Moving along...

I had another week of heavy reading and taking notes for my lit review. Some nights I also worked on my actual novel. I didn’t do much of new writing but I did revise a good amount of the draft I have. I rearranged the order in which some events are happening in the novel. I also revised some of the dialogue in the novel where I felt needed improvement. I am working on a loose outline so that I can have a map of where my novel will be going.

As for the readings for my lit review, I’ve really enjoyed the readings so far because I was able to find studies that talked about divorce effects on children of all ages. I found some studies that focused on younger children, like preschoolers, while other focused on teenagers and young adults. I think this is so far very helpful because the characters in my novel get older as the story progresses.

There were a couple of nights this week where I didn’t work on my project as much as I would’ve liked but I think that I was still able to get enough work done so that I wouldn’t feel like I needed to panic. I’m not sure if it’s safe to say that this was okay since we are still early in the process. I feel like there is a lot to still do but hopefully working on my novel along with the lit review will work out well. I feel like I have to take advantage of the moments where I feel inspired because I never know when there will be nights where I won’t be able to work on my project.

There is still much more to do but one of the things I need to do within the next week is find existing YA novels that talk about divorce effects on children and young adults. While I’ve read some stories that touch upon that, I feel like I need to do more research on this. 

Blog 2

It’s been a hard week, lots of reading and researching. I’ve made side notes on what I’ve read and I’ve underlined. But I have not yet started an official draft of my Lit Review. On some of my sources I have longer side notes that on others so that's kind of an unofficial draft of my Lit Review but I am still unsure what my draft will look like. I am trying to focus on reading and researching and understanding what I find. I’ve been trying to focus on finding information related to how children are affected (positive or negative way) when being raise in a broken family.

The topic itself remains very interesting to me but I still don’t know which sources I’ll be using for my Lit Review. It seems so far like the sources I’ve found talk about how parents sometimes think that by staying together they are helping the kids. From what I’ve read, research has shown that that is not always the case. While children will rather to see their parents together, they do not want to have them together under the same roof fighting with each other all the time. When I read that, I also research about whether or not is healthy to argue in front of the children. I found so far that some level of argument is actually healthy to have in front of the children so that they can see how mom and dad work things out even when they argue. But it is not healthy when the argument gets out of control or turns violent.

As for my actual novel, I took out all my crazy drafts that I’ve worked on over time. I am planning on re-reading the “final draft” I have and then looking at the older drafts when needed. I will also be working on revising and drafting more my novel. I am excited because the research I’ve found so far has motivated me to draft more. Blogging was helpful this week as well because I can see that I need to research more and start drafting my Lit Review. 

Thinking about my thesis topic...

This week I focused on brainstorming about topics for my thesis. I knew that I wanted to do something creative for my final project and I also knew I had creative writing projects that I had started but had not yet finished. In particular I had a YA novel I started writing a while back. As I thought about my thesis I decided that it would be great to incorporate my YA novel into the thesis and research more on the topic of the novel itself.

I spent most of my time this week thinking about my story, reading sections of what I have written already and thinking about what goals I had in mind when I started writing it. One of my goals was to write something I could publish and have printed copies of it. While this is a more traditional route I am excited to see how I could create a digital version of my thesis.