This post is about writing. I’ve been feeding this blog a pretty steady diet of pictures and commentary about pictures as of late (those posts are pretty easy to do, quite frankly), but now it’s time to change speeds a little bit.
It’s not really surprising that as a graduate school student I would be doing a lot of writing. In fact, I can’t really complain about the load of writing from school so far. I’ve only had 2 papers to turn in so far, and one of them was only 2 pages. Bah – that hardly even counts, right? The other was harder and more time consuming, making up for the relative easiness of the first one, a “think piece” about international relations theory that stretched out to 8 pages before I was done (not including a works cited page). It was supposed to be a tad shorter than that, but in the end I decided that I liked it at that length and just handed it in. That was on this past Tuesday, so I don’t know how I did on it – no feedback until at least until Tuesday comes ‘round again.
But I have been doing a lot of writing. On what, then? Garblog, for one. Although I have been hit-or-miss in the past week and half, I am going to get to 31 posts this month, a new Garblog record. Plus, in case you didn’t notice, Garblog has surpassed 100 posts on the year. This is quite an accomplishment for a blog that some years has had less posts for the entire year than I have done in the last 24 hours! (In my own defense, during the year in question I was deployed for about a third of the year and rotated essentially right afterwards into another highly demanding, travel-intensive job.) I have been enjoying the additional time I have to devote to this medium as of late. After all, I hear that what they say is true – if you want to be able to write well, you’re probably going to need to do some writing.
So I’ve been writing some school papers, some blog posts…that can’t account for all my efforts. No, you’re right, it doesn’t. Well, this wouldn’t come as any surprise to you if you were the one person subscribed to my Twitter feed (at least there’s one – thank goodness!), but I’ve really been pouring some time into the report I am obligated to write detailing my life so far in the Olmsted Scholar Program. Taken on the face of it, it sounds like a not-too-onerous task, right? At least it did to me…until I really started writing the paper. I sank a few hours into it, got to about 10 pages. Sank about 10 more hours into it – doubled the page count to about 20. Got up this morning, sat down at the computer and started writing. Pretty much did only that for the next 11 hours straight, and now we’re looking at about 40 pages worth of pre-edit material. I’ve got at least 5, maybe 10 more pages in the hopper before I think I will have everything written down that I want to write. So we’re looking at close to 50 pages of material, single spaced (yes, there are some photos as well, so it’s not all text), but still, it’s a lot of stuff! I guess it would have to be, though – after all, the report covers from March 2008 until about a month ago, that’s really about 18 months. During that time, I’ve changed residences three times, spent over 200 full days of class trying to learn nothing but Chinese, flown across the Pacific Ocean three times, completed a Half-Ironman triathlon, a half marathon and a full marathon, and a thousand other smaller things that add up to a person’s life. Luckily, all I need to put in the report is stuff that will help future scholars. That’s still a lot of stuff. I have to finish the report in the next week, so wish me luck.
I’ve also been writing a monthly report (next one due very soon!) that details my activities as a scholar in Taiwan. These reports, like the Olmsted report I just talked about, are also for a military audience. Rightly so, the folks who run the program I am on want to know what I am doing out here, they want to make sure I am being a productive human being. So I write reports for them. Like the short paper for school I mentioned at the outset, these reports are capped at 2 pages, not including any enclosures or attachments. The 2 page limit ensures that the report itself will be brief and succinct (although I do maximize my writing space by making it single-space J), but there is no length limit in the enclosures. On a serious note, based on what I’ve experienced here so far, there really is plenty enough for me to write about to easily fill that 2 page report and to load my communiqué down with multiple enclosures, but I don’t have time to do the report that kind of justice, really. I can make a good report without making it a book (at least, I can when I am submitting said reports on a monthly basis, as opposed to every 18 months – although the Olmsted reports are yearly from here on out).
Perhaps I should make this post end without making it a book. After all, I still need to write one more post before I can call it a night and sleep peacefully knowing I achieved my meaningless, arbitrary volume-based blog posting goal. J
GJS
P.S. I really do enjoy this writing. I just I thought it would be slightly humorous to present another take on my current short-term posting goal.
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