athenaltena | Five Things Learned

Well, one good thing that happened yesterday was that we got the scholarship application shipped off to North Carolina. And despite the fact that my English professor has essentially dropped the ball and didn't have my rec letter ready I'm not going to get penalized for it according to an email I got back from one of the people in charge of the scholarship. They must get this type of thing a lot.

So, because I keep insisting that this was a "learning experience", here's what I learned:

1. I really need to get a beta reader/editor for any vaguely important piece of writing I do. I miss a lot of stupid mistakes on my own. Especially when tired/stressed.
2. Summarizing a novel that isn't even finished is hard. Very hard. But I think I did a decent job with the summary I had to submit, hard as that was.
3. Page numbers on draft copies tend to help with editing. A lot. I learned that after the first draft I printed out and had my Dad copy-edit. Plus they take about 2 seconds to insert in Word.
4. The fact that I have a character named "Subaru" in my story is going to generate jokes about cars whether I want it to or not. The first one to crack that joke was actually my Dad, and he was just being funny, but he's probably going to be far from the last. Though I do mention at one point in the story that this character is named after the Pleiades, not the car, which only came into being some 500 years later *sigh*.
5. English Professors tend to be flakes, especially this one. Remind me never to ask him to do something for me with a deadline again. To his credit he's well known for being a little lacking in the memory department, and is otherwise a very nice guy, plus he was literally the first person I told about this scholarship and he seemed psyched about it. So hopefully he was just busy and will have my thing on Thursday and I can send that off to these people.

One of the (dare I say it) fun parts of this application was coming up with a 50 word biography, and this was what I came up with, which turned out to be 49 words:

I was raised by journalist parents in a house full of books and cats in the middle of the woods, learned to write in elementary school and have been addicted to it ever since, own way too many books, and spend lots of time up inside my own head.

And apparently that made my Mom laugh, so I think it expresses my personality pretty well.