Do you still think that way about me now?

I have completely forgotten what sort of things you're supposed to put in an LJ. My life has been very routine since leaving university - the perils of regular employment, I suppose.

My transfer (see previous entry) started in August, so I've been working in Ballymena for four months now. The travel time is much more suitable. I now have a decent period for unwinding on the weekdays, and I can even spare time to go to things through the week. I've joined a local choir in the last few weeks, and on Tuesday I was at a Christmas concert by the Ulster Orchestra, which was fabulous fun. I wouldn't have been able to do that if I'd still been working in Belfast.

I just finished reading The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane. It's non-fiction; you might find it under travelogues or natural history. In a bid to discover if there is any "wilderness" left, the author travels around Britain and Ireland to caves, islands, moors, mountains, glens, beaches and woods. ( A brief review )

I've worked on Company too, though I haven't done as much as I should - which is the story of my life, really, when it comes to Company :-/

And now, I shall probably disappear until some time deep into the New Year lol. Happy Christmas, folks, in case I don't see you!

February hasn't been a good month. I was horribly sick for the first few days with a stomach bug. At the same time, there was a reshuffle of management and a new duty roster for my team, but our line manager fell ill and was off for a fortnight, leaving Keith, the new staff officer, to muddle through on his own. Mary moved to payroll, and now Karen will be going there too, so we've got a new team member to train. Meanwhile, the auditors have come in and caused no end of havoc, what with demanding information which we don't have, locking us out of our own systems, having problems with logins, and making changes to our working practices which has screwed up how we run reports and trace payments. My probation year ends just as the economy goes into meltdown and transfer opportunities are unlikely in the foreseeable future. I haven't been sleeping solidly and all month I've had a high-pitched pain sitting just above my eyebrows, fading in and out of notice but never completely gone. I keep forgetting to call the health centre to renew a prescription I need. Birds of Prey and Nightwing ended. I haven't made the progrees I wanted on Company of Ravens. I'd love to take a holiday, but I don't want to use my leave so close to the start of the year; there's a flurry of public holidays coming up from March to August, after all, and last year I kept most of my annual leave for the winter months, as a relief from getting up on dark, cold mornings.

Perhaps the only bright spot in this whole month has been getting broadband :-/

You know, my writing has gone so much easier when it's just Jane and Lance. It was all I could do when writing the council meeting scene to get a page a day done. Today I pop out six no sweat.

I suppose I should alert everybody that I have NOT read the last Harry Potter yet, though it is in the house. My sister Sharon is reading it at the minute.

So I'm making up an American city (or possibly just a very big town) for Company of Ravens, for a number of reasons but mostly because the idea of fixing it to any real place fills me with all kinds of anxiety. (I think I've mentioned my setting phobias in a previous entry. Honestly, I don't know why I'm a writer; everything from dialogue and characterisation to simple plot fills me with dread argh.) Here's my problem: while I have a solid idea about the city itself (I drew a map. It's not to scale or anything, but still), my ideas on where it is in relation to other places and what state it's in - absolute mush. I've done some digging around Wiki and the US Census site and I have a vague idea that my city fits somewhere between the southernmost of the Mid-Atlantic states, the Midwest and the northernmost of the Southern states. Like I said, mush. And it's possible that I've selected random geographical features for my city and mashed them together in a way that doesn't exist in real-world terms.

All of this is a long-winded way of soliciting some geographical feedback, if I can. Basically: where on your rough mental map of the US would you put a city like the following?:

( Read more... )

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On a completely different though still related note, should I be using US spellings in this story? I'm already watching out for pants/trousers and sidewalk/pavement, but I'm talking about things like color/colour and gray/grey. One major character is English-born, though she's been living and working in America for a good number of years now.

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On another completely different but still related note, I adore Lance Nightingale, one of my vamp characters. He's terribly lonely and put-upon and Jill's Aidan would eat him for breakfast, but I heart him all the same *pets* Ah yes, this is why I'm an writer, so I can pet poor ickle vampire boys >:D

My hands are very cold right now. My bedroom is freezing.

I have been writing! Proper writing, not PhD junk! I did five pages on Thursday - I'm horribly slow cos I keep going back and adding/revising stuff - and I spent today thrashing out a storyline step by step, so now there are even more Post-it notes on the wall! I was never comfortable with the main plotline I'd taken with Company of Ravens; I'd saddled myself with a lot of inner-city grit and violence which a country girl like me knows precisely zilch about. So I've switched over to another strand of characters, who were originally going to be introduced much later, and I'm working through events from their side. I'm much more comfortable with this one. But again with the slowness; I'm probably at mid-chapter two material at the minute.

I'd like to salvage some of the original way it was going but I'm not sure how well the two would sit together. The new storyline features people who know all about vampires etc. while the original direction is from the point of view of people who don't have a clue. So one's giving away what the other is trying to hide. Plus (and I'm here going purely on the five pages from Thursday) the new storyline has a lighter tone to it which sits awkwardly with what was going on with the original plot. That's what I think, anyway; I could be being paranoid because I was still unhappy about working with the original plot.

I'd like to ask you guys what you think except that five pages isn't much to go on, and having worked through the new plot, there are now adjustments I wanna make. Oh the dilemmas!

In other news, the reason I've started back on the novel is that my PhD revision has finished... for now. I've revised every chapter now and the pertinent ones are in my internal examiner's hands at the minute to check that, at the very least, I'm on the right track. Also my Sims addiction is continuing in fits and starts. Creating Sims is giving me ideas for characters in my (still very vague) realistic novel.

I'm currently reading two books concurrently: a biography of Willaim Pitt the Younger (I have a fascination for that sliding period between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) and a novel about a black law professor whose controversial and paranoid father has died, leaving him to deal with some mysterious "arrangements", which, at this point of the story, has led to the death of one person that we know of.

Anyway, I have talked a lot. I need to get offline and get my hands warm, and let Mum and Dad get to sleep (dialup outlet is in their bedroom). Bye!