Again with the goals

With graduation two weeks away (!!!) I've gone and set more goals for myself and given myself more personal projects on top of my school work. Smart decision? Probably not. Nevertheless, I'm going to try and get everything done. The current project is a writing portfolio. I'm a little surprised I don't already have one pulled together. However, I'm not precisely shocked, which is somewhat unfortunate. Clearly, I know myself too well and don't always work hard enough on shaking myself out of old habits. With that fact recognized, I'll move on. Discussing my own shortcomings is not the topic of this particular blog entry.

The first thing I need for this writing portfolio is more samples of my writing. I do have a few things - research papers written for class, two one act plays I wrote, poems from creative writing, etc. - but I really need to punch it up and show the range of my talents. I'll be pulling entries from this blog to show some of my personal, non-fiction writing. I also plan to lurk some of my own character posts over at a few of my RP sites (more on this later.) Beyond that, I need to figure it out. I could add my NaNoWriMo wins, but am not 100% sure at the idea of including unedited manuscripts that were written in thirty consecutive days and still aren't finished. Besides the sheer massive outpouring of writing for word count's sake that is NaNo, I don't have the means at present to print out those monstrosities. Maybe I could skim some favorite sections and offer them with a summary of the previous action.

For a lot of the writing portfolio, I intend to pull heavily from my favorite RP site and the one I've been on the longest, Big Damn Verse. I've been a member since before that particular site existed and have served as a member of the admin team since fall of 2007. Going into our seventh year, the site has maintained a lot of the same core group of members and a lot of the same staff. We have seven years of original story lines, characters, etc. built up and plenty more to come. If I'm going to be pulling samples of my writing, I'd be stupid not to be pulling from my other online home.

My other big BDV project is a constant work in progress that I need to get caught up on. It won't happen until after graduation, I'm sure, but it's not impossible. That project is the BDV history. I came up with the idea back in 07 or 08 to summarize each of the episodes the ships run through. This would allow new members to know more about what each ship had been through and what sort of characters might fit in with existing story lines. It would also give veteran members a chance to re-read and examine character story arcs away from the massive amounts of collaborative writing that take place in the in-character threads. It seemed like an easy way to step back and make sure we didn't have too many identical SLs running or spot running themes or view a running storyline arc on its own, etc etc etc. I think I kept up with the project for six months, but that guesstimation might be too generous. Now, I feel like I need to dive back into it because 1. it's a project that can, in theory, be "easily maintained" once it gets up to speed, 2. I still think it would offer new members a tremendous advantage, and 3. bragging rights. If I'm able to catch every BDV history thread up to speed on my own, I will be able to say without any doubt that I've read every IC post on the site. That's the theory, anyway.

So, there we have it, the list of things I'm going to work on when I'm not doing homework or packing or cleaning the apartment. Ha! Wish me luck. I'm afraid I'll need it.





Disclaimer: Big Damn Verse is a Firefly/Serenity based RPG. ALL Firefly, Serenity material including characters, Firefly/Serenity photos & graphics belong to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, 20th Century Fox, and Universal Studios. The Big Damn Verse is NOT affiliated with any of the above. We make no profit, nor do we ever intend to. Disclaimer text copied from BDV main page.