Daft Punk’s Discovery or perhaps Human After All, whatever I manage to find. Afterwards for dinner, or before for lunch, we’ll hopefully make it to Musashi’s, a favorite Japanese restaurant that I talked about in this blog post from August. I’ve really been missing Japanese food, and lately I’ve been …

Staying up till my flight at 6am was probably not the best idea. I was exhausted for both of my flights, so much so that the intense security didn’t even bother me, I just wanted it over with. That aside, I’m happy to be home for a while.

We got a Christmas tree yesterday, which smells wonderful. I’m crashing on the couch usually, and it’s fun to have the tree lights on at night.

It was so rainy this weekend there were flood warnings, and the local news was all over it like there was nothing else to talk about. …

I’m eating a sandwich for dinner, because someone ate my leftover spaghetti and I’m almost out of food. I’m fairly cold even though they are keeping the radiators on for three more hours each day.

I can’t wait to get home.

All my lectures are over, but I’ll have to go to campus a couple more times in the next week. Tomorrow, my team has our instant messenger project presentation (just about our progress, since it’s a year-long project). But after that, and after another team meeting to sort out what we’ll do over the break, I’m all done.

My …

Thanksgiving is over, my birthday is over, I’ve had my first peppermint mocha, and it snowed last night.

It finally feels like it’s time to break out the Christmas music.

I’ve only got one more week of classes. The workload isn’t quite as bad as I expected, mostly because two of the projects were much easier than I thought they’d be. Still got a couple of reports, some code to finish up, and a presentation, but it’s almost the end.

I’ve been waiting for it to snow for at least a week or two now. Back home, they had the …

Since I last posted, I feel like everything’s happening at once.

I just finished watching the Harry Potter 7 live premiere online, where they showed interviews with a lot of the actors, the main director, producer, and of course J.K. Rowling.

The whole thing always astounds me. All this started as just an idea in a woman’s mind. She sat on a train, looked out the window, saw some cows, and it came to her. She chose to run with it, writing on napkins and eventually typing the final draft twice on a typewriter. Years later, her stories are a sensation.

What makes a story like that touch so many people? …

As far as NaNoWriMo goes, I’m not sure I’m gonna make it. Wednesday and Thursday I did the daily amount, and it wasn’t too bad. Friday I skipped it for an impromptu fireworks outing. And this weekend I realized I’m now three days behind, and it’s not going to get any easier. I’m not going to have any time for fun things if I work this hard. So I’m considering the goal I had last summer, of 500 words a day, which is doable, but I’ll get at most 15,000 words this month instead of 50,000. I hope to even …

It’s already November. The second day, to be exact. I know I’ve said this before, but I feel like I haven’t truly written anything for months. It really has been that long if you call “real writing” as content for my novel. Which isn’t really fair, I suppose. This past summer was just editing (though in a way that means it was more difficult). But I’m not ready to write the sequel yet, and not ready to do a third draft either. I want to write something fresh, and not just a short story, because I feel like I’m bad …