Blog/Journal Update #3

Emily Kim
May 15th, 2023
Careers 12 – A Block

As of this week, I have finally go en around to star ng the manuscript for my li le book. My
end goal is to write about 100 pages, and I have 20 pages wri en out so far, so I’m about one
sixth of the way there. I am aware that I will need to work a li le quicker and produce more
work going forward, and that is what I plan to accomplish. But out of the 20 pages I have wri en
out so far, I have learned many thing about the process of wri ng a mul tude of stories/poems.
Wri ng poems can become very repe ve at mes, so it’s important to switch the style and
type of poem occasionally. A challenge I faced was that since the book will be a collec on of
poems/short stories, you can’t really afford to include unimportant or irrelevant informa on in
your stories, so I found myself scrapping a lot of work that I spent me on. It may be a waste,
but I feel like the impact on my other works would be lost compared to some of the ones I
wrote that seemed uninteres ng. And since I’m wri ng mostly poems, they tend to be shorter
than stories, so I’ve also been trying to find ways to write less but with more impact, so that a
smaller number of words will be more meaningful because of the lack of words.
One of the main core competencies I displayed during this me is Personal Awareness and
Responsibility. More specifically Self-Determina on and Self-Regula on. I found that I was able
to work more efficiently when I’m working towards a short-term goal. For example, I went easy
on myself since it’s my first week of wri ng, so I set a goal of 20 pages which I was able to
complete. This also caused me to be a li le wiser about my decisions and how I use my me. I
took me at home and during my study block to research and do more wri ng rather than
spending my free me on my phone or doing mindless tasks. I was also able to display Cri cal
Thinking and Crea ve Thinking in the aspect of wri ng edi ng and scrapping my work.
By the end of the week, I plan to have wri en about 50 pages (70 pages total). A li le
ambi ous, but by se ng goals and con nuing to spend my me wisely, I feel like I could be able
to accomplish it. Originally, I didn’t really plan to get my book printed, but I might do some more
research in that area just so I could own a physical copy to keep and present during the
capstone presenta on. I an cipate that I may be in a bit of a me crunch soon due to my slow
start of star ng the actual manuscript. I fear that I may have spent too much reading and
researching and hence sacrificed the me I had to write. I would prefer to have the actual
manuscript completed in about two weeks, so I can spend at least a week edi ng my work. And
again, I don’t really an cipate that I’ll need any materials other than my laptop and a trusty
thesaurus for wri ng moving forward.