Farewell to the holidays

Tomorrow I start back at work.  Well, sort of.  We only need to go in for the afternoon and it's for training, but the point is, the summer holidays are over.  Please wait while I weep uncontrollably in the corner.

Okay, so that's a touch melodramatic.  I think perhaps it's getting me down because I haven't achieved as much as I wanted to this summer, and of course have no-one but myself to blame for this.  The writing-to-agents thing stalled quite fantastically last month.  I basically terrified myself out of doing it and convinced myself that it's never going to happen anyway because I'm so rubbish and no-one will want to read my work so what was the point anyway and I might as well not even bother - and so on and so forth.  Which is of course a stupid attitude to take - if I don't try there is no chance I will succeed as opposed to there being a slight chance if I do try - but I never said my brain was logical.  I have a rather hefty dose of crazy to contend with here, people.

And because of said crazy I felt less happy with the writing itself this past couple of weeks too.  I've managed to get to my ten-chapter-mark, which was my aim.  Kind of.  I originally aimed for the first third which, somewhere along the way, got turned into 'the first ten chapters' in my head, despite the fact that the first third would actually be more like seventeen chapters.  This is why I did a degree in English and not in maths.  So even though I'm not a third of the way in, at least I'm over 20k in, which is better than nothing I suppose.

Ideas for the new story which I'm not supposed to be thinking about are flowing thick and fast.  I've got plenty of little stories just coming into existence and several are already starting to link up, which is quite exciting in a way that my more established stories sometimes lack.  I don't know whether this new story will actually turn into a thing - it will be a monster if it does - but it's nice just to have ideas I'm excited about.

On a tangent, the checkout lady in Asda today asked me if I was 'buying all my stuff to go off to uni'.  Putting aside the fact that I apparently look eighteen-years-old, I suddenly wished that I could say 'yes'.  If only learning was a job.  And I don't mean in the 'learning how to engage and empathise with the customer' way.  I mean in the 'actually putting new things in my brain way'.  Mind you, if I do look eighteen, maybe I could just wander into random uni lectures and get taught that way.  After all, how many times did anyone ever check my ID at uni?  I do believe it rhymes with 'hero'.