Some Thoughts On The Matter

    If there's one thing people should know about me during my first few years at college, it should be that I have had horrid  luck with my past living situations. Whether it was freshman year and being lumped in with what was widely regarded as "The Worst Dorm on Campus " or my sophomore year living in a roach-infested drug den with a violent psychopath, it would be reductive to say that I've had a rough time with my "home life" in Tallahassee. However, even in the worst of situations, keeping a positive attitude has allowed me to make the most of what I can (so I wouldn't be completely miserable at home). Though it may have been hard in the moment, I look back on those first few years a little fondly, if only in a weird, messed-up kind of way. I learned a lot about myself and how to cope with all sorts of situations, ranging from pest infestations, loud noises, buildups of garbage piles, and more violence than I probably should've put up with.    ...

It's time for an end-of-the-year 2025 retrospective blog post! Truthfully, I debated on whether or not I should write such a basic, obvious blog post to round out the year, but I ultimately decided I would. Even if it's a bit selfish or boring to read for others, 2025 has been one of the most important, productive, and fun years of my life (if it feels like I say that about every year, then I think that's a good sign). I accomplished so much this year, whether it was social, academic, or professional, that I think I'll allow myself to pat myself on the back and celebrate myself as a 21st birthday present to myself. But before I spend the rest of this blog congratulating myself, I think it's important to recognize some shortcomings from the goals I set for myself this year.     At the start of the year (or rather at the end of the last year), I posted a blog that was meant to look forward to 2025 as a year of new growth, new challenges, and self-improvement. As a res...

    After October, I really started to take into account the small things in my life that provided me with stability during such a strenuous time in my college life. My friends who would check up on me, the simple but filling meals I would make for myself after a long day, and the routines that gave me something to stick to. One of the most important routines I kept was journaling how my day went, every single night at 11:45 PM. I took it up as a writing challenge for this academic year for fun, but it wasn't until I was reflecting on the past month that I realized how important it's become to me and my mental health. Before I tell you to pick it up for yourself, I figured you might want to hear about the background info on why I started and what sort of benefits I got out of it so far!     For context, I've issued myself a challenge every year since freshman year of high school, which tend to focus on different routines. They don't always have to relate to writing, ...

    Hey there! At the time of writing this, I've essentially finished up most of my FSUFilm application work (which is what I wrote about for the last three months), with only my personal statement remaining. But if you're getting a little tired of me blogging about my film school application, worry not! I have been keeping busy with plenty of other responsibilities and side quests that all came crashing down on me during the month of October. Among friends, I had a pretty grisly name for this month, but for the sake of this blog, I'll be referring to this October as Hell Month 2025 .     So what exactly made October so hellish for me? Let's start with the "needs" first, meaning responsibilities that I was required to attend to.      I'll start off with my Kudzu responsibilities— in terms of actually managing the team meetings, the weekly readings, and being a team leader, I was having a great time! I haven't really talked about how my new position as ...

 Finally, I have reached the last writing sample prompt for my application to the MFA Screenwriting program at FSU Film. It's taken many months of planning, drafting, and writing to get to this point, but now I'm finally ready to tackle my final script for the application... which happens to be the first prompt assigned. Hopefully I wasn't supposed to do this in a specific order! The prompt goes as follows: A two-page non-dialogue scene about a person trying to kill a spider in his/her home.      Immediately, my instinct with this piece is to lean comedic. After all, the first thing that comes to mind when I read the prompt is the mental image of one of the Three Stooges trying to kill a spider in a kitchen or something, resulting in much physical comedy and gags where the person gets hurt and the spider gets out without a scratch. And as fun as writing a Three Stooges sketch sounds, I have to assume that if it was my first thought, it was also everyone else's first ...

 Hello again! I've taken a month to take some time off (it is the summer after all) and start cooking a new idea for a story! The looming expectations of my application to FSU Film's Screenwriting program seem to dominate every minute where I'm not busy with school work or other activities, so I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone and work on an original story for a little bit while also tackling Writing Sample 3 of the MFA Application, which says: "A sample of original creative work, such as a short story, short play or screenplay of up to 5 pages."     Seems like a lot of wiggle room this time! I'm actually really looking forward to writing something for FSU Film that isn't borne from a restrictive prompt. While I do think that limits force writers to be more creative, and I feel pretty proud of my last script about microwaves, I do want to write a script that gives me a chance to flex my more creative situational imagination instead of dealing...