Long story short, I haven't been doing as well as I'd like to.

My grades are still passing but they've taken a hit. My confidence isn't what it should be. It's taken months to build up to the level I'm at now and I just can't take a lot of distractions.

It's been such that almost 100% of my attention has gone into coursework. As I've completed major assignments, you may have noticed I've been on more but the cycle's about to begin again and you may not hear much from me after classes start up again.

What little energy I have left has been going into writing. I've been told (by those who have read my work) that I'm starting to hit my stride and producing some of the best work of my life. That's good, because lately I've been concerned that I have an extremely narrow window of opportunity to "make it" as a writer before things go all Mad Max in about ten years.

Pessimism for the future aside, I'm convinced that being a novelist is the only career I'd really be happy with, though I'm at a crossroads where I need unbiased opinions about the prognosis of that career. If I don't have a future, then I have a monumental crisis I need to address because there is literally nothing else I actually want to do in my life.

I've tried to study many other disciplines and none of them were things I could really stick with before losing interest in about 2 or 3 semesters; writing is the only thing I ever cared about enough to stick with consistently. If that's not something I can reasonably expect as a career, then I feel like my restlessness will be the end of me.

I've finally found the one thing that I care enough about to face adversity for. I just hope the struggling and privation ends one day and I'll have lived for something. Ne frustra vixisse videar.