March 28, 2013

An Unexpected Education

The past month has been another surprise for me. My writing plan is not at all going as expected, and yet my personal movement toward a next novel is going quite wonderfully.

I started February by doing as I had planned, with some odd bits of writing and a good focus on a short story. Then a tweet came in from an acquaintance, with an invitation to join her in taking a MOOC from Coursera: Aboriginal Worldviews and Education. After a quick check, I determined that it was a quality course offered through the University of Toronto and would not offer a challenge financially. The time allotted for the course seemed just manageable, so I signed up.

I usually take a lot more time to think about something before going ahead. Had I thought about it longer, I may have convinced myself that I didn’t have time. Instead, the four weeks following February 25 have reminded me of November, with such an intense focus on one thing. All my spare moments went into the course. I didn’t do any writing other than for the course. I did a lot of reading and a lot of listening, and when I couldn’t do those things, I did a lot of thinking.

I am very glad for having taken the course. It was very well done and I learned a lot. Having been out of any educational setting for at least 20 years, I was glad to be back at focused learning for a while.

One of my main goals in starting my blog was to put myself out there as a writer. It is a way to share my writing journey and in so doing to help myself along in my process. I’m not blogging about actual writing this month, in this belated post, however, I am moving myself along in my process.

I took this course because I see it as research for my next novel. I don’t know exactly how it will contribute, as my story is really still quite a vague idea, but I do know that it will help. Part of my process is learning to trust myself, to trust the internal process that will lead itself to the novel that I NEED to write. So far, I’m finding this to be rather fun.

The plan for my next blog is to put some words to the things I learned while taking the course.


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