Back to School for This Old Fogey
It’s been three decades
Thirty years. That’s how long it’s been since I’ve been in school. I’ve taken a course here and there, but nothing where I’m required to actually, you know, learn stuff.
I considered it for many years but I never knew what to take or what would be interesting. I thought I should be taking courses to further my (nonexistent) career but I could never quite figure out what those courses would be. Money was also a huge issue, specifically, not having any. Yes, I could have applied for student loans but then I’d have one more debt to pay off and for many, many years I could barely manage the payments I was making on my current debts. Adding to the debt pile seemed unwise, especially if there was no guarantee of employment after the courses.
So I finally took the plunge. I had enough wiggle room on my credit card and the payments don’t feel quite as mountainous as they once were. But rather than go slow, I signed up for three different courses.
Two are writing-related: One for manuscript preparation and one about speculative fiction. The novel I wrote is weird, so I thought it’d be good to have some feedback on it from someone who has published speculative fiction. Feedback is provided in both writing courses, so it’ll be interesting to see the difference in instructors’ comments.
