Well, it's now the last week of class of my freshman year, and finals are coming right around the corner. It's kind of terrifying...and, all at once, sad. I've loved college so much more than high school. In high school, being someone who loved to read and to learn and to do all these nerdy things...it wasn't something that was celebrated. And yet in coming here to college, everyone is a nerd. Everyone is smart. It is socially acceptable--perhaps even celebrated!--to be the nerdiest you can be. I love it so, so much, and it's almost sad to be going home for the summer. A lot of my friends have internships here, but me, I'm going home to JulNoWriMo and self-studying.
On the self-studying first: I'm planning on doing a "48-unit course load" on my own, which essentially means five classes. One of those "classes" will be set aside any pleasure reading I want to do over the summer and for JulNoWriMo, as well as just generally being around friends and family back home (and maybe some goofing off). That will comprise nine units. The rest will be composed of reviewing Ch41a, which is organic chemistry (9 units), reviewing Ch102, which is inorganic chemistry (9 units), learning Ph2a/Ph12b, which is quantum mechanics (9-ish units), and learning ACM95a, which is complex analysis (12 units). I'm super excited; I've got an entire schedule worked out and everything!
As for JulNoWriMo, I'm basically writing something fairly similar to an idea I came up with for NaNoWriMo 2011, except I'm integrating more of my feelings about living in an environment that's super accepting of nerd-dom into my novel, tentatively titled "It's all Relative". (Ha-ha, a relativity joke; see what I did thar?) Allow me to paste my novel description from the JulNo website:
Sarah Jones is hopelessly addicted to two things in life: running and online gaming. After she quits the cross-country team, her mother decides she needs more direction in life--not to mention more things to pad her resume for college with!--and ships her off to live with her absent father in sunny SoCal for the summer, where she is signed up to take part in a summer science camp. Furious at being forced to do something so outside of her interests and inclinations, Sarah is determined to hate everything about the summer. Things quickly get out of hand, however, when she meets a boy at camp who has succeeded at the impossible: building a time machine. Suddenly, the prospect of a summer with an infinite amount of time at her fingertips doesn't seem quite so bad.This novel honestly comes closest to me "writing what I know" out of every WriMo I've done, which is a little funny, as I am probably the least knowledgeable person in terms of writing convincing romance stories. It's also a little worrisome, as I don't want to fall into the trap of writing a Mary Sue. I've honestly thought a lot less about characters this year than I've thought about plot, so we'll see how it goes.
Maybe once I've thought about the characters a bit more, I'll share some insights into Sarah and Wesley. For now, though, I think I'll leave this blog entry here, so that my blog is a little less empty and dead.
