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Alan Frederick Richards

19. Block Two gets Worse

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Edited by Alan Frederick Richards, Saturday, 11 Jan 2025, 18:10

I feel that the time has come to vent my disappointment about Block Two.

 

Block One was managed for those doing their Primary option. It was mostly revision of material in the BA (Creative Writing,) using the same text books as one of their sources. We were in Tutor Groups allocated by Primary option, with three special Forums for the Tutor Group:

·       A Forum for review of Activities

·       A separate Forum for TMA review

·       And even another, almost completely useless Forum just for the Tutor Group

That was for people who had chosen their Primary option and were familiar with it.

 

 

Then we came to Block Two. I thought this would be a gentler introduction, aimed at students with less knowledge and interest in their second subject. But, no, it wasn’t. It wasn’t aimed at Secondary option students. It was EXACTLY the same as Block One for those who had taken a different Primary choice.

But in Block Two, we don’t have an Activities Forum. For most of Block Two, we struggle on with Tutor Group forums that are useless. We don’t get the TMA review Forum either. And TMA 02, in the Secondary genre, will be marked by an expert in our Primary genre.

The so-called Genre Forum comes two thirds of the way through the block and is so confusing that students don’t understand it. It mixes up Primary and Secondary genres and is of uncertain use. Is it for Activities? It’s too late for half the Block. Is it for the draft TMA?

Yes, we have Workshops, Just as confusing and just as late. We are left with a Forum section; a Genre Forum – not in the Forum Section; and a Workshop – somewhere else.

 

 

What would Block One have been like with no Forums for the first few weeks and a TMA marked by someone chosen for a different Genre? That’s how Block Two has been treated.

 

 

My initial plan was to concentrate on TMA 02, and fit it what I could of Block Two. So far, I feel as if I am just waiting for Block Three.

 

 

Alan


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Alan Frederick Richards

18. Block Two

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It's hard to think of anything positive to say about Block Two of A802, MA Creative Writing. It's the only Block using our Secondary Option.

The arrangements for review and comment are almost non-existent. I can post Activities in my Tutor Group forum, but I don't think any others in my group are doing Film Scripts as a Secondary option. The Workshop, which won't take affect until after Christmas will allow some comment from others doing Scripts as Secondary option. There is no guarantee that those in my Workshop will be doing Films. And the Genre forums don't open until next year. I have no contact with people doing Films as their Primary option.

The TMA Review Forum is still there but will be useless in a group with no one else doing Films.

My aim is to concentrate on TMA 02, which I have already posted into the Workshop. [[But why am I not allowed to post the full TMA? It's limited to about 2/3 of it,]]

I can't see any point on the rest of the block, which is going over things like Character and Setting again - but concentrating on Drama. (Not Films!)


Meanwhile I have a mark for TMA 01, about what I expected. The feedback comments tell me to put in more of the things I deliberately left out - because I can't squeeze everything into 2500 words. 

I have written my fourth version of TMA 03 draft and may put that into a Block Two workshop.


Alan



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Alan Frederick Richards

17. Hiatus

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Edited by Alan Frederick Richards, Tuesday, 26 Nov 2024, 14:04

More inactivity as I wait to get myself aligned with Block Two.

Some worries about TMA 01 as my Tutor seems not to accept the Amendment in the News about using Arial font. I think we have come to an agreement.

Here's a link for my novel coming out on 1 December.

Book cover for Fatal Accident by Stella Scarlatti.

Alan

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Alan Frederick Richards

16. 78

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A quiet mixed week, as I suddenly find myself nearer to 90 than 65.

It's Week 6 officially, but Week 7 is the concluding week of Block One, with Week 8 allocated to TMA 01.

I've been doing several things, including looking at the start of Block Two. 

I decided a few days ago that there is nothing in my latest novel worth keeping for this course. So I have finished it, doing all the complicated checks. 'Fatal Accident,' by Stella Scarlatti, my Romance pen-name, is available on Kindle from 1 December.

Mostly, I have been working on the draft for TMA 02, which will be my first Screenplay. It will be an interplanetary Science Fiction story. I have several queries about the process:

  • How different can I make my Aliens on a different planet, without straying into Animation?
  • How much do I have to leave to the Director?
  • Do the descriptions of my Alien species go into the Cast List at the beginning, or when they appear in the script?
  • Should scenes be labelled and/or numbered?
  • Can I use Voiceover or Subtitles for Alien speech?
  • How do I convince the Tutor about running time? Can I time each scene?
I know that I will have a confusing array of options for queries - Tutor Group Forum, Scriptwriting Forum (not yet open,) and Workshops (with limited opening dates.)

I also have to wait, probably at least three weeks for the return of TMA 01.
And, of course, I am working on TMA 03.

Alan

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Alan Frederick Richards

15 TMA 01

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I know it's early but I have submitted TMA 01.

I still need to decide about TMA 02, and I'm working an another version of TMA 03.

I am moving from confidence about Block 1 towards apprehension about Block 2.

I may have a day or two off.

Alan


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Alan Frederick Richards

14. Doubts

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This is the scariest part of the course. The TMAs are becoming serious. I can only see this course as having two strands.

Reading the course with its associating readings; doing the Activities; posting on Forums. This is useful learning but, in all honesty it can be considered as optional.

Doing the TMAs (including the EMA) is the important part because it's how we get assessed.

I have been working on all four assignments, from before the official start. I had TMA 01, TMA 03 and the EMA more or less done in draft, with TMA 02 half done. This is how I feel now.

  • TMA 01 - I am happy with what I have written. I have converted it to the appropriate format and done the Commentary and Bibliography. I have posted the Creative writing part on to the Tutor Group for this. So far no feedback.
  • TMA 02 - This is a real problem. I'm doing Screenwriting (Films). I want to do Science Fiction. It has to be stand alone. I did have some ideas but they have been rejected as Animation, which is not allowed. I have to rethink everything. I am going to concentrate on this next.
  • TMA 03 - I have a draft but I am starting to doubt how good it is. It's Chapter 1 of a novel where all the excitement comes from Chapter 2. I am thinking about completely rewriting, but will use my current draft if I can't think of anything else..
  • EMA - I'm very happy with my draft but I have nothing significant yet for the Commentary.
So, I am much less confident than I was two or three weeks ago. But I have two or three months to work on TMA 02. 

Alan

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Alan Frederick Richards

13. Halfway Through Block 1 ...

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A lot has happened in two weeks. First, some unfortunate incidents outside A802.

Nine days ago, I tripped while walking along the pavement. Entirely my fault. I was busy looking something up on my phone to make a facetious comment for a Forum entry. Flat on my face, hitting my head on the pavements, but, fortunately, no broken wrists. I won't give you the gory details. My black eye is slowly disappearing. I think I have cracked ribs, which still hurt at night, but otherwise recovery is almost complete.

That's not all. On Saturday I went to London to see friends, with my wife. She did the driving and we had a nice day, visiting a museum and seeing a brilliant performance of Guys and Dolls at the Bridge Theatre by Tower Bridge. I won't give details of the nightmare that followed - but my wife spent two days in A & E, and neither of us slept much. She was discharged on Monday and I drove home. It was a rare complication of COVID, from which she is now fully recovered. I have a minor infection which I probably caught from her. It may be COVID.

Meanwhile, I am so glad that I have kept ahead of things with the course. I was never worried about getting behind. I will do a separate blog about the course ...

Alan


   

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Alan Frederick Richards

12. Week Two

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I think I have a good Tutor Group. Still three have not even said hello and two more have not contributed to the Activities.

But at least half of the Group are almost through Week 2. The Activities have been useful.

I keep writing on the side. Already I have draft versions of what may be two TMAs and the EMA, and I'm working on a longer story, Scriptwriting will be more of a problem. I still need to do a lot of work on possibilities for TMA 2.

I am desperately trying not to get too far ahead because it won't work with this course. I'm also trying to get into the habit of taking Saturday and Sunday off.


Alan


 

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Alan Frederick Richards

11. The First Seven Days

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It's getting better. So far 13 out of 17 Tutor Group members have emerged. Most, but not all of them, have been involved in Week One Activities.

I'm keeping two weeks ahead and saving my queries until later. Most of them will be about Scriptwriting. Everything in the Script area seems to be about theatre plays, radio plays and television. i will want to do films, stressing some very clever special effects that I will leave to the Director - tens of thousands of alien creatures!

Being tied to weeks is going to get worse - especially the Workshops. But they don't come until Block 2.

But so far - so good.

Alan

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Alan Frederick Richards

10. Starting Slowly

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Edited by Alan Frederick Richards, Friday, 11 Oct 2024, 14:15

The course has officially started ... slowly.

After 24 hours, nine people have identified themselves as students. I'm expecting another four or five. Most of them didn't announce themselves in the Introductory Forum. So there must be a lot more than 70 students on the course.

Some first impressions. I know I shouldn't generalize ...

  • I am outnumbered by women. Not a surprise.
  • Most are nearer to retirement than school age.
  • Most are just as unqualified in Creative Writing as I am. But some are not.
  • As far as I can see, Non-fiction is as popular as Scriptwriting, but most have not volunteered this information. No evidence of Poetry. I'm assuming that arrangements in Block 2 will be different.
  • I'm slightly apprehensive that other students read modern romance and crime. Not the Science Fiction that will drive most my comments.

I have started the first Activity. I'm ready with another five but I am suppressing my urge to move quickly.

Good so far.

Alan






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Alan Frederick Richards

9. Tomorrow ...

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Tomorrow it starts formally.

I've been round and round the site, through Chapters 1-3 several times.

I keep thinking that what I have written is too good for course Activities. So I pull it out of the notebook and start again. So far I have almost complete drafts for TMA 01, TMA 03 and the EMA, all just from these activities. I may change my mind later.

Much more difficult is understanding the idea of a Commentary.

I write in the way I have already written several novels. Do I have to pretend that First Person, Present Tense, starting in the middle ... are all inspired by Creative Writing textbooks with full references? They are familiar to me from experience.


The initial Introductory Forum has been very useful. So far, just over 60 people have emerged. Probably one group for Poetry, one for Film and Drama, one for Non-fiction and three or four for Fiction.  

All will be revealed tomorrow. Well, almost all ...

Worried ... No.

Apprehensive ... Yes, definitely


Alan




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Alan Frederick Richards

8. Tutor Allocation

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I feel that I ought to celebrate this event. But it has not been overwhelmingly exciting. Since the website opened, I have been looking forward to finding out about my Tutor.

Now, I have the name of my Tutor, but I realise that this is not he event that I was anticipating. i was looking forward to finding about others in my Tutor Group; accessing the Tutor Group Forum; and finding out details of Tutorial dates. For all of these I will have to wait until 5 October, the official course starting date.

I have reinforced one of the most important things that I have learned so far about this course. It is going to be tied closely to the week-by-week calendar. i won't be able to do everything two or three weeks in advance. 

I am also happier, after re-doing the activities of weeks one to three, with the course structure. I have found it much easier to write about topics that come just from a small prompt. And I am more confident about writing short stories  rather than novels. i wouldn't say that all my apprehension has gone. I am already thinking about problems I will find in TMA 02, which will be Screenwriting, my secondary topic.

I am almost resigned to doing nothing for ten days - until the official start date.

But I keep hearing Tess and Claudia, ' Keeeeeeeeep Writing.'


Alan




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Alan Frederick Richards

7. Watching and Waiting ...

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After ten days, I am slightly more confident finding my way round the website.

There are several places that look like Home - StudentHome, Study, Postgraduate Arts and Humanities. But the important one is the A802 Home site. It has a system of tabs that think I almost understand now - not helped by different versions on the laptop and phone.

It's like swimming through jelly but I have done a few things.

  • Weeks 1 to 3 as far as I can, with bits of writing ready for assessment via the Tutor Group Forum.
  • Looking at TMAs and the dozens of pages of guidelines and advice.
  • A first attempt at a short story that may become TMA 01.
  • Battling, unsuccessfully, with the Library facilities. 
  • Trying to get Adobe Connect to work after years of using a laptop with disabled camera and microphone.

 I know that all will become clearer when Tutors are assigned. At least, I hope so ...


Alan



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Alan Frederick Richards

6. FutureLearn

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I have been putting this off because it's going to be very negative.

I was seriously considering the Open University Creative Writing course and the FutureLearn course was advised as preparatory work. So I paid £100 and did the course.

I learned a few things and felt a bit more confident. But it's not really a proper course. The only assessment comes from other students and the general standard was abysmal. There is only one significant assignment near the end of the course. It's a single piece of writing, severely hampered by a very low word limit. But there is no assessment other than other students being able to comment.

I could have passed the course, with a nice Certificate of Completion, just by saying that I had done everything. But I submitted an assignment, modified from a tiny part of one of my novels.

Most of my comments come from assessments of this final assignment, and also from general chat coming from students along the way.

  • Possible as many as hundreds of people started the course. Most seemed to drop pout after week 1
  • Significant numbers either spoke in foreign languages or very poor English
  • Over several months, only 24 submitted a final assignment
  • Most of these couldn't write good English sentences. Probably half of them were not native English speakers. Others had no idea of paragraphs or creative writing
  • I think only four produced an assignment with any potential. Everone else was wasting their time
  • Only four continued as far as commenting on my assignment. Their main criticisms were about problems I had in cutting down the word count 

When I say that my Creative Writing is better than the others, i am not claiming to be good. But most others on the course were much, much worse.

I am hoping for more professional feedback from A802


Alan

  


 



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Alan Frederick Richards

5. Novelist

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I want to get through my reasons for starting this course, so here's a brief review of my novel writing career.

It started with NaNoWriMo, when I wrote a short novel about life on Earth during and after the eruption of the super-volcano underneath  Yellowstone. This was heavily base on autobiography.

But my real first novel, in 2013 was Science Fiction, firmly based in Mathematics. It was about an intelligent species, looking like a cross between giant ants, spiders and Mantises. Their physiology is unlike the humans who landed on their planet, but so is their psychology. They are emotionless clones of each other. The story is about their life and the lives of a small group of interplanetary visitors from Earth. It's called Transitions and you can find it by following the link to my Author Page as Jason Fredericks, my pen-name. 

That was it until ten years later I went back to writing. In just over a year, I have written another five Science Fiction Novels, one of which is a sequel to the first book, almost completed in draft ten years ago. You can find them via the same author page. The books are all in Kindle format, available from Amazon.

I began to widen my horizons and turned to Romance in more or less the present day. For this I took on another pen-name, Stella Scarlatti, with a younger, female, Italian image. Only one so far, Parliamo Italiano. But the sequel is almost complete.

Almost up-to-date ...




Alan





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Alan Frederick Richards

4. Early Writing. Blogs.

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Edited by Alan Frederick Richards, Thursday, 29 Aug 2024, 12:57

Pleased to announce that my course entry has been confirmed. More about this later.

I am not sure what started my creative writing journey. I was always interested in writing and the English language. Most of my final years at work were very technical writing, about IT Security. I retired at the end of 2006 and wrote a blog about cruising round the world, mostly in pictures.

2011. Another cruise. Another blog.

Then another proper full blog. This time it was about growing up in the Fifties and Sixties. This took a couple of years, With over 100 entries it was my first 200 000 words of proper writing. I still get hundreds of visitors every month. You can find it at: 

https://alan001946.wordpress.com/

After that I did three more blog series. The last one had 365 entries, one for every day, each one describing a species of life found in the UK - plants, insects, mammals, fungi and others - some native, some introduced or cultivated. Here it is:

https://speciesofbritain.wordpress.com/


I love writing. I do it a lot. More to come ...



Alan






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Alan Frederick Richards

3. Postgraduate Study

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Edited by Alan Frederick Richards, Monday, 5 Aug 2024, 18:58

Moving on to 1993, I had another opportunity to study, again funded generously by my employers.

My work has centred around what used to be called Programming Computers back in the Seventies. It became Information Systems (IS) and then Information Technology (IT) as it is now known.

So, in the Nineties, I studied Object Oriented Programming Languages, Project Management, and Intelligent Systems Analysis and Design, followed by M801, a Research project. My dissertation was entitled, 'Staff Scheduling for Maternity Services: A Practical Design and Implementation.'

In 1998, I was awarded a Master of Science degree in Computing for Commerce and Industry, to add to my two Bachelor of Arts degrees.


More to come about my writing. I still have more than a month before the course starts, but I have done some preliminary reading.

... 


Alan



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Alan Frederick Richards

2. The Open University

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Edited by Alan Frederick Richards, Monday, 5 Aug 2024, 18:58

I started learning with the Open University when it was in its infancy. That's why my OU number starts with C. It was in its third year. There was no Internet, and there were no mobile phones. Distance learning meant a course workbook through the post and watching programmes on BBC2 . TMAs were done on a typewriter, with carbon paper, and sent in by post!

It was before the complicated Degree structure we now see. Almost all the students just took an unspecified BA. It may have been the only option.

I started a few years after starting work and I was lucky to have en employer who paid for my fees. But student finance was simpler in those days. There were no student loans. Most University students were given grants to pay for their living expenses. The grants also covered University fees. (When I took my BA in Mathematics at Cambridge in 1969 I didn't know anything about fees. The grant just paid them.)


So my first OU Degree, from 1973 to 1981, was very mixed, starting with D100: Understanding Society. I did courses on Psychology; Language; Soviet Government (The USSR still existed then;) Space and Time; And Music.

Why did I do it? because I always want to keep learning. In the words of Rudyard Kipling, "I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who."



Alan


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Alan Frederick Richards

1. Creative Writing

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Edited by Alan Frederick Richards, Monday, 5 Aug 2024, 18:57

I'm back again:

1966-69: BA, Cambridge, Mathematics

1973-81: Open University BA 

1993-98: Open University MSc, Computing

2024 - ???: Open University MA, Creative Writing


I'm looking forward to everything about the course, apart from paying for it!

More to come later about my life and my creative writing. See the links for some of it - 7 novels published so far.


Alan






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