As usual I’m getting sloppy with updates again, but then, since my second-to-last post (my last one being something of a cop-out anyway), I’ve started uni again, and apparently this year they actually expect us to do work. A little at least. It’s not too bad: I’m doing a 50% dissertation, which means that 50% of my final degree comes for a 10,000 word essay I have until April to complete, and the other half comes from an 8,000 word prose project, of which I’ve already written the first 4,000 words of the first draft (more on that in a minute).

I’d be lying if I said I’d been devoting myself entirely to uni work and that’s the reason I haven’t updated, at least partially. Other primary influences are, to a small extent my job, which remains amazing, because a) there’s very few customers, and, unless they ask for wine recommendations, are generally low maintenance and b) I work with some pretty cool people who I have both opportunity and inclination to converse with at length.

I’ve been reading a lot, some of it for my dissertation, mostly, apart from my nightly session with Marcel Proust, because my course leader told me I should do more critical reading, Terry Eagleton’s Introduction to Literary Theory. Damn, Literary Theory is, as they say on the internet, srs bizns (serious business), pretty interesting though, if you’re a geek like me.

My other time-sink lately -

- pause for a shot of bourbon (not an alcoholic, my housemate did one too) -

My other time-sink lately has been Bioware’s Jade Empire, an Xbox game from about four years ago that, like the only other Bioware game I’ve played (Mass Effect) is a brilliantly immersive experience and contains the kind of world, like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, that I find myself just wanting to spend time in, talking to its inhabitants, discovering its secrets.

What else have I been up to? Just enjoying October I suppose. I think it’s one of my favourite months, being right in the middle of autumn, still with the memories of summer, and less dark than November or December. It’s a beautiful month when the weather’s good, as it has been. I’ve been buying squashes, and candles and teas, lots of teas, and, as usual, just taking it easy. And baking gingerbread.

I woke up at half ten today, but my bed was warm, so I stayed in bed for half an hour with my blind half up, looking at the October sky. I’ve also spent a lot of the month listening mostly to a band whose first album I found a few years ago for £2, and whose second album I recently bought, called Logh. They’re seem perfect October music, as do Audible, who have a song called ‘October Song’. Scarling. I’ve also found good listening lately, as they sound a little similar to Logh, though more gothy.

“We’re not, despite the sign, welcome at all.
Don’t let them know who we are.
Don’t let them know where we’re from.
Sorry sir, we were just trying to get home.
Waiter, serve us our drinks then leave us alone.”

I like Logh’s lyrics, even if they’re mostly pretty meaningless.

This post’s quite erratic, even before the bourbon. I get jealous when I read other people’s blogs and think they’re effortlessly better than mine. I kind of assume I should be an amazing blogger because (I think) I’m a good writer, but actually, I think I’m worse because of it. I used to just free-write my blogs, and write about myself, but with this site, I’ve tried to craft my posts more, which means I put in more time and effort, and they often feel more contrived. That’s not to say I’m entirely unhappy with my output, I just like to free up every now and then like this. Also, I think a lot of my friend’s blogs that I’ve read have inherent advantages in that a) they generally write less, making them more appealing to read and b) they’re generally into photography, arts, or music so they can post either pictures or song streams/links, which are better suited to web viewing than long prose pieces.

Back to my work for this year: My ten-thousand word dissertation is going to be on the ways fiction adapts to ‘the digital age’, so I’m looking at how the internet and e-readers affect the distribution and consumption of fiction, which is obviously relevant to myself, being someone who publishes, at the moment and not entirely (though mostly) by choice, exclusively on the web, and who would be looking at getting my work ‘out there’ in the future.

My prose piece, at least in its current form, is more retrospective, archaic even, being influenced almost entirely by Remembrance of Things Past and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It’s going well so far, and might even turn into a novel, albeit a short one, except for the one flaw my tutor pointed out yesterday: without some justification of the Proustian style, it runs the risk of becoming nothing more than a pastiche. Well, I’m thinking of ways to get around that, and I don’t think it will be too difficult, probably adding some post-modern elements will help, so I’m not worried about that.

Otherwise, when I read out my second draft in class yesterday, which was the first time anyone other than myself had seen it, the response was better than I had hoped for, ie. my style wasn’t criticised, and in fact, very little, other than the flaw I just pointed out, was criticised, just a couple of lines here and there. This is promising as, in my opinion, this is about the most ambitious work I’ve undertaken so far, and so I’m glad I still have a good feeling about it, though I am only at the first stage of a fairly long journey which, I imagine, will take up a lot of the time I would otherwise devote to short stories. To compensate, I might periodically post ‘work-in-progess’ to this site, or not. Apart from that, I don’t want to say too much more about it right now, except that anyone who’s read any of my previous work can pretty much guess what it’s about, and anyone who’s read any of Remembrance of Things Past will have an even clearer idea.

Tags: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, fox, Gingerbread, Jade Empire, James Joyce, Legend of Zelda, Marcel Proust, Mass Effect, Pumpkin, Remembrance of Things Past, tea, The Wi, Videogames

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 9:47 pm and is filed under Personal Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.