Writer's Stress

            Today I worked longer than I ever have on my senior project! Over the weekend, I found out that I received the Stamps President’s Scholarship at Georgia Tech. I thought that it would be best to attend the last accepted student reception at UVA to get a final feel for the school before making my decision between UVA and Georgia Tech. Since I was in Charlottesville for the past few days, I was unable to work on my project on Monday or Tuesday.  So, I had to spend every second that I could today trying to make up for this lost time (along with trying to balance a new class in my schedule). I spent the 30 minutes between my English class and lunch break reading through the commentaries that I had written for my first ten pages. I am really glad that I got the time to look through these because I realized that I had made a few simple mistakes in my writing. I also realized that there were some letters where I had completely forgotten to write commentaries! I filled in these gaps during this time and made final revisions to each letter.

            After lunch, I spent around three hours looking at the rest of my commentaries for each letter. I continued to catch simple mistakes in my writing, and I found letters that needed more elaboration to improve clarity. I also had my parents read through each blurb of text to get their feedback on the details that I chose to focus on. The hardest part about writing the text of the book was definitely trying to decide what must be included and what could be left out. For example, the flora and fauna page could have so many details about different types of species found in Ecuador. However, it was impossible to talk about them all in less than four sentences. I spent the next four hours of my day trying to start piecing the images and text together within the Blurb software. This was my new favorite part of the process – getting to see the book finally take the form of a real children’s book. The hardest part was reformatting the text to fit the “Print Safe” lines on each page. I cannot wait to see how it all looks when it is done (hopefully by the end of this week).