The Week So Far
So far my Wednesday has consisted of frantic shovelling of overdue tasks and ignoring all Uni stuff, which is fair enough, since the reason I have such a backlog is that Uni has taken up all my time for the last two days for anything 
but the most critical responses, including some copy-editing of Dark Spires stories. As always happens on new ventures I’ve made a number of mistakes which have now caught up with both me and the rest of the team.
Monday morning started with Film Making, which is going to involve some actual hands-on filming, editing etc. Then into Writer’s Workshop, about which I’ll pass over for the moment, except to say that I hope it improves — but I can’t drop it, as it’s the core of the course. And then to Feature Journalism, which looks as if it may yet be the most interesting of all three lectures.
Yesterday morning was dire, because I was so exhausted. I wrote this at the time:-
It’s 4.45 am as I write this, and despite -or perhaps because– being exhausted, my brain is boiling. I’ve been awake for nearly two hours, and I have a splitting headache which four paracetemol couldn’t shift last night. In forty minutes or so, I have to get up, so it seems like a good idea to rise early and type this.
The problem was the seven hours of lectures and seminars that I had yesterday, from 9 to 6. By the end of it, I felt like a zombie, but clearly the information and mental stimulation that I took in yesterday has percolated through my brain, and caused this morning’s insomnia. This afternoon, I have a three hour lecture and seminar, and then aside from a solitary lecture late on Thursday, that’s my week done.
Ah, I hear you mutter, it must be nice to have a five day weekend.
Except of course, that the first of those five days will probably be spent as a hollow-eyed wreck; and then there’s the small matter of revising Ultramassive. And all the work spent away from the class, which should be the majority of it. At the moment, I don’t know how the hell I’m going to manage another week of this, let alone a year.
Maybe some answers will come to me when I feel less like the intellectual equivalent of a battery hen, force fed on ideas and concepts instead of chicken feed.
I somehow managed to get through the day, including working on Ultramassive, which is my other writing Must-Do at the moment. Things began to turn around in the afternoon with a stunning lecture on Genre Fiction, one of the best I’ve had in just over a year at the uni. I’ll blog more on that on…let’s say Friday, hmm?
Then it was home for dinner, and work into the evening starting the shovelling. But at least I have some answers to yesterday’s insomniac rant, which vindicates my two basic rules of communication:-
1. Never write anything on the web or in an e-mail that you aren’t prepared to see all over the web.
2. Whenever you’re feeling, emotional — angry, tired, depressed– sit on it for 24 hours. 🙂
More news tomorrow on Damage Time, which has its UK release. And in about 90 minutes, I’ll be off to listen to William Gibson talk.
