Here’s what I got up to this month-and-a-half!
- The school squad group chat is quieter these days.
- #Growingpains tour
- School-related things
- Beginner’s Japanese
- Bookity Books
- NaNo Prep
- Trip to Edinburgh
- Goodbye to the nail salon
Uni things
Towards mid-September I said goodbye to a number of school friends that were heading off to Uni and moving out. I’m hella excited for them! They’re heading off to do a huge variety of exciting things. Although they’re all my motivation for working my butt off this year, most I’ve heard is that things are expensive, and freshers’ week is a blast, and they have lots of cool student discounts, yet things are still expensive. Their workload seems to be increasing at a pretty fast rate, too…
#Growingpains book tour
I went to the #Growingpains tour in Waterstones Birmingham featuring four lovely authors: Laura Dockrill (Lorali), Julie Mayhew (Mother Tongue) , Claire Hennessy (Nothing Tastes As Good) and Jess Vallance (The Yellow Room).
I hadn’t read any of their books but rest assured that they are all on my reading list after hearing them talk a bit about them – they are all funny and lovely people! I also managed to get some great writing advice from Laura Dockrill and Julie Mayhew about the plotting and structure of a story which has inspired me to approach my current project differently. I was suddenly bombarded with ideas, and also did a bit of a horrid thing and cut out a few of my beloved, yet unnecessary, characters to archive them for another story. Thus began my prep for this year’s NaNoWriMo.
Exam Scripts
The day after that, I went into school to pay to get my exam scripts back, and pay for the archery club which I still go to. I can’t wait to see what went wrong four months ago, in a gut-dropping, sigh-inducing way. My UCAS application is also well on its way and hopefully should be finished soon. I’m in no rush as the staff from my old school are prioritising this year’s Year 13 and have warned me that they’re not going to put mine first – fair enough, really. I think I have just sighed a hundred times just having to write this paragraph, but it’s something that has to be done.
Japanese Lessons
I signed up for a course in Beginner’s Japanese in September which started last week, as it’s been something I’ve always been interested in doing. Had I gotten into Uni I would have used the module-switching opportunity to do it, but thankfully I found a way to do it anyway. I have previously tried to learn at home but I’ve never had any lessons so my knowledge is random and I can’t string sentences together… There was a beginner’s Plus option but it’s good that I went for basics as the course includes a few things I hadn’t covered in my self-learning and it’ll help me to reinforce the things I do know. I am also using the lesson structure to go over my Vietnamese as well.
Bookity Books
In my first write-in session at #BookityBooks (as opposed to the ones where we just talk about books), we did a couple of word wars and I got stickers (always fun), a fortune cookie (always fun) and won a prize (YEAH. GO ME.)
I had decided not to bring my laptop and wrote by hand for my word wars, which I didn’t have much high hopes about because I know I’m a really slow writer. It turns out that I’m actually pretty fast under pressure – I did 300 words exactly in fifteen minutes, which is about a side and a half of stretched out handwriting on A4. In the ten minute war, I almost matched that with 248 words.
There’s hope for my Psych essays this year, everybody! Even if the average word size in my essays is larger!
NaNo Prep
NaNoWriMo is coming up, so I was very good about planning and did it all in a two-day sitting. By planning, I mean I summarised ideas for scenes that I’d like to write and made sure there were loads just in case I got stuck and wanted to move on. It’s a pretty long list. We did a bit of criticising at the month-end session at #BookityBooks so I had the other members (and by that I mean just Maddie) look at my intro. My issue is that descriptive paragraphs sound fine in my first-person POV style but not in my third person because it sounds less personal and just too much. So now I am trying to strike up a conversational tone in third person that should hopefully be easier to read through.
The Spontaneous Trip Up North
Coming into the second half of the month, my Dad invited me to go up to Edinburgh with him for a couple of nights. I was a little worried about it at first, but decided to be positive about the idea and went along. My family and I have never been to Scotland at all before as it’s a bit of a long drive – estimated at about 5.5 hours but that ended up being longer due to weather, construction work and general traffic.
Anyway, Edinburgh and Glasgow (where I went on our second day) are really lovely cities that I’d love to visit again to explore better. All the buildings in the city centres have a charm to them that’s unique to their cities and not like my home Brum at all. I mostly had to tag around with my Dad on this trip, but I want to come back and visit Edinburgh Zoo and all the museums I spotted on our drives around the city. We visited the seafront in the early morning when it was still chilly, but it was still really nice – I love a nice quiet beach. If you are visiting, I recommend the Mussel Inn in Edinburgh as a restaurant to eat at in the evening, although be sure to book a table first!
We also dropped by Newcastle to visit one of Dad’s acquaintances on the way back. That makes three cities in three days!
The Nail Salon
As we go into November, my parents have sold their nail salon to focus on their new business ventures full-time, and I have to say that it was sudden and that I’m not quite ready. I had no idea that earlier this year I’d be walking into the place for the last time. The place is virtually the same, just that it will have different people working there from now on. I liked the neighbourhood it was in and the familiar local faces – faces that probably assumed I was a local too. My parents ran it for over a decade, which is over half of my life so I do feel a bit of a sad pang knowing that I’ll probably never go back.
That’s what I’ve been up to this month! Next time, you’ll probably be hearing a bit about NaNo, UCAS and my progress in languages.
Until then!
X
Twenty Swans 