OUUROBOROS

Forgot to update this. A lot of stuff has happened, okay? :<

First of all - and quite clearly, most important of all - I'm going to the Houses of Parliament. That's right! I have two days of work experience there this summer, and it's going to be fun! What can I say, other than this is blatantly just the beginning of my rise to power? First the UK, then the world!
I'll actually post about the story behind this work experience at a later date. The politician in me is super excited!

On the other hand, this is my current progress with my short stories (the titles can be found on the current projects pages)

Stories 1, 2, 3, 6 & 9 are completed, and I actually like them. 1, 2 & 3 are in the final stages of editing, 9 is close behind, 6 needs lots.
Story 4 is completed and I absolutely hate it. It took a whole month because I kept blocking on it, and it still sucks.
Story 8 is being worked on right this minute and is half way done!
And story 10 has a bunch of ramblings written for it that I mostly don't like and will change.
7 will be written but will be super long, and I still don't know how the hell I'm going to do story 5.

Over the last few months the overall storyline of the collection has developed a lot! I'm really excited by it now, even though it is super behind schedule.
I also completed NaNoWriMo this year, beating 50,000 words easily! Unfortunately I didn't know you had to submit your work once you finished, so it didn't even go on the damn record. Boo!

I'm super behind schedule with it and won't get the ebook completed in time, but I'm going to do my best to hit my new deadline - Easter. I've got no work until early January but I've also got to revise for my Chemistry retake, which is pretty lame. I'm going to fail it, I already know. I don't just hate Chemistry, I actually despise it. I'd forgotten how much I hated it until I picked up my old notes again.

Everything's going well in general, though this short story collection project is taking far longer than I'd hoped. It may well eat up most of my gap year, but I don't mind so much any more. I really think that the plotline, now completely refined, will be enjoyable for other people to read. At least, I hope so! We'll just see what happens.

I also sent off my UCAS form (just before I got my parliamentary work experience - so I can't put it on there, which sucks) and am nervously awaiting my results! Regrettably Cambridge said they'd take me for English but not Biology (or NatSci as it would be there) so I've had to start gunning for Durham. Please let me in, okay? If I get to the end of my three years and haven't made my fortune as a writer/get sick of science I'll just convert to Law, I suppose.

I'll update this more, I swear :<

Diana, this is for you. ❤  
Thanks for a wonderful afternoon discussing our respective stories, novels, plans, potatoes, theology, life, the universe and everything. Respect for putting up with me and my lameness! We must do this more often and I want to see that story, ok? I know you read this so :>

Yeah so I haven't updated this for a few days, I've been too busy procrastinating on my stories to do anything else. Forget 'We've Lost Our Moral Compass', I'm working on the tenth short and the final one in the collection (both physically and chronologically) which I should not be doing because I really ought to be finishing the others but whatever. It's fun.
I have worked a couple of new concepts that I really really wanted into the shorts so I'm fairly pleased. The first one is the story of Icarus - obviously a slight distortion of the original, since the setting is a parallel future. It ties into the idea of swallows symbolising freedom of thought - in the shorts Icarus was a man who wanted to fly like the swallows that he watched from his window, so he made a pair of wings and flew away. Then the ending is the same, of course - he flew too close to the sun and burned his wings. It's my favourite of the old legends, always has been. I'm just a little bit obsessed with the imagery in it. And it fits because in a way, most of the characters in the shorts could be compared to Icarus. Nick, John, May, Richard, Chyber - all of them fit.
It also gives me so many ideas for digital paintings, which is something I really need to get back in to. And just drawings in general. I'm ridiculously lazy and unmotivated these days.
The other concept that I've worked in is to do specifically with Richard's character. One of the recurring phrases in the shorts is that 'The Government always win'. Richard Deaux is a gambling man, addicted to cigarettes and vodka, and it pretty much mirrors the idea that 'the house always wins'.

In other news I'm falling behind on nanowrimo which is bad, and I need to feel bad. I was also reading my new book on quantum physics on the bus home (it interests me, all right? It's the only part of physics I really like) and one little paragraph in there somehow made most of Chemistry A-level clear to me. It was about electron shells in atoms and how e- move between energy levels and emit different shades of light and that's why spectroscopy works because each element does different colours due to different numbers of atoms and shells/energy levels and I don't know it's not the most thrilling stuff in the world but I had an eureka moment and then felt really lame. Why didn't I understand this last year? Maybe I wouldn't have got a B if I'd actually understood Chemistry instead of parroted it, and then I wouldn't have had a B ruining my other nice A-level results.

So, for NaNoWriMo I'm going to work on completing my set of shorts. At the moment five are finished, there are only five more to do, and I'm well on the way with number 4: We've Lost Our Moral Compass. Only issue is that I can't decide whether it should be first or third person. I normally hate writing in first person and it's not my forte, but it seems to be the best option for this particular story; which is effectively a dystopian Alice in Wonderland. Think Alice in Wonderland where the dream world wins out and there is no happy ending.

I have also realised that creating this blog was an excellent way to procrastinate and writing in it will be even better. Since hardly anyone is going to read it I'll be mostly keeping it as record for myself, to make sure I hit my self-imposed deadlines. I want We've Lost Our Moral Compass completed by tomorrow, which is quite possibly not going to happen, but we'll see how it goes. There may also be the odd opinion post because I'm a fairly opinionated little swine and no one will listen to me ranting about stuff in real life :<

Things I have learned today: I look pretty silly when I wear my glasses. I literally have bottle glasses, I'm so damn blind.

Procrastination over.