Semester is over! I’ve basically finished my first year of my Creative Writing degree as of yesterday. Well, I have this one 10 minute prac test tomorrow and there’s the off chance I won’t pass this one subject, so technically I’m ten minutes away from possibly finishing my first year, but then after that, I am free.

Perhaps I will reflect on that in another post, but I definitely think the decision to go to uni finally has been great for my writing and helping to take it seriously. I also feel so much calmer and healthier in the head not working full-time in that office job of mine.

But holidays means much more time, which will mean I’m going to find some kind of casual job for a bit before uni goes back next year. I have like four months holidays which is kind of a lot of time. We’re actually only at uni for half of the year, which doesn’t seem like much given we’re getting into truckloads of debt for it.

But anyway, holidays means more time and lots of things to do, including…

• Reading! Lots of reading. Reading political books, like Eugene Debs’ biography, Bending the Cross, which I’ve been meaning to finish, and novels like Suffient Grace by Amy Espeseth which I’ve had my eyes on, and lots of poetry too. I think I will start compiling and culling a manageable list of things to read over the holidays.
• Writing! Of course, but writing that I want to do, and getting together with classmates and other writers outside of class to critique stuff and push each other to send stuff out.
• Art! I’ve got a canvas sitting around that needs stuff added to it, as well as a few other ideas.
• Learn how to use fewer exclamation marks!
• NaNoWriMo i.e. National Novel Writing Month i.e. writing 50,000 words in a month i.e. writing a lot in a select period of time
• Write more poems, which is like point two but specifically poetry and lots of them
• Put on a poetry gig involving RMIT creative writing students because that would be fun and I have time for more poetry gigs and I want to show other Melbourne poets how talented we all are
• Running – Yeah, am still obsessed with that. Running the City2Sea on November 11, 14km, so will be training for that. And finding other races to do
• More cycling because I got a new bike and it’s less impact on my joints from all the running, and am liking getting around like that.

So yes, I have grand plans, much of which might fall apart fairly quickly, but hopefully not. If you know of jobs around, let me know, that would help heaps. What’s everyone else got planned?