Week 4 has already come and it feels like this is the turning point for catching up and finally getting my head around everything. I’ve had some productive study sessions recently but I’m still a little too focused on certain subjects because of how soon their first assessments are due, forgetting that they kind of queue up after the first one and that I need to be mindful of it. I’m hoping that this week I’ll finally get the green light to start my internship hours.

I haven’t been doing my writing prompts and have been struggling to write more than a couple of lines of personal writing but more than anything, I can’t decide on what my piece for my writing project will be. Because of some things, my critique group hasn’t met up yet, and so I haven’t felt the pressure to actually have something but our first meeting is coming up soon, and so I’m going to have to pick something soon. I keep switching in between a couple of ideas I have but am not happy with any of them being proposed as a ‘pick me, I’m fresh!’ kind of thing, and so that must mean that they’re not right, right?

I think the current problem is that one of them is so heavy that I don’t know how to approach it for publishing and don’t want to do it wrong but the other ideas I’ve picked are form old folders where I didn’t have a long-term purpose for it, and they’re just shallow stories about characters I wanted to design and needed to put somewhere. Like a terrarium rather than a real world. I think that’s a problem with a lot of my old work (pre-degree).

It has to be something that I could potentially publish, or at least fake my way through a proposal with. I always want to write something interesting and fun when we have critique groups, because it can be such a hard time if you hate what you’re reading, especially when it has to be read several times. That might be my problem, trying to tailor it to that goal rather than giving it a real purpose. There’s no ‘bigger picture’ and that’s not a good thing.

Right now, I’m tossing up between three ideas: My Cultural Safety Journey, Intrigue and Barely Human Commodities.

My Cultural Safety Journey

My Cultural Safety Letter will be a mix of an open letter and a personal essay that will outline what I have learned these past two years regarding my own culture and Australian culture and how my thinking has evolved. The purpose is to also challenge the thinking of the reader, which is designed to be non-Indigenous Australians.

Pros: it’s something that I want to write and I have a purpose and plan for it. It’s not the same as anything I’ve written before and the timing is correct for it.
Cons: it might not be received well because of its nature and I don’t know if I know enough right now to do it. I also don’t ordinarily write extended non-fiction and so don’t know how competent I will be writing it.

Intrigue

Intrigue is about an old god or demi-god (haven’t decided what they are yet) who has an insatiable curiosity about how humans respond in different scenarios. They work an ‘ordinary’ job and go to an ‘ordinary’ university, doing what they can to blend in while they invade the dreams of humans at night, putting them into vivid and stressful simulations whilst writing reports on them as if they were experiments.

Pros: it’s an interesting concept (or at least I think it is) and I already have enough written to get a critique on it
Cons: it doesn’t currently have any real direction because it wasn’t written with one and I haven’t been able to think of anything fitting that I feel isn’t stale

Barely Human Commodities

Barely Human Commodities is about a world where humans are spliced with animal DNA, giving them animal attributes. Like with the theories of control over how a baby is born, some people specially breed and raise either Talents, Fighters or Breeders. Like Pokémon, only with humans. It’s a standard rebellion against the system as the ‘Fauna Panel’ work to rescue Animalis who are abused for the profit of other organisations or people.

Pros: another interesting concept (maybe) and it has social commentary
Cons: the only plot line it currently has is very typical, I feel that it’s been done before, at least I know that aspects of it have been done, and kind of sounds cringy now that I lay it out.

So, what do I pick?

I’ve been thinking about just scrapping everything and starting again but nothing is coming to mind. It’s driving my mad… just a bit.