In Despair of not quite being there

Yes I realise that I have totally dropped off the face of the planet for nearly a month and a half and I apologise for doing so without notice. While I was on holiday I was all optimistic that I could have a decent work-play routine that actually left me with enough energy to so much as switch on my laptop when I got home. Well, you can all see how brilliantly *that* plan turned out.

I'm rather at a loss to understand where August and in fact Summer has gone, I'm somewhat doubtful that Summer even exists at the moment since I'm wearing a hoodie as well as a dressing gown and thick bed-socks- oh and not to mention the fact that the central heating is on - IN FREAKING AUGUST! Bah anyways I didn't dig myself out of my hermit hole merely to rant about how effing cold it is right now.

Basically I've realised something recently - I am getting ever closer to my 21st birthday (bricking it btw) and I have yet to find the niche in this world where I feel like I truly belong. This revelation of sorts came to me this weekend while I was in Oxford with my family for a Bank Holiday weekend break. Back when I was still with my boyfriend I went down to Oxford to visit him at uni several times so I knew my way around the town reasonably well. As we walked about I found myself wishing I could live in this gorgeous town since it's chock-full of bookstores and coffee-shops, which are pretty much the two best things I could hope for in a
place to live.  Yet for some bizarre reason I felt like I shouldn't be there, like I was invading an intellectual nest where I wasn't welcome.

Before I ended up at Aberystwyth Uni, I had applied to Oxford university (although in retrospect it really was a crap idea and a waste of a uni choice) and when I got rejected I couldn't help feeling like it was a massive door slammed in my face which really quite upset me at the time. It was like being told that I wasn't smart enough to deserve to go to Oxford when I'd been told waaay back in primary school that I was in fact *that* smart.

After I left uni last December I did actually reapply to do a totally different course which at the time I thought I'd really enjoy, ironically enough the best place in the country to do that course (Publishing media if you're interested) was at Oxford Brookes - Oxford's little sister uni as it were. In the months after applying I slowly lost all enthusiasm for the course and when I finally got the email saying I'd been unsuccessful in my application I really wasn't massively bothered (bear in mind that it was on the day of my Grandad's funeral and I had just got a job that morning after 5 months of being tediously unemployed so I was a tad hysterical) but this weekend I came to the conclusion that perhaps I'm supposed to stay away from Oxford since neither of the universities want me there so as much as I'd like to live there I just don't ... belong there.

I've been feeling somewhat the same at work recently, it gets remarked on frequently that I use a lot of big words - my production manager kept asking me to repeat the word "eviscerate" most days for nearly 3 weeks. Whenever someone asks me what I was doing at university there's always a quiet moment after I say  "French & Spanish" like they don't quite know what to make of me. My love of Harry Potter is gently mocked on a regular basis by one of the directors (whose 16 yr old son got onto to Pottermore early) like my enthusiasm about the books is something to find amusing.

I have a bad habit of launching into long-winded explanations for things that could really be summed up in a few short sentences (this blog post for example) - although I try to improve myself on this front it's pretty dang hard so I do waffle on a bit at work. However I find it rather hurtful when my production manager (who I end up pestering for large portions of the day so I know that jobs are getting done and that I'm not going to have angry customers ringing me up wanting to know where their mugs are), blatantly tunes me out when I'm trying to talk to him and maybe making a hash of it. It's bad enough that my own sister does it to me if I'm waxing lyrical on something vaguely nerdy but when my employer does it to me when I'm trying to do my job then it does make you feel pretty shit.

At the risk of sounding terribly snobby I feel like no one at work is quite on the same intellectual wavelength as me. Don't get me wrong most of the people I work with are lovely in their own quirky way but I feel like I'm masquerading in a boxful of round pegs when I am secretly a octagonal one - I can't help but wonder if there are some other weird pegs like me in jobs that don't entirely satisfy.

All in all I'm not altogether happy with the turn my life is taking right now - yes, I have a stable job which on it's less stressful days I do enjoy. But the next few months are going to get progressively more insane and I worry that the day will actually come I that do stay so late at the office that I fall asleep there. At my age I *really* don't find that prospect appealing, I need a job that won't keep me stressing all weekend because I know everything is going to go horribly wrong the next week when half of the factory staff is on holiday (this will soon become a reality so don't ask me how my week's been on Friday - it's for your own safety). I need a job that I can switch off from in the evenings, one that doesn't keep me late and take up my lunch hour. I need a job that doesn't lump a massive amount of pressure on me and leave me with inadequate managerial support. I need employers who respect and appreciate how freaking hard I work sometimes and don't just bitch about how infrequently I make the tea.

Basically I need a new job - but considering how long it took me to get this job I'm obviously very wary to just hand in my notice and jump ship blindly. I'd actually have to have another position secured without a doubt before I could say "cheerio" and in these times that's next to bloody impossible.

So my dilemma is eating all of the brainpower I've got left at the end of a day, I'd read almost nothing for a week until this weekend. I've not blogged since I was on Holiday, I've not made a youtube video since the same time, I'm barely on facebook or twitter anymore. It seems like I've living for work, food and sleep with odd moments of sociability on Friday nights - I cannot spend the next year like this, I just can't.

Help. Please. I need to get off this merry-go-round of highs and lows. Hell I just need this whole year to become a faint memory - it's times like these that I get mightily nostalgic for high school.

You may now go back to your lives (thank you if you were dedicated enough to reach the end of this - I owe you a cookie or something).

LadyV

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Nanowrimo Day 10

I'm gonna make this quick cos it's nearly 3 hours into Day 11 and I'm still awake. But it's weird that I count the words I got after midnight as part of my Day 10 work - I spose it's cos I consider the day not over until I go to sleep ergo everything I write pre-sleep is part of that specific day regardless of the time that I actually go to sleep.

So yea, today I faffed about for most of the day waking up late, doing laundry, cleaning the bathroom, managing to break our decrepit hoover etc. until after having my rather yummy dinner of spag bol and garlic bread I decided to actually sit down and write. But then I hit a snag.

One of my friends who I occasionally send bits of my writing to (Not Jess btw another friend) had sent me a reply to the email I sent him with the first chapter of my Nano novel. In that one email he managed to compare my story to a mundane chapter of Twilight (Which by the way he has never read), suggested that it is merely an account of a day *I* would like to have and not a piece of writing for an audience other than myself. He also said that by having my FMC go to work like she does every day that I was "writing myself into a hole" and that I should have trashed the shop instead. His exact words "In a good book, shit happens" - I grant you this is valid point but just because the shit doesn't happen in the first fugging chapter doesn't mean that it isn't gonna be a good book. Lots of books I've read have a taken a couple of chapters to get going properly, it's incredibly snobby to dismiss a book as being bad if it's merely setting up the norm at first to blow it up in your faces later rather than plunging straight in with the action.

He also said that by using the bits of French in the dialogue like I do, although it adds to realism (They are all French after all) I'm supposedly "limiting my theoretical audience to French Teenagers". I say bollocks to that - Firstly I am not using so much french within the story that it's incomprehensible, granted I realise that I may have to adding clarifying statements to sections where a sizeable chunk appears but the grand majority of the story will be in English, Secondly there are plenty more people outside of France that know enough French to understand the bits that I use (if you're up on your swear words then you'll be able to translate the rather choice phrases I use in the excerpt of Ch. 1 here) and even if you don't know a great deal of french it's still possible to decode what it means from the context and the similarity between the spellings.

(BTW I'm sorry that this is turning into a rant- I can't help it)

But what really irked me was how he bookended these statements with "don't take this to be negative criticism" and "Despite these few tiny problems" erm yes... right THANKS! Next time I want my novel to be kicked and ground into the dirt I'll send it to him. Otherwise I'm sending it to beta-readers who have actually *read* a book in the same genre as I'm writing (YA/Adult Urban Fantasy) and therefore know what is good or not for that genre. Plus you sound like a right arsehole when you compare the story to a book you've never read and misspell the author's name. Just sayin'

*Deep Breaths*

ON TOPIC - so yea today I wrote chapter 6 of my nothing-like-Twishite-totally-accessible-to-non-French-Speakers novel. I ended up writing a good deal of the 2,092 words after midnight cos I was too cold and pissed off to really focus before then. But after a quick Word War with Emilee of Penultimate Page via twitter and then a good dose of procrastination in the form of Jackson Pearce's livestream show discussing trends in YA fiction (Really interesting) I finally knuckled down and met my word count target.

Total word count one third of the way through November - 17637 words!


Right terribly sorry about the ranting detour but I needed to vent about it, any suggestions for dealing with rather unhelpful criticism like that would be greatly appreciated.
So I'm shattered it's almost half 3 in the morning and it's cold and rainy - oh yay! /sarcasm

Night y'all
LadyV

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