In the beginning

As some smart guy once said, let there be light.
And so it starts.

Since I am for the most part separated from my kith and kin, and I am generally rather awful at keeping up with anyone I don't actually get to see, I've decided it's time for me to start a blog. So here we go.

I now embark on the final semester of my undergraduate career, and hopefully of my university career. Well, almost. I don't technically graduate until August. I'll have everything done by April (unless, of course, I fail one of my classes), but I put off graduation for two reasons. The first: El Salvador. Some of the professors in the Geography Department at BYU are doing a migration study of families from El Salvador in the US. If they get the grant money, they're going to send some students there to interview members of those same families back in El Salvador. Students like me. For free. Again, that's assuming we get the grant money, but it's still pretty exciting. The other reason is even more exciting. I got accepted to an undergraduate summer program in the Pembroke-King College at the University of Cambridge! I apparently have quite a few friends who've participated in this program. I'll be studying there for eight weeks, from the end of June to the end of August. Hopefully, I'll manage to get enough outside funding to tromp around Europe a bit too. While I'm at it, I figure I'll drop by Oxford and read me some Shakespeare or Tennyson in the library so that when I actually publish a book, I can legitimately put in the About the Author section that I studied literature at Oxford and Cambridge. You can't say an author sucks if he studied literature at Oxford and Cambridge. You just can't. Especially one who's been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize (it costs $50 to make a nomination). All I need after that is a really good picture of myself (preferably with a pipe or cane) and I am set as an author. That, and I have to finish a book. But I'll be all set on the important stuff after this year.

As for writing, well, I don't know how much I'll be getting done in the immediate future. This last semester, I dropped every single ball I was juggling. It was pretty awful. I thought I was planning a fairly easy final semester for myself here, but I'm looking at it now and think that I'll be just as busy. Hopefully I will manage my time better. I have a Spanish literature class which might cause some trouble and I know ceramics will take a big chunk of my time (I had to give up on it last semester in order to salvage my other classes). I'm just going to audit the ballroom dance class I signed up for; with ceramics, I know I won't have enough time to dedicate to a dance class, but I still want to improve my (currently minimal) waltzing skills. The other courses don't worry me too much at this point. I hope to go to Brandon Sanderson's class one last time, if for no other reason than to keep my head in the game. If I don't have time, though, it's not a big deal. I've gone three times already and have probably gotten most if not all I'm going to get out of it. Anywho, with all I have to do in the coming semester, I don't expect to get much actual writing done. Nor do I expect to get very far at Cambridge. Yep, it's looking like it's going to take five bloody years to write my first novel. Granted, almost none of that time has actually been dedicated to writing it, but I would have liked to get it done sooner than it will be. I wish it were done now, of course, but that's sort of my own fault.... Plus, I'd like to get on to writing the book that comes after it. I allow myself to worldbuild and such for that series, but I am diligently not working on that one until I finish what I'm working on now. It's far too good a story to drop before I get to share it.

That pretty much summarizes what's going on right now. We'll see how this all works out.