The beginning!

Thursday night I went to my orientation at UCLA. I was nervous, I know, surprise. I got there an hour early - it didn't take me as long to get there as I thought it would, even in 5 o'clock traffic. And then the lecture hall was very easy to find. There were about 100 other students there, and I'm happy to report I didn't seem to be the only one who was a little apprehensive.

The directors of the program spoke, there are several, and then an alum who was signed by an agent her 2nd quarter in the program. It was all pretty inspirational, positive, and good-natured which I appreciated. The basic message was everyone in the program has talent, what will set us apart from the rest of the industry and each other is the amount of effort we put into our writing. So that was encouraging.

I have my first class tomorrow - the lecture class, and then I have my section class Tuesday - seven students and a teacher. Again, I'm a little nervous but I'm excited. I have a list of films I need to familiarize myself with. We'll be using Lars and the Real Girl as our major film study this quarter and about 15 others in different ways, including Juno so that's exciting!

Also, tonight I finished up the fourth part of my novel - Harold's story! Tomorrow morning I'll start on the final part - David's story, I'm pretty excited!!! I'm hoping to have it done in a week or maybe two. I'm a little late on my deadline of finishing before school began but I'm confident that I can finish soon - I can see the end! And it's heavy (clocking in at over 400 pages so far! Eeek, I know, I'll work on the editing soon).