Week 2 Famous Last Words: tiny jatakas experiment

So, I'm already writing my famous last works for Week 2... when it's still Week 0. But I learned my lesson last semester: because of the trip I take to Austin over that weekend in-between Week 3 and Week 4, I've got to get ahead now. Last semester, I was not proactive about that, and I spent literally weeks catching up. This semester, I really don't want to play catch-up, so I'm going to work ahead and do my very best to try to finish Week 4 before I get on that plane!

And after writing the tiny jatakas for this week, I am feeling really confident that this semester is going to go well for me in terms of writing. I was all set on focusing on the Mahabharata's "Book of the Forest" or maybe doing a project about riddles (Yudhishthira and the yaksha, Birbal, etc.; I had even started collecting resources for that!), but then I discovered these 100-words stories, and I just can't get enough of them! There's something incredibly satisfying about examining every sentence and making sure that every word, literally every word, has work to do. When I used to write longer stories, I would always struggle with 1000-word maximum limit, and it would frustrate me. Now that I have this radically different limitation, it's actually fun because I can see that the limit is helping me to create something really distinct that I honestly never would have thought to do on my own. I've seen lots of people comparing 100-word stories to haiku, and while it's not that extreme, it does have that same kind of feeling, where the tiny space of the story is, paradoxically, full of room in which to relax your mind.

So, I really am ready to go go go. I have no idea what will happen when I try to extract 100-word stories from the epics, but what a fun challenge that will be, right? What I learned from the assignments in Week 2 is that I really don't need to do reading notes as a separate assignment; I can just write the 100-word stories AS the notes, which is kind of weird, but obviously very convenient. That means I dropped all the reading assignments from my class plan, and instead I'm just focusing on the project, story-writing, tech tips, famous last words, plus all the commenting. Here's what Week 3 looks like: storytelling and project research, plus some reading and/or microfiction storytelling, and then another famous last words. The spreadsheet is working really nicely for me, so I'm curious if any other students will give it a try! :-)

HAPPY NEW SEMESTER, everybody! And HAPPY NEW DECADE!