Attention Dwindling

Already the first lecture back and she was writing, and not taking note. A daily, a distraction, just as the people in front were eating chips and wedges, distracted themselves. In fact, how many people pay that much attention int he first class anyway, introducing you to the subject? Focus. She wanted to continue passing, yes? Of course. "Explain what it is you're doing" Not paying attention. Oops, I mean, paying heaps of attention. Alliteration, critics and formal ... er, something. She forced her pen away from the page and her eyes back up to the power point slides. Even though the person beside her was drawing and the person front left was sleeping. That was okay, she'd pass.

[119 words]

Humiliation vs. Motivation

16 April 2010

Debates inside your head are the worst of all. My lecturer says arguing is great ... it's not. You got your heart saying one thing and your brain saying another. Would it be funny to see their reaction? Or too scary and embarrasing? The tutor had said that humiliation was the best motivation. Did it work on tutors, though? Or did it just backfire on the students? She thought the latter. Yet she knew she'd already made her decision. It's not her fault that when she found an idea she would stick to it. Maybe he'd never noticed it at all ... just a small reference ... she knew that was too much to ask for. She giggled to herself. Next week's lesson was bound to be fun.

[128 words]

Assessment Thinking

My head hurts. I don't know why, it just does. Surely it couldn't be because of the amount of thinking I've been doing? Let's see - an assignment yesterday, a competition entry, lots of assessment due dates being filed. Today - a lot of procrastination in the form of looking like I'm still doing something relevant ... downloading all the lecture notes, tutorial readings, assessment criteria sheets, and placing them neatly in folders ... before setting down to do some nice, hard thinking about what do for assignment number two. It came to me about 3:00, but I was still contemplating it about eight hours later. Would it work, wouldn't it, why, why not? This, after all, was worth 30% of my overall mark. Would I pull it off? I would soon find out.

[134 words]

Overtired Writer

She folded her arms across the desk and lay her head on top of them, closing her eyes for rest as she let out another stifling yawn. The writer was overtired, again, but she couldn't go to sleep. She had to write. But to just rest her eyes for a few moments, that was all. She thought of the story she started exactly two years ago. She thought of it's sequel, what she was hard at work on now. She thought of the amazing climax she would write, and suddenly jerked herself upwards as a less than nice image popped into her head, of how her characters would suceed, or suffer, in that climax. The images were forever playing in her head like a movie, and she knew what her characters meant when they supposedly could not get rid of their horrifying flashbacks. She created them, of course she'd have them too.

She'd been listening to her first lecture today on creative non-fiction, and a non-fiction book had been published on the story of two men sitting on death row. It had killed the person as an author because to finish their book, they needed the execution to take place - to two of these characters... except that these characters were actually real. She'd hate that. At least her's was all make believe. She could convince herself no one was so harsh. But she knew there were those that were.

[240 words]