Kirylin’s Voice

It turns out working on my application essay for NYU has really affected me. I’m very nervous about this transition to begin with, even though I’ve debated and researched for the past year to make sure this is the right move.

Working on these questions is really making me feel pretty small and stupid right now. I realize that’s just a weed-out technique, and I’m really above it, but I’m really afraid I’m not going to be able to offer an application that measures up. They only take 30 students each year.

Because the seed of doubt has been planted, I’m now freaking out about Syracuse, too. I know if I can pull together the NYU app, then I can submit it to Syracse and look like an incredibly strong candidate.

The whole thing has actually produced an interesting reaction out of me. I think someone may have to actually physically remove me from my room for a few hours some time soon, just because I’m so freaked out.

Thanks to working on these applications, I am now aggressively working on the book I’ve been promising my students. I’ve set the order for the book, and am writing articles to explore each topic as I try to figure out what’s going to work, and what won’t. I’m designing graphics for the articles. I’m plotting various parts of the article. The mascot thing is still eluding me, but the teens tell me the little alien is a hokey kind of cute.

I’ve also put together a few notes on how to make the book interactive so it could be offered in a different format.

Then I apparently got bored, because I pulled out some notes I made on a very long bus ride from San Antonio, Texas, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, two summers ago. These were originally notes for a set of children’s books I was going to write for NaNoWriMo that year. The plans eventually developed into a series of choose your own adventure books, thereby making them illegal for NaNo, but the means of how the adventure was selected was fascinating.

Essentially, the reader follows a path through the book by solving problems. It occurred to me at the time that the whole thing would actually make more sense as a video game, but I was bound and determined to write it out as a book. I had quite a bit of it planned out. I had the books named and numbered. I had the characters laid out (oddly enough, my characters really follow the action movie/cartoon/comic book formula. eep!). I had several ideas written out for puzzles.

Everything has now been typed in to EverNote, and I’m already trying to picture storyboards and determine how much item writing needs to be done per book. It’s going to be some work, and it’s a project I’m not going to be able to do at my current level of knowledge. If I can get it to something haflway respectable that will show off what I currently know, though, then it can become part of my portfolio for NYU.

I feel like I could take on the world and have a nervous breakdown in the process!