Week 8: Famous Last Words

At the halfway point in the semester, it seems appropriate to do one of these posts. :) I'm mostly keeping up in this class, despite having to switch to doing things according to the daily due dates instead of being a week or more ahead. Again, maybe I can use this weekend to forge ahead into Week 9 and buy myself at least a little space? (But who am I kidding; I'm also trying -- and not really succeeding -- to get ahead on research papers right now, too.) I'm getting more selective about the assignments I do; for example, I intentionally skipped the blog comments assignment for this week but made up the points with two tech tip extra credit things.

I'm super excited for the readings in the second half of this course! I've already started in Palace of Illusions, and up after that is Breaking the Bow and then, hopefully, allowing enough time, I'll read The Missing Queen. I love being able to work fun novels into my readings for class! Not to mention, these are all books I'd either run across before and wanted to read, or that were mentioned earlier in this course and sounded intriguing.

The Storytelling and Storybook assignments are hit-or-miss for me. I was surprised by how my first Storybook story turned out. I had expected to put in more detailed information about festival celebrations, but I ended up having a difficult time finding much more than surface descriptions. On the other hand, I felt like Sita's voice really took over as I was writing, which is the first time I had that authorly character-writes-own-story feeling. For the weekly blog assignment, meanwhile, I loved the idea of telling Krishna's story as a revitalization movement, but I felt like the idea fell flat as I tried to actually write a version pulling out those elements. Eh, on to the next week!

(source)