{"id":5483,"date":"2019-12-08T20:00:41","date_gmt":"2019-12-08T07:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/?p=5483"},"modified":"2019-12-08T20:48:06","modified_gmt":"2019-12-08T07:48:06","slug":"what-did-this-year-part-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/what-did-this-year-part-one\/","title":{"rendered":"What I Did This Year \u2014 Part One"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/2019-in-Plastic.jpg\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-5500\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/2019-in-Plastic.jpg?resize=480%2C640\" alt=\"\" width=\"480\" height=\"640\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Late last year, I had the brilliant idea of doing a Master\u00a0of\u00a0Arts in Creative\u00a0Writing.<\/p>\n<p>The University\u00a0of\u00a0Auckland offers an equivalent MA and is only a couple of hours drive south of Fortress Mamea, but there was a certain <em>je n&#8217;ais se quoi <\/em>that an MA from the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wgtn.ac.nz\/modernletters\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">International\u00a0Institute of Modern\u00a0Letters<\/a>\u00a0at the Victoria\u00a0University of Wellington held for me.\u00a0Part of it was the cachet IIML has. A larger part of it, to be honest, was that the IIML is in my <a href=\"http:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/tag\/wellington\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">hometown<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The Lovely\u00a0Wife, gods bless her cowboy boots, arranged her whole year&#8217;s work schedule so I could commute between the winterless north and the windy city. I planned a sub-48-hour travel itinerary for each of the 24 workshops that were spread between March and October:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Tuesday\n<ul>\n<li>3:30am\u20136:30am \u2014 drive from Fortress\u00a0Mamea to Auckland\u00a0Airport<\/li>\n<li>7:30am\u20138:30am \u2014 fly from Auckland to Wellington<\/li>\n<li>8:30am\u20139:45am \u2014 buses from Wellington\u00a0Airport to Victoria\u00a0University<\/li>\n<li>10:00am\u20131:00pm \u2014 Tuesday workshop at IIML<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Wednesday\n<ul>\n<li>10:00am\u201312:00noon \u2014 Wednesday workshop at IIML<\/li>\n<li>times varied according to cheapest flights booked but \u2014\n<ul>\n<li>bus to Wellington\u00a0Airport<\/li>\n<li>fly to Auckland<\/li>\n<li>drive to Whang\u0101rei<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>\u2014 with arrival times as early as 7pm and as late as midnight.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I looked at that itinerary and thought,\u00a0<em>How hard could it be? It&#8217;ll be fun \u2014 I&#8217;ve got several years worth of podcasts to catch up on. It&#8217;ll be a blast!<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The novelty of that commute wore off after the first week. Six and a half hours of travel each way will do that. But I did it, and I&#8217;m here to blog about it.<\/p>\n<p>On the very first day, programme director <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ken_Duncum\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Ken\u00a0Duncum<\/a>\u00a0had a bunch of portfolios to show us greenhorns what we&#8217;d be producing by year&#8217;s end. One of them was for my favourite New Zild television show:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/Insiders-Guide-folio.jpg\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-5488\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/Insiders-Guide-folio.jpg?resize=480%2C336\" alt=\"\" width=\"480\" height=\"336\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I took it as a sign that \u2014 commuting aside \u2014 I&#8217;d signed up for a year of awesomeness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Late last year, I had the brilliant idea of doing a Master\u00a0of\u00a0Arts in Creative\u00a0Writing. The University\u00a0of\u00a0Auckland offers an equivalent MA and is only a couple of hours drive south of Fortress Mamea, but there was a certain je n&#8217;ais se quoi that an MA from the International\u00a0Institute of Modern\u00a0Letters\u00a0at the Victoria\u00a0University of Wellington held for &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/what-did-this-year-part-one\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;What I Did This Year \u2014 Part One&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1335,1336,95,384,928],"class_list":["post-5483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scriptwriting","tag-iiml","tag-ma","tag-peter-cox","tag-the-insiders-guide-to-happiness","tag-wellington"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5483"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5501,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5483\/revisions\/5501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}