Shores of Night

Yesterday was my first day back in the classroom. Not just for this term, I've been doing distance learning for a year now and it's only the fact that my new module, Reading into Writing isn't offered as a distance learning course, that means I'm back in the class room at all. The lesson was good, with lots of lively discussion about the set text, Gawain and the Green Knight . I also have the name of my Final Project tutor, and I'm back with Ian Marchant again (he's the tutor for Creative Non Fiction). I get on with him well and so I'm looking forward to working with him. I'm hoping to see him today, even if its just to hammer out an appointment time to discuss Forest Brides properly.

One of the things I wanted to do this year was record the good things that happen, rather than just the bad ones. That way I hope to have a list of good experiences I can look back at and know that things aren't as horrible as they sometimes seem. The past couple of weeks have been quite rough; January isn't the kindest month and with work, study and everything else it's felt like the mountain path has all but disappeared recently, leaving me with just sheer cliff face to navigate (and no crampons). Nonetheless there have been a few good things going on too. I got to spend the book tokens I got for Yule and that meant picking up seven brilliant books, which I'm really looking forward to reading. I ordered a copy of the Sea Watch by Adrian Tchaikovsky - it seems to be the red headed stepchild of his series, Waterstones had pretty much every other book by him, but Sea Watch has been conspicuous by its absence. The seller told me it would take six weeks to come in, but i...

I'm late with this, but I hope you'll forgive me in the timing of this somewhat Janus themed post (looking back and forward at the same time). A lot of things have been whirling around my head from coursework to novels, to working myself into pointless stress over roleplaying... something I've decided to cut out of my life almost completely for now because I've come to the conclusion that at present it simply cannot make me happy. So my 'this is a new year, oh my God' post ended up being put on the back burner a bit. If I'm honest I don't have a lot to say, my resolutions largely boil down to 'keep doing what I'm doing', to keep reading and writing and working to get up the mountain to being published (fully aware that there's another peak to climb after that one). The only change to 'situation normal' is that as I'm not gaming I'm going to have to seek out a new social life. I'm an introvert and I'm also extreme...

Happiness; it's on my mind a lot at the moment. Partly because of the time of year, that mandatory happiness sentence at Christmas, and partly because a good chunk of my 30s has been spent scrabbling around trying to make sense of it all and find out what actually makes me happy after... well what feels like a long time of just wandering aimlessly and finding out what only offers disappointment. 'All that glitters is not gold', as J.R.R. Tolkien put it, never seemed so apt. The thing about happiness is that, like humour, it's a very personal thing. What makes one person happy doesn't another, and sometimes it feels like it's hard balance to get right, sometimes almost impossible; especially where groups of people are concerned. For instance, reading books is one of the things that makes me happy and fulfilled. A friend only reads comic books (which I have no problem with - I'm happy to quote the Tenth Muse idea to anyone with five minutes to spare and an o...