Huh...

Today has been a weird day. One of those days when you feel like you haven't achieved a thing, and might as well go into hibernation.

I woke up, and read a bit. Some guys came to fix our TV aerial. Then, I edited my Andrew Marvell essay again, but then got bored of that. Then... I can't remember what I did. I browsed the internet for a bit, refreshing Facebook over and over again as you do, and cut the music for a tap dance I'm teaching. I decided to read a bit more (Fruit of the Lemon by Andrea Levy if you care). Then I decided I was tired and felt sick (I've eaten nothing but peanut butter and jam sandwiches for several days and am starting to feel like my insides are dying - hello student life) so I went to sleep.

I woke up and it was dark. All my housemates were gone. I was sleepy and confused. I felt lonely and depressed, so ate a block of wensleydale cheese to make myself feel better. It didn't work.

So I watched a random old episode of Life on Mars. And... I am still depressed and lonely and confused. I think I'm going a bit crazy. I haven't been to a lecture since Tuesday... I really need to get out of the house. Tomorrow I think I'll go to the library. I don't know, I guess life doesn't feel that exciting at the moment, and there's nothing that inspires me to write. I'm just limping monotonously through my degree, as usual...

Huh. Depressing.

The apocalypse continues...

...and I don't use that word lightly. My friend managed to battle through the howling blizzard to the shop today, and apparently people were bulk-buying tinned food as if World War Three were about to break out, while the manager ran around shouting, "I HAVE NO STAFF! I HAVE NO STAFF!"

However, it's a very beautiful apocalypse. We went on another country walk today, and I took some more pictures I just have to share.

That last one is my favourite - breathtaking, no?

It's starting to drive me a bit crazy, though, being stuck in the house like this. As you've probably guessed from the fact I'm updating my blog so frequently...

MORE SNOW ARRRGGGEEEHHHHHHHH

England has officially become The Day After Tomorrow.

It has been snowing all night and all day so far. People are snowed into their houses - you can't see the wheels of cars underneath the snow. The whole economy has just shut down for a day; I don't know anyone who has gone to work or school. All the roads are entirely deserted, but they don't even look like roads anymore, just massive blocks of white. My friend and I just walked to the park and we were sliding down the main roads, along with everyone else, because there are no cars.

Then we got to the park, and it was beautiful. It looked like Narnia. I'll put up some pictures later, when I've charged my camera. The lake was frozen over and the poor ducks were all huddled in one corner; trees had fallen over, unable to support the weight of the snow on their branches. We walked over the heath, and we kept falling into massive pits because we couldn't see them, and then we climbed to the top of the hill, falling over and sliding back to the bottom several times. We found a field of untouched snow that came up to our knees, then fell backwards onto it (it was incredibly comfortable) and made snow angels. We walked through the woods, through little alleys where the snow-laden trees bent over to form archways, and every time the wind shook their boughs they sent a flurry of snow falling down on us. It really did feel like we had entered a magical new world.

Then we got completely and utterly lost for two hours.

But it was quite nice. If you stopped, all you could hear was the wind and the gentle patter of snow on the leaves.

We eventually found our way out of the woods and I walked home, once again sliding down the roads. If you take a run up and then just let yourself slide, you keep going for a good five seconds. Before falling over, of course. It was so nice to see parents pulling their children down the middle of the road in toboggans, laughing and shrieking. I suppose families don't get to spend much time like that together these days.

If this snow doesn't stop, I have no idea how I'm going to get back to uni on Sunday. Right now, I'm just enjoying sitting here with a cup of tea and some cake (goodbye new year resolution) enjoying the warmth of my house, and looking out of the window at my garden, which is so covered in snow it looks like one huge marshmellow. It makes me want to write, obviously, but I have essays to do...

Edit: Some photos of the park...

Oops!

Oops - I just started writing another new story.

I just couldn't help it. I was trying to write my Seventeenth Century essay, and the idea just came to me, and I had to start writing before I lost it. So now I'm writing a novel about a girl who thinks she's in love with a Cavalier poet (not me, you'll be relieved to hear, I just thought it would be a funny concept) - and then he somehow gets transported from his world into hers and she has to work out how to send him back. An idea that I'm sure has been done millions of times before, but never mind. It's fun to write! It'll probably be a shorter story, like The Window Cleaner and The Healing Properties of Tea - about 30,000 words or so.

I'm still writing the story about Anja, though - I finished Chapter Three today.

But I didn't get a word of that important assessed essay written...

I am the essay ninja!

Oh gosh. My eyes are bleeding. I have just spent about six hours relentlessly writing an assessed essay for next term. The essay is about two of my favourite books, Rebecca and Jane Eyre, but in a way that makes it even harder - I have so much to say about them, and I can't fit it all into the 5,000 word limit.

New year's day I sat down and pounded out 9,000 words, thinking it was the best thing I'd ever written. But I won't lie, I was hungover from the night before, and when I read it all back yesterday it didn't even make sense. Literally, I hadn't even spelt half the words right. So today I've been editing, editing, editing, basically inhaling cups of tea to get me through it, and now it's starting to come together. But I'm exhausted, and I still have another 2,500 essay to write after this one!

Between bouts of furious essay writing I have also started my new story, which follows Anja, one of the characters from Storm Awakened. Like SA, this is basically another opportunity for me to practise my writing. SA is full of horribly flowery descriptions, so my project for this new story is to make my writing much tighter and more lucid. I'm trying to say more by saying less, through the actions and dialogue of my characters. I need to stop spoon-feeding my readers with top-to-toe physical descriptions, obvious and overblown pathetic fallacy, and unbearable blocks of stilted three-page-long expostulatory dialogue. You guys aren't stupid, I know that.

Another massive problem with SA was that most of the supporting characters had no lives outside of Kate and Jouran - they were just 2D cardboard cut-outs standing in the background. This time I'm trying to get inside the head of every character, even the minor ones, to build up genuine relationships between the characters. And I'm not trying to make my characters the ideal people I would like to be anymore. I tried to make Kate this sweet, virtuous, angelic person - I was fed up of reading about feisty kick-ass rebellious she-warriors who just played into the hands of the stereotypes they were meant to defy - but she ended up a boring, pathetic wet blanket. Anja is much different. At the beginning of the novel she has almost no redeeming features, but I plan to change that as I go along!

But I'm still starting from the same old position of having no plot beyond the first ten chapters or so. I know roughly what is going to happen, but not how it's going to happen, or how the story is going to end. I've decided it's more fun that way. I can imagine if I rigidly planned every plot point, and then stuck to it from beginning to end, I'd get horrifically bored halfway through. It just wouldn't be an adventure. The way I write at the moment, I never know what's coming next. It's great. I can decide on the spur of the moment to kill off a character, or dramatically change the plot so that the whole story veers off in another direction. Yes, I end up with plot holes, but the story always somehow manages to limp to a vaguely plausible ending. If I'm serious about the novel, I can always revise it afterwards, right?

But I wasn't serious about SA, and I'm not about this novel either, really. Like I said, I'm just practising my writing.

Exciting news though: regarding The Novel (as in, the big one, the one I'd like to try and publish, which will hopefully have some kind of literary merit rather than being fluffy-fantasy-romance-sellout-trash), inspiration has finally come. I have an Idea. Of course I'm not going to tell you what it is. I'm not going to tell anyone what it is, at least not until I've written a few chapters and discovered it actually works. But it's going to involve extensive research, and I've decided that every Monday (I finish quite early on a Monday) I'm going to go and spend hours in the library with my laptop, researching and writing. I want to get a portfolio of good, serious writing built up so that when it comes to applying for a Masters I have something to show for myself. Therefore Mondays = Writing Mondays. That's my new year resolution (as well as eating less cake).

On a completely unrelated note, I hope everyone had a good Christmas and New Year. I did. I'm now enjoying hitting the sales...this morning (pre-essay marathon) I bought a gorgeous jacket from Whistles - that's another £100 out of my magical ever-replenishing fountain of money that I don't have. I will justify this shopping habit one day, when I publish a book, or work in a bookshop/library for the rest of my life, whichever fate happens to befall me.

I'm now going to watch Family Guy, as I need some comic relief after spending half the day writing about flipping patriarchal ideology and the angel in the house and binary oppositions. Screw you, Gilbert and Gubar, you can't get the better of me!

SNOWWWW EEARGGHHHH

You may have noticed that it's almost Christmas. I certainly have. For one thing, it's been snowing, and as usual the country has gone AGHIUHEHOIHHHAAAHHHHHHH SNOW and everything has ceased to function. The roads are like ice rinks, no one can get anywhere, it takes everyone five hours to get home from work, our driveway (which is a massive hill) becomes a death trap. On the plus side, everything looks pretty. Here is our garden:

The second one is smoky because our neighbour likes to have massive bonfires for no apparent reason. Ironically, it has been snowing almost every day, but it is forecast not to snow on Christmas Day. Pah. I'm hoping that at least some of the existing snow will remain on the ground so it still looks nice.

Our house is looking pretty too. We really go to town at Christmas...lights, decorations, Christmas scented air fresheners, little bowls of nuts all around the house, and my mum has even made an amazing Christmas cake this year. Here is the tree, with some of the presents already under it (more to come though, yay!):

Doesn't it look lovely? I have also been doing lots of Christmassy things. The day after I came home from uni my mum and I went to Cologne (in Germany in case you didn't know!). They have a famous Christmas market there - lots of little stalls selling handmade gifts, food and

Gluehwein (mulled wine, of which a lot was drunk). It was great fun and it even snowed. On the first day we did loads of Christmas shopping, and on the second day we went on an excursion: a boat trip down the Rhine, and then we went to a picturesque little village on the side of the river and did some wine tasting.

Here's a picture of the Christmas market in Cologne:

On Sunday I went to a lovely candlelit carol service. On Monday my friend and I went to London for what has become our yearly tradition: we get pizza, then we go to Harrods and pretend to be posh, then we go ice-skating outside the Natural History Museum. We then usually go back to mine or hers to drink hot chocolate and watch Love Actually, but we couldn't do that this year since it took us two hours to make the fifteen minute drive home from the train station (because of the snow). The drive was actually quite fun though, because we played Christmas songs very loudly and had a singalong. I'm not ashamed to say that I love Christmas songs!

I've basically been doing anything I can to avoid the two beastly assessed essays I have to write for next term: one on Andrew Marvell and the other on Jane Eyre and Rebecca. I've been ploughing through my reading though! I've recently read Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood, Germinal by Emile Zola, the first Lord of the Rings book (that was for fun, not for uni), Possession by A.S. Byatt (brilliant, I'd really recommend it), and The Atom Station by Halldor Laxness...now I'm reading The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (it's a lesbian novel I am reading for my Feminism module...it's pretty dull to be honest!).

Tonight is the Wednesday reunion. When everyone from my school comes back from university for the holidays, everyone goes to the local pub on a Wednesday. The evening consists of people hugging and exclaiming, "HOW ARE YOU? IT'S BEEN SO LONG! I LOVE YOUR HAIR!" before retreating into a corner with their close friends and muttering, "Well he's put on weight! Eurgh, she's changed so much...ever since she went to uni she thinks she's so cool," and the like. It's a bit awkward really, but it will be great to see my close group of friends, many of whom I haven't had the chance to see yet.

Christmas Day aside, I'm really looking forward to Boxing Day. There's a tradition in a nearby village where they close all the roads and hold a race/pub crawl. Basically people get into teams and choose a theme; they then dress up in costumes and make a "pram" relating to that theme. The teams have to race their pram between the various pubs in the village, buying a drink in each one. People get drunk in the morning and fun is had by all. This year our theme is safari: our pram is a jeep and we're all dressing like different animals. I'm the antelope and have spent most of today making a pair of paper mache horns. I forgot how fun paper mache was!

Anyway, I hope everyone reading this has a wonderful Christmas and New Year (if I don't update before then) filled with much loveliness, hot chocolate, mince pies and tacky straight-to-DVD Christmas movies. :)

The little black book.

I've recently taken to carrying a little black leather book with me everywhere I go. Every time I have a random interesting thought, or I want to remind myself to do something later, or I am struck by something I see or hear and what to put it into a story, I scribble it down in my book. Horribly pretentious, I know, but I think it's a great idea for every writer to have one. How many times have you felt inspired but had nowhere to capture the feeling? This way I never forget the ideas I have for my stories. On top of that, it's entertaining to flick back through the book and recall how I felt at a certain time.

I suppose it's similiar to the commonplace books we learnt about in our Seventeenth Century module. Writers used them to jot down interesting pieces of rhetoric they learnt, or quotes they liked, or facts that could be useful to them. Some of these commonplace books still exist. This, for example, is John Milton's:



It's fascinating to see his actual writing (the fact I don't particularly like Milton aside). However, I think his book is possibly a little more...academic than mine is. When people see me in the library hunched over my book, scrawling things very quickly, they must think I'm a really deep and artistic person and that I'm wrtiting down something profound and intense. This is not the case. Here is a quote from my book, and it's pretty representative of the whole:

The man sitting across the aisle from me on the train is wearing my nerves down the threads and writing in this book is all I can do to stop myself from leaping across the gap, tearing the phone from his hand and jumping up and down on it repeatedly whilst screaming for him to SHUT UP. Admittedly he is speaking in a language I do not understand but this makes it even worse because he keeps laughing every few seconds and I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IS SO FUNNY!!!

Hm, profound. I wonder if Milton has any angry rants in his book? I doubt it.

Anyway, I think that every writer should have a book like this. We let so much of life pass us by, as if we're sitting on a bus and everything is just a blurred scenery that passes us by. We should be taking snapshots of it, even the mundane things, to look back on later. Synecdoche is the technique of describing the whole by reference to smaller parts of it - you can create the feel of a whole crowd just by describing the hats people are wearing or the sound of their voices. In the same way, the little details of life, the things we barely look twice at, can be used to create something really vivid and realistic. But we need to capture them before they slip away and we forget them forever.