they accepted me!

Oh lord, if I were to list the avalanche of disappointments this semester we’d be here all night. To keep it short, most of my time was spent holed up in my room with a bunch of textbooks and thirty labs, and as the months passed I just hated my major in increasing amounts.

Some of you know that I applied for an internal transfer to Columbia College back in mid-March.

I just finished my last final today, lo and behold I get the most welcome letter in my inbox saying that they’ve accepted me!

Nobody in my family is particularly happy for me, and few people understand why I’m so happy. One of the first reactions I got were, “Oh, didn’t you already get into the engineering school? How is this different?”

Well, internal transfers are just as difficult as external ones–this was completely unexpected. The acceptance rate is about 9%, and my GPA is dreadful from all the engineering classes I had to take, they had no reason to take me and I had written off the possibility entirely. I looked back on applying as, a “what the hell, it doesn’t cost me anything, why not try for it?” kind of deal, and I never thought they would take me!

The worst reaction were my parents, who weren’t excited at all, my father a calm acceptance at the next crazy antic his daughter would get herself into, my mother almost hostile, asking whether or not anthropology would find me a job.

I don’t know. I didn’t think that far. As I said, I didn’t even think I’d get in.

But I don’t care, I am ELATED.

thoughts on flash fiction

I think I finally figured out why I’m only able to write flash fiction (under 1000 words… perhaps even less). This is my theory: whenever I set out to write something, I always think of the end first. This has happened in every piece, fiction or poetry, I’ve written in the past five years. I get a little thrill out of that emotional kick of the last line.

Because I know how it ends, I’m impatient to get there. At best, the words are economical, at worst, they’re rushed. Almost every piece I’ve written can be defined by it’s last line. If you reminded me of a piece I had written (Case in point “O,” “Soulmates,” “Anna,” etc.) I can tell you verbatim what the last line was.

What I realized in roleplaying, however, was that sometimes you don’t know how it ends. Anna’s story is largely unfinished, which is why I feel compelled to keep writing it. I dug her backstory out of one impulsive scene (she climbed through the window offering the notorious rake a job), but it was only backstory–I don’t know what happens to her.

My question is, have you ever experienced this? Do you think this is a set-back, or just a feature of one’s writing?  And if you have experienced this, how do you get past it?