Faith, Hope, and Love

I'm on the phone with my sister and she's reading me parts of her attempts at a memoir. Mostly it's just ramblings about her first memories. Of me (apparently she thought I was annoying), our sister and brother, our cousins, our friends, her birthdays. While reading it out, she happened to mention my very first blog , which was on MySpace. (I also remember having an account with Open Diary. Anyone else have one of those? I think my username was African Aggie.) At one point I wrote every day. Sometimes multiple times a day. And then one day, I deleted most of the blogs, and just kept a few random ones. (I did re-write most of the ones I deleted into a real journal.) Taking a look back is kind of like opening up a time capsule. Simple things like:  my relationship with my brother ,  a time when I actually missed College Station  (yeah, barely miss it now, haha),  kisses from Khalil  (who is now five! oh, how time flies!) This stuff dates back to like 20...

It's Day 4 and I have 971 words. Out of 50,000. I'm about 3 (maybe 4) days behind schedule.  Unlike the dude in the cartoon, I have an idea of what to write about. But since I signed up on a whim, it's been a slow process. Especially since most of my free time is spent hanging out with family and friends. But it's coming along... and at least I'm writing!

Should I take it that God is seriously smiling down on me and showing immense favor? Because I just got offered a job... following a pretty catastrophic interview experience. Okay... maybe not entirely catastrophic, but it started out pretty roughly. And I was pretty certain that any chance I had at getting this job was shot to hell. And yet, I got an offer. However, now I'm unsure about accepting  the offer. Does that make me ungrateful? Does that make me foolish since even getting the offer seemed like such a long shot? Why is being an adult full of so many hard decisions? I'm also a little bit unsure about doing my MFA. I have about a month to two months (depending on the schools) to get everything together for my applications. And I feel so... unprepared. That's a lot of money to invest if I'm not going to be able to put out my best. But then again, maybe God will work His wonders and I'll get acceptance letters anyway. Even when I probably shouldn...

This Halloween is truly happy, because early this morning I became an aunt! What a thrilling moment (and maybe slightly scary new role) for me! So Halloween will now officially be one of my favorite times of year, cause I'll get to celebrate (and spoil) a nephew! Overall, it's actually been a pretty fun Halloween. I normally don't do anything. Being a Christian, I'm not anti-Halloween, but I don't really celebrate it either. Also, having immigrants as parents meant the idea of buying costumes and having their children go door to door begging for treats from strangers was lost on my parents. My first time to trick or treat, oddly enough, was in Nigeria. The missionary families would take their kids house to house in the Seminary and Baptist Medical Center, and then there would be a Halloween Bash at the Ellison's house. One year I was a figure skater (and spent the whole time in the van because I couldn't roller skate) and then there was my last year in ...

It's official. I signed up for the National Novel Writing Month (a.k.a. NaNoWriMo ). This means I have 30 days to write 50,000 words or more, successfully completing a novel. I have no outline. No characters. No ideas. Okay... some ideas. But nothing really developed. I kind of decided to do this on a whim. I've had a few friends take up the challenge in previous year, and have been tempted to join, but always had some excuse as to why I couldn't do it. Well, I was seeing a lot of promo for it and then a friend of mine said she was doing it and asked me to add her as a writing buddy. And that's when I took the plunge. I've found a few tools to help me, too: Google's Writing Nook  and Scrivener .  And maybe along the way, I'll figure out what I'm sending as my writing sample(s) for my MFA applications! Wish me luck for next month! (And feel free to keep me accountable.)

I've started on my applications!!! Yay!  Although, not so much on working on any of the bucket-load of writing I need to do. Especially since my list of schools has grown from twelve to twenty! No intention of applying to them all, but it does make this process a little bit harder as I try to make decisions, etc. Right now, my biggest struggle is the personal statement. Each school has different lengths... and ultimately I need to answer the questions, why do I write and who do I want to be as a writer.  And that boils down to Anne of Green Gables and Chimamanda Adichie. Now to somehow articulate it in 350-800 words.  Anyway, I also started my online class, A to Z Grant Writing, and so far... so good. It's been pretty basic information, but I can already tell that by the end of the six weeks I would have learned so much. Hopefully it'll land me a real job, too. 

This week, I impulsively decided to listen to NPR. Although people assume that I listen to this radio station all the time (must be the journalist thing or something), I actually have only tuned in when my dad is in the car (in his world, only the news, classical music, and the occasional hymn or sermon is worth listening to). But this week, I was sick of listening to KLTY with their horrible commercials and over-the-top promotions, not to mention the same songs playing over and over and over again. And I thought, "why don't  I listen to NPR?" Without a good reason, I promptly switched the station. And I loved listening to the radio so much more this week. I'll be honest and say that sometimes the news and politics talk make me want to snooze, but for the most part the programming has engaged my mind during the generally mindless commute I make at various times during the day. I think my favorite show is A Way With Words , a language show. The English language i...