defibrillate (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
defibrillate) wrote2011-07-10 12:39 pm
defibrillate) wrote2011-07-10 12:39 pm
Entry tags:
SO PRODUCTIVE
I am feeling pretty proud of myself. You know how I said I shouldn't pick up any more comics, back on Free Comic Book Day? I was wrong! It turns out they've been wonderful inspiration for a doujinshi. I just finished the script for the first installment, and well, it's much better than I thought I could do. It's 14 pages exactly. I'm not sure how many pages of comic that's gonna translate to, but I think the script for A Serious House on Serious Earth was pretty short and it was a decently long oneshot.
I was going to set myself a goal of finishing what I have planned so far by the end of the summer, but I really don't think that's realistic. There's what, seven weeks until fall quarter? If I could draw comics at the rate they're serialized in Shonen Jump, I might finish. Could I draw comics as fast as professional mangaka with a staff to help them out, who despite that usually only have time for one meal a day? NO. Most definitely no. So, as far as timeline goes, I have no fucking clue. Especially considering I'll have hospital volunteer hours by the end of this month (I'm sorta thrilled with that, too).
This doujinshi will be wildly unpopular and maybe ten people out of the entire fandom, at a generous estimate, will have anything good to say about it because it contains NOTHING romantic and no nudity. It's very dialogue-driven and has a political flavor to it. I can imagine the hate mail now! （⌒▽⌒）
I don't want to sell it. I just want to publish it online.
I also have Plans For My Future.
And no, they don't involve shipping off to a military base. I talked myself out of that one again. I'm actually falling back to a set of plans I had around six months ago, that I scrapped because I am sometimes a vividly hopeful young person who cannot see reason or set logistically sound financial expectations.
I'm going to get my clinical lab assistant certification (takes about six months), which will allow me to get a job that won't make me want to kill myself and will also pay enough that I can support myself and afford tuition. Previously, I could support myself, but there was no hope of being able to afford, in terms of money or time, school. Which is why I moved back home. I know I may end up working full-time again and fitting in school at the same time, but really, that's manageable. Want to know what's not? Working fifty hours a week for Starbucks and trying to fit school in at the same time. If I'm not emotionally drained by asshole customers, I can keep ridiculous hours just fine. Going to bed at midnight and getting up at four-thirty suited me okay in high school (I did that for a year).
The good thing about this particular certificate is that (and I've checked every couple months for the last year) there are always lots of job openings for lab assistants in this area, and what's even better is that some of them don't even ask for a certification. If I had something like a phlebotomy certification as well, that would make it easy for me to land a position in a hospital which are usually the ones that pay best.
So, the plan, roughly, is: get certification, land job, leave home again, more school. No, I really can't stay at home. I refuse to. There is a level of bullshit, a level of mental and emotional abuse that no human should have to put up with and this family finds it easy to go above and beyond that standard. Now with actual threats of physical violence! I'm better at not taking this stuff personally than I was when I was fifteen, but that doesn't really make it less annoying. I want to be done with this nonsense. Having a foreseeable goal that will help with that makes a huge difference in my ability to get things done.
Also, I mean, do I want to stay a CLA for the rest of my life? Nope. However, from the research I've done, it can pay $25,000-$45,000 per year. Let's say I pay $700/month for rent (if I move to a fairly cheap neighborhood, which I SO prefer to a more expensive one) and $300 a month for expenses ($10/day isn't much but I can manage, especially if my employer offers subsidized transit passes). If I expect my salary to be $20,000 per year (pretty safe estimate) that leaves me $8,000 for tuition - Each five-credit class at the school I'm currently at is around $500, and if I take fifteen credits per quarter that's $1,500, which works out to $6,000 per year. That leaves $1,000 to set aside In Case of Calamity and $1,000 leeway for textbooks and materials. It's actually a pretty tight budget, but I've had worse and I certainly haven't had better.
Now, money could again become a problem when I move to a more expensive university, especially since the one I have in mind projects about $25,000 per year in tuition and expenses for an attending resident living away from home. However, there are government programs to help with food and housing that I may qualify for once living on my own, and usually if you apply for financial aid and they see that you're in one of these programs, they approve you. There's of course the issue of my step dad's salary being counted against me until I'm 25, but I'm working on a way around that, too. Once I'm living on my own and can claim I'm not in contact with my parents (with the help of a police report from last year showing my step dad to be violently abusive and a letter from my mother's psychologist, who convinced her to file the report) I could almost definitely have part of, maybe even all my tuition paid for by financial aid.
So, lots of things in the works, lots of things in planning stages. Of course, there's the $3,000 I need to pay for the certification this all hinges on, but living at home and working, I can manage. Maybe a little slower than the six months the program's supposed to take but I'll sure as fuck manage.
Projected plans just make me giddy. I love feeling capable.
Why on Earth do I think I can take a full class load while working full time? Well, I did it for one quarter, and my GPA during that time is the highest it's ever been. Stress = more productive Erica. This'll work out. I'm certain.
I was going to set myself a goal of finishing what I have planned so far by the end of the summer, but I really don't think that's realistic. There's what, seven weeks until fall quarter? If I could draw comics at the rate they're serialized in Shonen Jump, I might finish. Could I draw comics as fast as professional mangaka with a staff to help them out, who despite that usually only have time for one meal a day? NO. Most definitely no. So, as far as timeline goes, I have no fucking clue. Especially considering I'll have hospital volunteer hours by the end of this month (I'm sorta thrilled with that, too).
This doujinshi will be wildly unpopular and maybe ten people out of the entire fandom, at a generous estimate, will have anything good to say about it because it contains NOTHING romantic and no nudity. It's very dialogue-driven and has a political flavor to it. I can imagine the hate mail now! （⌒▽⌒）
I don't want to sell it. I just want to publish it online.
I also have Plans For My Future.
And no, they don't involve shipping off to a military base. I talked myself out of that one again. I'm actually falling back to a set of plans I had around six months ago, that I scrapped because I am sometimes a vividly hopeful young person who cannot see reason or set logistically sound financial expectations.
I'm going to get my clinical lab assistant certification (takes about six months), which will allow me to get a job that won't make me want to kill myself and will also pay enough that I can support myself and afford tuition. Previously, I could support myself, but there was no hope of being able to afford, in terms of money or time, school. Which is why I moved back home. I know I may end up working full-time again and fitting in school at the same time, but really, that's manageable. Want to know what's not? Working fifty hours a week for Starbucks and trying to fit school in at the same time. If I'm not emotionally drained by asshole customers, I can keep ridiculous hours just fine. Going to bed at midnight and getting up at four-thirty suited me okay in high school (I did that for a year).
The good thing about this particular certificate is that (and I've checked every couple months for the last year) there are always lots of job openings for lab assistants in this area, and what's even better is that some of them don't even ask for a certification. If I had something like a phlebotomy certification as well, that would make it easy for me to land a position in a hospital which are usually the ones that pay best.
So, the plan, roughly, is: get certification, land job, leave home again, more school. No, I really can't stay at home. I refuse to. There is a level of bullshit, a level of mental and emotional abuse that no human should have to put up with and this family finds it easy to go above and beyond that standard. Now with actual threats of physical violence! I'm better at not taking this stuff personally than I was when I was fifteen, but that doesn't really make it less annoying. I want to be done with this nonsense. Having a foreseeable goal that will help with that makes a huge difference in my ability to get things done.
Also, I mean, do I want to stay a CLA for the rest of my life? Nope. However, from the research I've done, it can pay $25,000-$45,000 per year. Let's say I pay $700/month for rent (if I move to a fairly cheap neighborhood, which I SO prefer to a more expensive one) and $300 a month for expenses ($10/day isn't much but I can manage, especially if my employer offers subsidized transit passes). If I expect my salary to be $20,000 per year (pretty safe estimate) that leaves me $8,000 for tuition - Each five-credit class at the school I'm currently at is around $500, and if I take fifteen credits per quarter that's $1,500, which works out to $6,000 per year. That leaves $1,000 to set aside In Case of Calamity and $1,000 leeway for textbooks and materials. It's actually a pretty tight budget, but I've had worse and I certainly haven't had better.
Now, money could again become a problem when I move to a more expensive university, especially since the one I have in mind projects about $25,000 per year in tuition and expenses for an attending resident living away from home. However, there are government programs to help with food and housing that I may qualify for once living on my own, and usually if you apply for financial aid and they see that you're in one of these programs, they approve you. There's of course the issue of my step dad's salary being counted against me until I'm 25, but I'm working on a way around that, too. Once I'm living on my own and can claim I'm not in contact with my parents (with the help of a police report from last year showing my step dad to be violently abusive and a letter from my mother's psychologist, who convinced her to file the report) I could almost definitely have part of, maybe even all my tuition paid for by financial aid.
So, lots of things in the works, lots of things in planning stages. Of course, there's the $3,000 I need to pay for the certification this all hinges on, but living at home and working, I can manage. Maybe a little slower than the six months the program's supposed to take but I'll sure as fuck manage.
Projected plans just make me giddy. I love feeling capable.
Why on Earth do I think I can take a full class load while working full time? Well, I did it for one quarter, and my GPA during that time is the highest it's ever been. Stress = more productive Erica. This'll work out. I'm certain.