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With summer break fast approaching, graphic design students like me are trying to figure out productive ways to spend their time. Work for money? Work for experience? Summer classes?

I’ve spent the past few months doing everything I can to
find an internship this summer. Finding a company that isn’t an MLM and will
actually pay good money for your design work is tough. Luckily, graphic design
is a field that’s in demand, so there are a lot of good options out there.

The other option for getting design experience during the summer
break is freelance work, but that comes with its own slew of issues. There’s
nothing worse than beginning to work with a client and getting excited for a
project just for them to look at you with a face like the Surprised Pikachu Meme
when you start to discuss cost.

With two weeks left in the semester, here’s hoping we figure
something out soon!

Throughout my writing life, I’ve tried–and often failed–to maintain a balanced attitude towards my writing. Tried to read the work I’ve produced with enough detachment to make judgments about what needs doing (or perhaps it’s more apt to say “make assessments”) without getting hung up about the worth of the work.

So often in the classes I teach, I have to talk students down off the judgment ledge. “This stinks.” “This is awful.” “I hate it.” “I’m going to tear it up because it’s no good.”

I know what it’s like to have those feelings. But when I do–and when my students do–I remind them that their thoughts are just thoughts, their feelings are just feelings, and that they don’t necessarily have any truth functional value. That is, just because we say “This stinks” doesn’t mean that it does. And just because we feel “I hate it” doesn’t mean that the work in process isn’t good enough for the stage it’s at or doesn’t have the potential to become a fine work of art.

I tell my students, “Our job is to write the work, to finish the work to the best of our ability. It’s a critic’s job to evaluate the work.”

This is why I don’t do group critiquing in my classes. Because I want my students to think only in terms of their own work; I don’t want them to have to mull over several (twelve, fifteen) written judgments of how well other people think their work in progress is coming along. We each have to find our own particular, and sometimes idiosyncratic and peculiar voice, and this takes time, time best spent without listening to others’ opinions which can derail us. As I tell my students, what would a critiquing session sound like with William Faulkner sitting next to Ernest Hemingway sitting next to Virginia Woolf. Can you imagine it? “Your sentences are too long.” “Your sentences are too short.” “Why are you telling the story from so many points of view? Stick to just one!”

The problem with all this is that it’s judging a work way before a work is completed, way before the writer has found her/his voice for the work or even learned what the work is about. Many of us write really incomplete, semi-incoherent narratives while we’re in process, and we don’t figure things out until very late in the writing process. In my own work, what the work looks like two or three months before I finish often is very different from the work I complete. That’s because it takes me that long to figure out how I want to tell the narrative. And once I learn that, I work quickly.

I’ve seen many a writer–myself included–stopped dead in their tracks when someone offers criticism too soon. Or at all. My particular point of view is that we should wrestle with our work until we’re satisfied that we’re finished with it for now. When we believe that there is nothing left for us to do. Notice I don’t say we should wrestle with the work until it’s good. Just until we believe it’s finished for now, and working for the time being.

It’s important for me to maintain a certain equanimity while I write to get a book to the finish line. And there are a few behaviors I’ve adopted that help me.

1. I don’t say “My work,” I say “The work”. “The ending of the work needs some refining: maybe I need a concluding scene.” Compare this with “The ending of my chapter doesn’t work: maybe I need a concluding scene.” I learned to do this a long time ago. I read a wonderful meditation book for people with chronic illness that suggested it was better for us to say, “The arm is in a great deal of pain today” than to say “My arm is in a great deal of pain today” or to say “Anxiety is present today” rather than to say “I’m very anxious today. The first allows us some distance, some detachment that automatically makes us feel better (at least that’s true for me).

Similarly, when we say “the work” rather than “my work” we take a step back from our attachment to the work, allowing ourselves to assess what needs to be done, not judge the work.

2. Never judge our work’s merits. Just think about what needs to be done next, one small step at a time. Judging will prevent us from doing the work that needs doing. Think, instead, of the work that needs to be done: this will make us feel more powerful. It will give us an action plan. “The beginning of the work needs some tightening, I think; I’ll try it and see what happens” rather than “I hate the beginning of my chapter; I don’t know what to do.”

3. Keep our work to ourselves until we think it’s ready. Don’t hand our work around and ask other people what we should do, not unless we’ve wrestled with it work for a very long time and we’re truly stumped.

And a word about asking another writer to read our work. . . .

We must respect the fact that the reader is giving up time to do their own work to read our. Years ago, I spent a long time reading the manuscript of a friend’s memoir. She gave me guideline questions to answer as I’d asked. When I finished, I called to talk to her, whereupon the writer said that she’d changed everything already and that we didn’t need to talk. Hours of my time wasted. That was the last time I read her work.

Lois McMaster Bujold’s delightful series of novellas featuring Penric and his demon Desdemona continues with “The Orphans of Raspay” where Penric becomes hopelessly caught up in the sad situation of two orphan girls. If you haven’t read the previous novellas, go check them out, starting with “Penric’s Demon” (EBR review), where you’ll get my opinion on the Audible reader as well as the low-down on what it means to be a sorcerer with one’s own demon.

As seems to always be the case with the Bastard, the god and “master of all disasters out of season”, Penric thinks he has one job but finds himself unexpectedly on assignment to another. When his ship is boarded by pirates, he must use his wits to avoid them detecting his sorcerous side. He ends up with a group of potential slaves or those for ransom when he meets two young girls who were on their way to find their father. Their mother has died and seems that she has made a bargain with the Bastard to watch over her children after her death–and he has sent Penric (unbeknownst to him) to make good.

Penric solves this dilemma the only way he can: with cleverness, Desdemona’s magic, and a little (or a lot) of chaos. Desdemona is a chaos demon, after all, it wouldn’t be as fun without a little craziness. The relationship between Desdemona and Penric has only deepened. It feels like they really know, understand, and appreciate each other. I enjoy their relationship and interactions, and Bujold really makes them fun and sweet. But Penric makes a new relationship with the girls and discovers a paternal side he didn’t know he had. First, he must convince the girls that he wants to help, but they’re clever girls and haven’t survived this far by being silly. Bujold portrays the girls realistically and their interaction with Penric feel genuine.

There isn’t a whole lot of worldbuilding this time around compared to the other stories, although we do get to see a pirate town in action. There isn’t much new to the magic, either. Here, “The Orphans of Raspay” is more about relationships and Penric’s evolution as a representative of the Bastard. And he wears it well.

The post The Orphans of Raspay appeared first on Elitist Book Reviews.

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Green Sandi. When I tried to map the resources, they are not getting mapped correctly, So please check and advise.

Today on Reddit, someone posted a before and after picture of the picture of the Ohio State University’s quad. After planting the grass, students would walk across the field to get where they wanted instead of on the sidewalks around it. A more recent picture shows an overhead view of the quad today, and what was once dirt “desire paths” are now actual concrete sidewalks.

George Mason, on the other hand, treats these desire paths
like the plague. They’re tucked in all across campus, and rather than pave over
them and turn them into sidewalks, they’re blocked with barricades, ropes, and
trees. However, that doesn’t fix the problem, people simply walk around.

There’s a subreddit entirely dedicated to these desire paths,
and I’ve seen GMU’s campus posted multiple times. The comments section is
always shocked that the university would rather have patches of dirt and be
stubborn about the paths they want people to use instead of fixing the problem
and paving over it.