Capstone, Week 1: Finalizing the Concept - Problems, Solutions, Thoughts

I'm afraid I'm caught between a rock and a hard place in terms of what I want to create.

Ultimately I came into Shepherd because I wanted to get all I could out of its creative writing concentration, and I quickly moved from that into the Communications department when I realized that English wouldn't teach me anything that three dozen writing guides and personal experience wouldn't solve eventually. I chose this route because I wanted to be able to write anything and everything, to be the kind of jack-of-all-trades that every self-respecting desperate freelancer should be. I want to do justice to that.

Things are hectic, though. I'm taking six classes, and working a part-time job around 20 hours a week, and I can feel my circumstances tempering me but it still feels too often like there aren't enough hours in the day to do anything substantial. I hope it won't be considered lazy if I write something like a research paper instead of doing a project involving lots of people and moving parts and scheduling conflicts, but if I do that I need to have a place to submit it to.

And there are the idealistic and fun ideas, like building an alternate reality game or working with some other fledgling medium to prove that I have the basic principles down and I can intuit the patterns behind new modes of art and communication. ARGs are wonderful, but to have meaning with such a small audience one would need to be strongly tethered to the real world, and on a cleanly college campus bustling with young adults I can't think of many ways to integrate a game-narrative with the real world that wouldn't immediately be smudged / cleaned / graffiti'd over / destroyed accidentally / moved / replaced.

I should note that if I had complete control of the guidelines and my own time, I would write a book of essays about various media, find some way to tie those media into it, and either publish it at a small press or try to serialize it through a news-site somewhere. My tenacious English minor's showing, I'm sure. Given that, whatever I choose - and I will before the next few days are over, because I need to - the hard work of it's bound to mostly be writing, and I imagine the final product will be, too.