Happy 2014!
It’s been a good start to the new year. After my hard drive crashed last summer I went through a mini nervous breakdown thinking that I’d lost half a novel I was working on (it turned out that I had most it saved on USB, but I still lost around 15,000 words and a lot of character notes). It’s hardly a masterpiece, but I’d put a lot of time and energy into creating something I knew I could be proud of once it was finished. So losing so much work put me off writing anything new for a while. Note to reader and self: ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR WORK
The reason things are looking up is because something clicked while I was in France. My parents took advangtage of the house market over there at the start of the new millennium. They bought a crumbling wreck of a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere for 11,000 francs (that’s about £5000 in today’s money) and spent ten years adding bits and pieces. Nothing extravagant, just the essential stuff, like a roof, and floors, and a working shower.
Et voila, la maison!
The point is it’s the perfect place if you’re at all creative, or if you just need peace and quiet. There’s a farm at the bottom of the road and not much else. On average you’ll see/hear about one car every five hours passing by. The village is a ten minute walk and has all of fifty houses, a boulangerie, post office, village hall, bar, grocers, and a library that opens once a month. There was a butcher that opened every Wednesday, but they’ve since moved on to bigger and better things. It’s the sort of place where you hear scandal like the baker’s wife having an affair with the postman, followed by a nervous breakdown, a pregnancy, and a suspicious death. I love it.
So I knocked out over 8,000 words while I was over there, and went over some ideas for character development. The goal for finishing the whole thing has changed slightly. I don’t want to feel so pressured because that’d take the fun out of it. The general idea now is to have written a first draft by April. That way I can proof it, get it edited, then hopefully shove it on Amazon by June – the same deadline as my Masters degree.
Asides from the book and my degree, this year is largely going to be about finding a job. In between writing this blog I’m honing my CV, adding bits and taking away, trying to make myself sound as employable as possible. The grad scheme deadlines are all looming, and I think a lot of people on the course, myself included, are realising that you just can’t afford to be picky when it comes to applying for work. When alumni from the university come in and talk to us, a lot of them tend to stress just how important it is not to get wrapped up in landing your dream job straight away. Many of them were surprised by where they ended up, but none of them seem to regret it.
I’ve posted the rest of the photos I took in France and a few more of the coast in Britain during the storms. Have a look and let me know what you think, and keep an eye out for a Sherlock post I’m using as serious procrastination from these grad scheme apps.
Roisin's Writing 