Week 2 — Fighting Obstacles
Like anything in life when one starts a journey its almost always impossible to expect a smooth ride. In all the previous iterations that I have ventured forward in, it’s the small things that usually beget the growing avalanche of obstacles which will eventually stop my passion projects.
Nonetheless pushing through these is a task that I have assigned myself for this 365 day project and as such I have worked through some of my passion projects. Out of the five passion projects that I have worked on, I have been able to move forward on three of them whilst I am waiting on feedback for one. The rest is something that I have engaged into research on.
As a communication specialist my job has a tendency of taking me everywhere and I also have a schedule that is constantly changing. Thus I have to work on the fact that each of my tasks and projects need to be reorganized through the various challenges that I encounter. One tool that is helping me through this is the Passion Planner, which I found to be an interesting way of keeping track of my day without having to depend on internet, devices or even electricity (each nursing a potential for becoming an obstacle). If and when I have internet access then I use Sunrise to organize my web calendar and Any.Do for tracking any latent to do lists that I may need to log in.
Without further ado lets delve in my set of activities for this week. The first project that I want to mention in is the MIKMIKRADIO project.
MIKMIK RADIO
As mentioned last week I had set proposals for local radio stations and I am still waiting on the feedback for those. In terms of programming though there was a milestone, it was the first time that I surpassed the 3 hours mark for my set of individual program uploads.
This came to be through the mixing of my two different programs into one “epic” program which highlighted 45 songs of different genre organised through the three main sections. This had to be done in a hectic three hours and also had to follow the tradition of the two types of programs that I usually upload on a weekly basis. After finishing recording this program I was afraid that the amount of songs and the differing nature of their messages would be off-putting to my usual set of listeners since they included two different philosophies. Nonetheless the feedback that I have gotten was quite encouraging and I found out that people had enjoyed the selections.
The feedback was also supported by the ranking that I have gotten from the Mixcloud chart sessions which was a good incentive to keep doing what I am doing.
POF
For my graphic novel project, this week I started to outline each of the vast array of main elements that would be involved in the project. As mentioned last week although I had the skeleton of the story that I wanted to tell and I could very well give a concise and apt synopsis on the crux of what the story will be. Once I re-embarked on actually writing it I realized that I had to go on about fleshing out the character sets and world and subsequently I had to go on about the process in a clear and detailed way which would only be aiding me in fortifying the essence of my story. This meant that I had to have a character set descriptions (1 paragraph for each character set), a timeline into which these character sets will be involved in, how they would interact in the world of POF ( hence the coggle diagram) and then character profiles, story outline, etc. This would be an ongoing process that would eventually be THE bible for any and all things POF.
My plan is to have the main structure for the world building set by the end of February, hence this week I went on creating character set descriptions for each and every one I had listed last week. That turned out to be an interesting exercise since it gave me some new ideas to incorporate in the story, thus I hope that doing this exercise repeatedly will help me construct a more robust story. For next week my plan is to have a detailed story plot outline and a full page synopsis of the first three chapters of volume 1. Afterwards I would have a good foundation to actually start writing which accordingly will be started by mid March
KAHN
I have only a small update for this project, one of the reasons that I did not get to do as much as I would have liked when it came to implementing my projects was because I had an assignment that took me to Bahirdar and as such I didn’t have the requisite time and organization to meet my deadlines. Even so this trip actually helped me clear up some interesting things regarding the setting of my novel KAHN, which basically had the first part of the story happening in that area.
Thus I got in touch with some local people and conducted an impersonal research to acquire a more meaningful insight into how things were in the times that my novel was set. This exercise helped me view some interesting perspectives on events taken from people who actually lived through them.
This will be a good thing to use on my novel since it would make my story more plausible and believable, next week I will be working on adding to my word count which currently stands at 6055.
AMHARIC FONT DESIGN
This is the project that got sidelined due to the inability of being in my home office to work on it, hopefully I will device a system whereas I will be able to work on producing works no matter where I will be.
A dear friend of mine has suggested I look into some typography projects that were done by Addis Ababa University students which I thought would be a good idea since it would be giving me perspective and I will try to do that this week, if not I will work on some basic sketches which I hope to show you next week.
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Here’s hoping that I will bring you a more productive update for next week’s objectives, until next time. SAYONARA
