I have been being writerly.
I am frantically trying to get my story finished before I go back to Cambridge in a few weeks.
Did I mention that I am doing a Master’s’s degree at Cambridge University? Well, I am.
I do not need to finish the story for any special reason, but I want to be able to say to anybody who might be hiding a literary agent under their bat-gown: Aha. I have a Completed Children’s Story that I Prepared Earlier, do you want to have a look?
In fact one of our tutors has promised that if it is half decent she will get her own agent to look at it, so all I have to do is a) finish it and b) make sure it is half decent, and I will, at the very least, be in with a chance.
A children’s story has got to be around eighty thousand words, and mine, so far, is sixty four thousand, six hundred and fifty four. I do not think I will get it finished in that number, and will probably have to cut some bits out, but that is better than the other way, of frantically trying to think of something else interesting to say.
I am almost getting to the Thrilling Conclusion. I am not sorry about this, because I have got repetitive strain injury to my typing finger now, from repeated keyboard impacts. That is sixty something thousand words of story, plus seven hundred words a day on these pages, plus emails to the taxi office, Oliver’s housemaster, and to anybody else who pesters me and expects me to reply. That’s is a very lot of bashing for two typing fingers.
On top of that, and the housework, a massive reading list has today thumped into my Inbox. I am sorry to say that there is almost nothing on it that I want to read at all. My taste in reading at the moment is no more sophisticated than JK Rowling’s detective novels, and we all know that I am never, ever going to read works called: Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape, or, for that matter, Minor Feelings: A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition, or even: Two Trees Make a Forest: On Memory, Migration and Taiwan. I would like to think that I was sufficiently academic that I would, but frankly, I won’t.
I don’t care. When my last Cambridge school report from my tutor came in it said Excellent, and gave some reasons why I was excellent. I didn’t show anybody because that sort of gush is a bit embarrassing really, but I have kept it on my desktop, and look at it every now and again when I feel like being vain. I can be very smug about myself sometimes, and really should not be encouraged.
My own story is never likely to make it to the reading list. It is the sort of story I like to read, by which I mean it has got a dragon in it, some talking cats, and lots of thrilling moments where the young person can beg its parent for just one more chapter before bed, pleeese, in complete indifference to the bottle of Merlot waiting ready-uncorked on the table downstairs.
Anyway, I have spent a very great deal of today writing, and might try to do a bit more if we have a quiet night on the taxi rank, not least because I have finished my knitting, and do not wish to read anything at all on the mighty Internet. I am enjoying my book but am trying to read it slowly so that I do not accidentally finish it before I have found something else to read, and am trying to save it for emergencies.
In other news, there is no other news really. I have been for a long and very windy walk with the dogs, completed all available laundry and now I am on the taxi rank.
I won’t see you tomorrow because it is Saturday and just too difficult to write in five minute bursts in between people with bad legs who just want to go around the corner.
I will see you on the other side.
