And we go Marching on – see what I did there?

I feel bad about not writing any actual blog articles and will try to get some out this month. I had one ready to go for when I got back from vacation but the closure of schools made the topic a bit moot so I am saving it for the future. I have a few ideas for writing but I’m trying to focus on writing my novel so am avoiding any extraneous writing. I just wrote a whole paragraph on writing but deleted it as it’s now what this update is about. I’ll try to work in a blog post soon.

I have at least another month of enforced holiday. My colleague and I have been asked to go for Covid-19 testing on March 23^rd so hopefully our school is thinking of starting up again in April. I won’t say having lots of extra time to focus on my master’s and writing isn’t nice but I’m also not getting paid for the time I miss. There’s been a lot of talk on if foreign teachers are supposed to get paid or not during these “extra” holidays but the way my contract is set up, I’m not an actual employee of the school I work for so get paid on a “work done” basis. The end result is that if I’m not actually teaching, I don’t get paid.

Fortunately, other than lost salary, which is never nice, it hasn’t been that big an issue. As a proponent of personal finance, I save money whenever possible so we have a lot in the bank. Because of this I haven’t tried to get into online teaching, choosing to focus more on studying and writing for the moment. I’ll go through the list of areas and see how I’m progressing.  My wife has gone back to work already so I’m home alone during the week. As the days go by, I’ve changed my daily schedule slightly as well which I will share with you.

Education: Time stops for no student and that’s definitely the case for my masters. I continue to put in two to three hours every morning depending on what needs to get done. As before I’m usually done with the official course by day 3 of the week so the rest of the days I check the forums and try to comment on the other students’ contributions. The rest of the time I will either spend reading relevant reference books on the week’s topic or working on tools that will help me in my writing assignments. I spent a few days making a comparative spreadsheet of all the language teaching theories which has been useful for quick analysis of my teaching methods and classes. I’ve also done my first analysis of two of my writing assignments and will do my first analysis of my third one tomorrow. At the moment I am focusing on understanding them and coming up with questions that I would want to ask my tutors, as well as projecting what kind of references or classroom investigation I think will be needed. So far, the current quarantine mode of the city has not affected my studies too much. I’ve had to adapt a few of the tasks given but I’m hoping that classes will start up again before I have to actually start doing classroom investigations.

Writing: Once my studies are done for the day, I move on to my writing. My novel continues to progress. I finished the first eight chapters and sent it out to alpha readers. So far only one has gotten back to me but they “loved” it so hopefully that’s a good sign. Once I sent out the first eight chapters I took a week off from actual writing but spent the time outlining the next eight chapters on my trusty home whiteboard which I am already deviating from but I have decided on the last scene of the novel, unless there’s an epilogue, so I know what I am working towards now. Writing a novel in parallel to my masters course has been interesting. In my masters course, one of the “strands” is language awareness and that gives me more to think about how and why people say things as I write dialogues. I’m also creating a language, though to be fair it is based on an ancient language but I have to think about how the language might have changed over the thousands of years. My goal is to have a linguistically sound language that makes sense and that, if someone analyzes it, respects the rules set out for it. I’m also having to do the same thing for another language but that one is totally made up so that’s even harder. At the moment, I’m on chapter eleven of the novel and progressing at the steady rate of two thousand words a day. Starting tomorrow, I plan to increase that to three thousand words or a full viewpoint per day, at least on the days I don’t have to write for my masters’ exercises. Generally, one chapter is three alternating viewpoints, one from one character and two from another and it alternates by chapter. Each viewpoint is about three thousand words and can either be a scene or a succession of scenes. My goal is to have the first draft done by the end of April at the latest so that I can fully focus on writing my assignments after that. A youtuber I respect said in one of his videos on writing that a first novel should not be more than ninety thousand words. The first eight chapters of my current novel that I sent out amounted to sixty-six thousand words. Oops. Technically It’s not my first novel, which currently stands at its first rewrite of 110,000 words but I feel this one is going to go a lot longer. I’m not overly worried about that at the moment. I will probably do a blog article this month about my approach to writing that will go into more detail so I will leave this at that for the moment.

Language: Covid-19 has put off any chances of doing the HSK-3 test for a while so my Chinese has gone on the backburner for the moment. To apply what I’ve learned from my masters, my daily repetitive memory and cognitive strategies in January kind of burned me out for those strategies so in February I’ve been doing compensation and affective strategies which mostly consists of watching Chinese movies I enjoy without subtitles and trying to understand them. Naturally this consists mostly of action movies and I’m currently working through the Ip Man series. This month I plan to get back to some memorization strategies and add some cognitive strategies as well, probably by practicing online HSK 3 tests.

Health: My weight stays about the same but this week I have finally gotten going in my exercise regimen, doing HIIT exercises in the morning after I finish studying and before my writing and in the afternoon before dinner. I am generally sticking to OMAD but have now moved it to the afternoon. Generally, I cook a meal for me and next day’s lunch for my wife between 1 and 2 o’clock in the afternoon and will have a snack around six or seven. My goal is to limit my feeding time to between two and eight o’clock. I did break down at the end of the third week of February and get some beer but now I’m back on the nonalcoholic wagon. I’ve also started going back to my martial art roots and practicing “Sil Lim Tao”the beginner wing chun form. I’m thinking of signing up from some sort of martial art once the Covid-19 epidemic dies down.

Entertainment: Mostly gaming. I finished my first play through of “The Witcher 3” and am slowly going through it again. The internet and vpns have been crashing a lot so haven’t played Eve online too much other than keeping up my PI. Diablo 3’s 19^th season finished today and the 20^th starts on the thirteenth of March so I’ll have that to keep me occupied this month. I finally watched Joker and have mixed feelings on the story though it’s a great performance by Joaquim Phoenix. I’ve been keeping up with “Star Trek Picard” which continues to be a bit boring and a great disappointment. Let’s just say the Star Trek universe was always about meeting new cultures and now they are trying to turn it into some sort of space western universe which is not Star Trek. I’ve been watching Stargate SG-1 to get some good science fiction and it still holds up relatively well. Currently on season three. I’ve also been rereading a few of my favorite series. Read through John Ringo’s Black Tide series about a zombie apocalypse which seemed oddly appropriate and his spin-off series set in Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter universe which is always a fun read. Currently I’m reading through one of my all-time favorite fantasy trilogies “The Deed of Paksenarrion” by Elizabeth Moon.

So I’ve mostly kept up with my goals, other than Chinese but the motivation for that has fallen off a bit but I’ve still managed to hold on to it. Also made more of an effort to speak Chinese with my wife but daily language is pretty limited in its scope. I think next week will be my masters midterm break which will allow me time to start pre-production for my writing assignments and get a bit more reading in. Hopefully by April I will get back to work. Studying the masters gives me all kinds of ideas for teaching but I can’t use them yet since I have no classes.