Puppy and College and Work, OH MY

Here goes a new semester! I ended up dropping a class to keep my life from being too crazy this semester, so I just have six classes! And they're all super fun looking ones. Yay!

Abnormal Psychology
Fundamentals of Counseling
Human Genetics
Cognitive Neuropsychology
Marimba Ensemble (we have our big performance this semester, too!)
Karate II

Karate and Marimba are both classes I'm taking purely for enjoyment and hour credits. I also get a scholarship for Marimba, which is definitely nice.

Cognitive Neuropsychology will be the hardest, I'm guessing. It's known for being a hard class, partly because the professor is super smart and students have trouble understanding everything that's taught in class. So fingers are crossed for that class!

Human Genetics I'm taking for my Science credit. Figure it'll be an interesting addition to the Neuropsychology class.

I'm probably most excited for the Abnormal Psych class-- I already have my textbook and have looked through it and it looks like it'll be majorly interesting. I've heard from a lot of students that Fundamentals of Counseling is pretty awesome, so I also have a lot of excitement for that one too. I've also had both of those professors before, and they're both really cool.

So yay schoolz!

I'm also still teaching piano and working at the library, both of which I'm still enjoying. I just had a student return, so I officially have eight students again! Whoop whoop!

A final thing that will be making things interesting is that I recently got a puppy...

Yeah, I know, genius move, right?

My dog, Madison, had to be put down about a month ago, which was really depressing. She was about thirteen-years-old, so she lived a good long life. We did 4-H Obedience, Agility, and Showmanship together, and got several Grand and Reserve Champion scores. She was pretty much the perfect dog, I'm pretty sure.

But anyhow, yeah.

My mom's dog needed company, because he's been around other dogs all his life and he's a hyper Shepherd dog that needs to spend energy. So we needed another dog. And I wanted a puppy, because I like to be the one to raise my dogs.

So, I found an ad on Craigslist advertising Rottweiler Labrador mixes, and picked one up, aaand found out she was part Pitbull too. I'm not one of those people who is negative feeling about Pitties, but I do know that raising a Pit mix is going to be a lot more work. Not sure what I've got myself into here, but she's the cuddliest puppy I've ever met, so I'm up for the challenge.

If you want to hear more about her, I started a blog for our adventures here: Pit Adventures

And this is getting long, so I'll leave it at that! Update complete!

-Raven

Goals and Such

So, I recently returned from a writers' workshop that I've been attending since 2010. It's put on by One Year Adventure Novel (lovingly known as OYAN) and consists of the Summer Workshop and the Winter Workshop (which has actually only been around three years). It's kinda awesome how much OYAN has grown-- the first workshop (Summer Workshop) in 2010 lasted only a day and consisted of a very small number of students. Like, twenty or less.

I haven't attended the last two Summer Workshops, but they're now HUGE. I think the last one I attended had more than eighty students, and it lasts for five days now. The year before last they introduced the Winter Workshops, for the older (mostly graduated) students, which are smaller, and wonderful.

Every year, I leave super inspired and ready to work on more story stuffs. This year they had a focus on making goals as well, so I left inspired as well as with goals in mind and a head-start actually meeting them. 

Aaaand, I'm going to post them on here.

Writing Goals for 2015:

Finish the rough draft of the current novel I'm working on (Rising as We Fall)
Finish editing my murder mystery
Get a short story published
Enter at least one story contest

Poof and voila! Writing goals! Yay!

I shall hopefully update my progress on these regularly (hopefully)!

- Raven