I've Been M.I.A., But I'm Back With a College Degree!

This blog is something I treasure. It allows me a platform to write my thoughts on topics that are important to me in long form, and then to distribute those thoughts to a large audience. It provides me with a place to practice my writing, which, to a young writer trying to sell her fiction, is valuable no matter what the medium. It also produces instant feedback from readers and gives me the opportunity to interact with them.

So why haven't I written anything here since June of 2014? Why have I been neglecting something so important to me for almost a year?

Well, a number of life-changing things have happened to me in the past ten months. For your convenience, here's a chronological list:

• This person wandered into my life and made me fall in love. Rude. I would recommend following said person on Twitter and Instagram though, since both include quality content (Danny is both an amateur photographer and sassmaster).
• I went to the Caribbean on a family vacation and met some donkeys. The donkeys in Bonaire are morally offended by any form of journalism and so refused to allow me to write a blog post in their country.
• I started my senior year of college, which is the primary reason I wasn't updating this blog. Because of how draining senior year was, both academically and emotionally, I actually fell behind on everything, including writing/editing/revising my novels, reading for pleasure, keeping up with the publishing world, etc. Even playing video games started to feel like exerting too much effort.
• During my senior year, I taught a class on Leo Tolstoy, one of my favorite classic authors. If you're interested, we read Anna Karenina, selections from War and Peace, part of his essay "What is Art?", and The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories (a compilation of his shorter works), using the award-winning translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The class was small, but a big academic and personal success. It also took a lot of work, as you would expect. If you're into beautiful prose, expertly crafted characters, and emotions in general, I recommend you read all of these things.
• I ended up smack in the middle of a censorship controversy at my university (which, now that I no longer attend the school, I am comfortable stating is the University of Redlands). I was co-editor-in-chief of the student newspaper The Bulldog Weekly when, midway through the year, our student government decided to cut our funding. Suspiciously, this came after we published an article that didn't make the university look very good. My co-editor and I wrote about it here, but I plan to write a blog post talking more extensively about this as well.
• I graduated from college, earning my bachelor's degree in Writing Fiction: Listening, Absorbing, and Creating, which is a combination of the literature, creative writing, and psychology fields. If you're wondering why my major sounds made up, that's because it is. During my undergrad, I was part of an incredible program called the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies that allows students to design their own majors, which requires a lot of extra thought and self-motivation. I have a lot of negative feelings toward my university right now because of the whole newspaper drama mentioned above, but I can't speak more highly of Johnston and it will always have my heart. So, if you're considering the U of R, DO JOHNSTON.

And now I'm doing some traveling in Europe as a sort of graduation gift to myself. But what comes next?

Originally, I had planned to pursue a master's degree immediately after finishing my undergrad. Senior year helped me realize that I'm pretty burned out on school, at least for now, so I'll be spending the next year focusing on my novels, catching up with the publishing world, pleasure reading, and keeping up with this blog. I'm so excited to finally have time to participate in these things again, without having to schedule them around homework.

After that? We'll see. What masters degree would I want to pursue? Many might think I'd go for a creative writing MFA. I considered that at first, but now I know that's not the path I want to take. I have many reasons for this, which I hope to discuss on this blog at some point in the future.

What about literature? Tempting, but I think I'd rather indulge in all the pleasure reading I can in the years to come. Pursuing a masters in literature means committing myself to whatever my professors list in the syllabus. While I'm sure they'd assign some excellent reading, it means another several years of not having time to read purely for pleasure. Also, the niche I'm most interested in learning more about is Russian literature, and I'm pretty sure that requires learning Russian. Which would be great, and I would love to do that eventually! But I'd prefer to focus on getting my writing out there first.

If I'm going to pursue a masters in anything, my ideal choice (for the moment) is a masters in publishing. I'm really interested in becoming involved with publishing from the editorial side as well as the author side, and I've looked into some publishing programs that seem like excellent networking opportunities.

So, expect more posts from me now. I don't have homework taking up my time anymore and I'm looking forward to posting my thoughts somewhere less restrictive than Twitter. For those of you who have stuck with this blog, thank you so much for reading. For those of you who started following me within the past year, welcome, and I'm glad to have you!

I hope this is the beginning of a fulfilling and educational new era for this blog. Keep an eye out on Instagram for photos of England, Ireland, Scotland, and more!

-Morgan

Read More

Update: Why You've Been Hearing Nothing but Crickets from Me

Hey readers!

I just wanted to give you lovely people a quick update about why I seem to have completely vanished from my blog (I'm sad whenever I remember I haven't written a blog post since February). I spent a month after writing my Frozen post editing my third novel until it was in fine enough condition to have people actually read it, so my priorities during that period were that and schoolwork. During April, the finals crunch really set in. Now I'm taking a month-long class dedicated to reading Ulysses (by James Joyce) and practically nothing else.

For those of you who haven't heard of the book, Ulysses is an extremely experimental, dense, and complicated novel and takes a lot of energy to simply read, let alone respond to and discuss. For instance, last week my friends and I spent nine or ten hours reading a chapter that was eleven pages. Eleven pages. But I love the thing. I'm only halfway through, but I get the feeling it'll be up there with War and Peace for me (which is a huge honor).

I've still managed to be fairly active on Twitter, so during the next month, you can find me there (usually rambling about Ulysses). Once the summer starts, I should be back to updating this blog, which I'm excited about. Just because I haven't been updating doesn't mean I haven't been getting ideas!

See you in June!

-Morgan

Read More

Tips and Thoughts on Traveling

I have returned from Italy! What does this mean, readers? It means lazing around in my sweatpants for a couple days, jet lag punching me in the face on a regular basis (my body thinks it's 9:00 pm right now, WOO!), and getting to write another blog post after nearly a month away from it.

As you know from reading my previous blog post, I was in Italy with a class. Now, I am a big fan of scholarly pursuits, and traveling is one of my favorite things to do. Putting them together is like combining peanut butter and chocolate for me. So, I had some expectations. I expected the other members of my class would be just as enthusiastic about learning as I am, and as conscious and self-aware (read: as non-touristy as possible) about being in a different country as I aspired to be. I thought I'd be traveling with a band of "my people."

Before I proceed, please note that I am not slamming my classmates, nor am I saying that they are wrong or disappointing because they did not bring my fantasy to life. Some of them were truly there for the class, while some just wanted the experience of being in Italy. That's fine; to each his own. Many of them did not manage to finish all the homework, or did not attempt it. People half-assed their final projects, or found ways to get good grades while still not putting their all into their work. Almost every night, most of my classmates went to a bar and got drunk. Again, that's all totally valid. People were there to have fun, and that is their version of fun.

Conversely, I'm the type of person who likes learning for the sake of learning, and gets frustrated when others do their work in a way that rewards them with strong grades but cuts how much they actually learn in half. I get more frustrated when so many people don't do the reading that we can't have a fruitful class discussion as a result. I don't drink and I don't think I've ever been to a bar, unless it was also a restaurant. So, was I in Italy with "my people?" For the most part, no. But did I have fun with them? Yes. Not in the way I expected, but I very much enjoyed my time with my classmates and will always be happy for the experience we had together.

The point of this semi-disclaimer is I want to post some tips on traveling that occurred to me while abroad, but I also want to emphasize that these tips apply to the type of experience I, specifically, like to attain while traveling. My classmates didn't follow all of these tips, but that doesn't mean that the way they traveled was "wrong." It just means that they wanted to get something different out of Italy than I did. So, if your personality isn't much like mine, these tips might not help you. Or you could get something out of them. You never know. If you are like me--eager to learn both academically and culturally, not too interested in the night life, aiming to be as efficient as possible--then you might enjoy these tips:

1) If you are traveling for a reasonably short amount of time (such as a month) and know you will be based in more than one hotel or city, pack as light as you possibly can. My professor suggested none of us check any bags and to avoid rolling suitcases due to all the cobblestones. I took this to heart. I purchased a backpack that just barely fit the tripod and telescope required for the astronomy portion of the class. I only packed a week's worth of shirts and three pairs of pants, choosing not to care that I'd have to wear them multiple times without washing them. I made sure all my liquid toiletries were less than 3.4 fluid ounces so I could carry them on. Was it worth it? Hell yes! I didn't have to worry about stairs or a ridiculously heavy bag. Travel between cities went more smoothly, and it felt good to have all my stuff on my person. I didn't have to worry about lost luggage or anything.

2) Be culturally sensitive and conscious of how you behave in public. If you're American, like me, many other countries already have a bad impression of your country. Some of this extends to USA residents, meaning some people who live elsewhere assume certain things about you just because of where you're from. For example, before departing for Italy, my professor's wife warned us that American girls have a reputation abroad for being "loose" (translation: not so picky about who they sleep with), loud, obnoxious, ethnocentric, and big party animals. Now, some American girls are like this, and there's nothing wrong with that. People are different. But for people like me, who don't fit any of these traits (at least I hope I'm not obnoxious or ethnocentric), it can mean having to work extra hard against people's preconceptions of you. I only looked a man in the eye if I had to directly interact with him, such as if he was my waiter. I spoke as much Italian as I knew instead of expecting everyone to know English, even though most Italians do. When what I needed to say went beyond the Italian words I knew, I asked if they spoke English to be courteous (though, sadly, I sometimes forgot to do this).

As a side note, I really dislike the philosophy, "Who cares what I do? I'm never gonna see these people again." Sure, but you're perpetuating negative American stereotypes. Worse than that, sometimes it means being incredibly rude to people, which is doubly insensitive when you're a visitor in THEIR country. Just be nice! And if you make an honest mistake, learn how to say "I'm sorry" in Italian, or in whatever language best corresponds to the country you visit.

3) Don't get drunk every night. I might be biased because I don't drink, but there are some good, practical reasons for this. Of course you wanna drink wine in Italy and have some fun. From what I hear, Italian wine is excellent, and if you're between the ages of 18-20, you can buy alcohol abroad when you can't at home! If you wanna get drunk a couple of times, go for it. But don't go overboard. According to a guidebook we read, having a good time by getting wasted is a pretty American concept. By the time European kids are 18, they're used to wine. I might be wrong about this, but I've heard some of them have been drinking it with meals for a while by then. For them, it's not this forbidden substance or a big thrill to drink (excuse my ignorance if I'm wrong). Americans who get completely trashed all the time while abroad are, among other things, supporting a stereotype. More importantly, keeping an eye on how much you drink is for your own safety. You're in a foreign country. You don't wanna be taken advantage of. Also, do you know how much money I saved by not buying alcohol? Probably hundreds of euro.

4) Balance your sightseeing with your studies. There's a reason we went to Italy to study Galileo instead of China. How wonderful is it to read about Galileo facing the Holy Office of the Inquisition in the Vatican and then walking down that intimidating hallway yourself? How awesome is it to look through a telescope and see the moons Galileo discovered with your own eyes? I would have loved Italy either way, but viewing it through Galileo's eyes, 400 years after he made his discoveries, enriched my experience a hundred fold. I will never forget his story, which is so significant to human history, because of the context in which I learned about it. I understand his importance so much better than I would have if I'd read about it in a classroom in Southern California. Sure, I could have been out exploring more of Florence when I was reading about Galileo's discoveries in my hostel. But do I regret it? Not for a second.

I have lots more to say on this topic, but I realize this post is getting rather long. So I will say one more thing. I grew a lot in Italy. I feel much more like an adult now than I did when I left. I walked through Roman and Florentine streets by myself and found my way back to my hostel without issue. I only got lost twice the entire time I was there. I spoke to non-English speaking people even though I was embarrassed by my lack of fluency in Italian. Above all, though, I did not worry nearly as much as I do when I'm at home. In Italy, I let things happen and I didn't stress about it (for the most part--there were a few exceptions). My concerns suddenly became small. All the things I fretted over on a regular basis while at home seemed tiny when I was so far away, in a country that was practically a different world. Yes, I am a writer trying to get my work published. But if that doesn't happen or doesn't work out the way I want it to, the world will not explode. The Colosseum will still be standing, with historical richness literally etched into its walls. Venice will continue to be made out of magic and unicorns. Wonderful things will still be happening all over the world.

I hope everyone who reads this gets to escape their bubble, if even only for a few days, at least once in his or her life. Happy travels.

-Morgan

Read More