Year Abroad Update, Part The Last

Tübingen in the snow

This is going to be my last year abroad update. And not because I'm too forgetful to keep writing my blog (no matter how likely that would be)! I've recently decided that I'm not going to continue with studying German, and I'm also not going to continue with my year abroad. So I guess my "year abroad" updates are actually "semester abroad" updates? :P

Neither of these decisions have been on a whim. In fact, my reasoning is going to take a bit of explaining, since both decisions impact each other quite a lot.

Year Abroad, Part Four: Welcome Week

I’ve been in Germany for about a month now and classes still haven’t started. Yes, Tübingen University starts late, and I arrived earlier than I probably needed to. But I’ve not had nothing to do. I have a book to write (still not finished, but this draft is getting there!), and of course there’s cooking, cleaning, sorting out the last bits of paperwork (which seem to take the longest… Never mind this “your year abroad is the best year of your life!” stuff; I swear all I’ve done on mine so far is get stressed over admin). And last week (12th - 15th October) there was also welcome week!

Year Abroad, Part Three: My First Week

It feels far longer than a week that I've been in Germany. Technically, I have: my parents and I arrived last Wednesday, so it's only really that I've been Germany on my own for a week. But that isn't what I meant. Saying that it's only a week since I said goodbye to my parents just feels wrong. Surely it can't have been so recently?

I've spent my first week alone in Germany working on my book, exploring Tübingen (pictures below!), going for jogs (admittedly only two), having awkward conversations with flatmates I barely know in the kitchen, setting up a German bank account, handing in forms, and Skyping numerous people, numerous times. I definitely feel like I'm settling in; like I'm getting to know my surroundings and life here is a little more normal.

Year Abroad, Part One: Preparation

Since I got back from my family holiday in Italy, I haven't been writing as much as I'd have liked. I've been busy. But not in the usual way. My year abroad has come around rather fast and I've suddenly realised there's quite a lot I still have to do to prepare for it.

I'm spending my year abroad studying, in Tübingen, Germany. I leave in two days.

University Life, Part Two: The Cons

Previously, I've written about how great an experience university is (you can find that post here) - but that doesn't mean it's for everyone. Not everyone is cut out for studying. And good Lord, do you have to do a lot of studying.

Besides studying, university can be tough - in terms of organisation, mental health, and a whole load of other things. So here are all the things I've found that aren't so great about uni life.

University Life, Part One: The Pros

I chose to come to university mostly because I didn’t know what else to do. That sounds like a bad way to make such an important decision, but I had no idea what job I wanted to do – besides, the idea of getting a job terrified me. There were no apprenticeships in anything that would suit me. There were, however, degrees that would suit me. I figured, if I do a degree I enjoy, then surely that will lead me into a career I enjoy.

So, whether it was the best choice or not, I went to uni.

And let me tell you something: I am so glad I did. Sure, there are some things that haven’t gone as I’d hoped and things that I wasn’t expecting to be problems (more on that in another post), but on the whole, university has so far been a fabulously beneficial experience for me.

For starters, remember how I said the idea of getting a job terrified me? Well, so did the idea of leaving home and going to uni. But the thing is that, at uni, everyone is the new kid. You’re shoved together in your halls and your lectures, and nobody knows each other and everybody is probably just as terrified as you are, whether they show it or not. It’s a new start, a new experience, surrounded by new people.

That’s several advantages in one. In school, you have a limited number of friends: of all the people of your age in your local area and who are in some of the same classes as you, you have to find the most agreeable ones. At uni, though, there are people from all walks of life, and in both classes and societies, you all end up classified by interests. Whether it’s a mutual passion for your degree subject or for a certain hobby, these are people you actually have something in common with. These are people you can be yourself with. And because they’re new people and it’s a new start, you can feel free to be whoever you want to be. I, for example, took this new start as the perfect chance to turn vegetarian.

Speaking of feeling free, leaving home to go to university gives you a whole new sense of independence. You get to come and go as you please. You get to make whatever food you like at whatever time you like. You can spend time with whoever you want for as long as you want. For me, this has taught me things about myself I didn’t even know. I have discovered that I love experimenting with food and trying new things, even though I’ve always been quite a picky eater. I’ve also realised that I have a tendency to try and do things on my own, without asking for help – and consequently, that this isn’t always a good thing, and that it can feel good (and totally not as scary as I thought it would be!) to share my thoughts, plans and ideas with others.

I see uni as a stepping stone to adult life: you've moved out of your parents' house, but you're not living on your own yet. You have to cook and clean for yourself, but you're with other people who are also learning how to do that. You have to budget your money and your time, but you have the support of the uni - personal tutors, advisers, and other welfare staff - to fall back on if you need help. It's a safe space to learn to be independent and grow your confidence so that you're ready for the adult world.

On top of that, there’s an awful lot of opportunities that university has to offer. Be it internships, research projects, semesters abroad – there’s more chance for CV improvement than just your degree. Plus, it’s an absolute confidence booster. When I signed up to be on the committee of the Creative Writing Society last year, I wanted to help, in some way, to improve a society that I saw so much potential in. But I was terrified of adding extra responsibilities to my studies; I just wanted to do something small. Now, though, I’m taking almost complete responsibility for the anthology we’re putting together, and I’m helping to organise the writer’s retreat weekend we have planned. I've made phone calls, I've promoted the society to strangers, and I've even led some of our writing sessions - which means talking to an entire group of people at once. It’s more responsibility than I imagined I would have, but it’s showing me what I am actually capable of when I push myself out of my comfort zone!

All this independence and confidence boosting has ultimately shown me that the Big Wide World is not as scary as it sounds. Thanks to my involvement with the Creative Writing Society, I have an idea for what I career I want to go into after I get my degree. And more impressively, considering how scary I found it before, I’m actually looking forward to life after university.

But university isn't all positives, and its pressures are another reason why I'm looking forward to leaving. And if you're reading this while wondering whether university is for you, you'll need the full picture - not just the benefits - before you decide. So, here is my post on the cons of university life.

New Semester Resolutions

     In the midst of writing essays and revising for the January exam period, I forgot to make New Year’s resolutions this year. Not that it really matters: I always think there are many opportunities for new starts apart from New Year. For me, one of those is a new semester. Deadlines and the stress they bring are gone for now, allowing time for other commitments such as self-improvement. Plus, with new modules under way, a new semester seems like the perfect time to become a new version of oneself.

     I’m not making resolutions as such, but there are many things I’d like to start doing, better habits I’d like to get into, this semester. One of them, as always, is to be more organised. This time, I’m going to stay on top of filing my lecture notes and I’m going to make sure to give myself plenty of time to not only complete but also perfect my assignments. I’m also going to watch the German news every night and watch more German films, to keep up my language skills; I might even sign up for German conversation classes, as I don’t feel I speak enough in seminars. And I’m going to do it all with positivity and motivation to spare.

     But that’s not all. I’m going to be a lot more involved in my university’s Creative Writing Society this semester, and that’s not so much something I’ve decided to do myself as something I’m already doing. I signed up to the Creative Writing Society committee last year as the “Editor”, which so far in this academic year hasn’t involved much, so I’ve basically just been doing odd jobs that other committee members are too busy to do. Now, however, the anthology we’re putting together is gaining momentum, and this is pretty much entirely my domain. I’ve been promoting the anthology to the Society’s members; I’ve been reviewing all the entries we’ve had so far so their authors can improve them*; I’ll be going to talk to the head of the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics to see if the School will support and advertise our project as well as get us more writers; I’ll be organising feedback sessions for the writers to read and comment on each others’ work; and when they send me their final submissions, I’ll be formatting the whole thing for printing. 

     On top of all that, I’ve volunteered to help out with some of the other things Creative Writing is doing at the moment, which goes from the running of our usual writing sessions and social events to the organising of a writers’ retreat weekend at the end of the Easter break in mid-April. All in all, I feel like being part of this society’s committee is going to be incredibly hectic for me over the next couple of months, but the success of this society is something I’m very passionate about, and right now I feel like my enthusiasm will be more than capable of making up for any time, energy or sleep I end up lacking.

     Finally, I hope to spend at least ten minutes every day working on my own writing project (come this summer I’ll have been writing this novel for four years, and I’d very much like to finish it before I die), and I’m also aiming to start updating this blog regularly – every Friday, to be exact. I’ll be posting updates on my writing, updates on the Creative Writing Society, other writing-related bits and pieces, book reviews, and maybe even a short story or two. If you’d like more frequent updates, I’ll be posting shorter posts and occasionally some pictures on my tumblr blog.

     I know it seems like a lot for one girl to do while keeping herself alive and healthy, attending lectures and maintaining some semblance of a social life, but I feel like I’m in a much better place mentally and emotionally this year compared to last year**, so I think I can cope. Plus, I feel a challenge is what I need. What better way to stay focussed than to always have something to focus on? What better way to get oneself out of bed in a morning than to have so many goals to achieve? Of course, I can only hope that this doesn’t backfire; this is supposed to result in productivity and fulfilment, not stress and an impulse to hide from everything under my duvet. If this is a success, then I’m hoping it’ll set me in positive, productive habits for the rest of my life.

     On that note, let the whirlwind that is this semester begin!

*=I’m planning on writing a blog post on editing others’ work, so look out for that in the near future.

**=There were points last year when even the prospect of leaving my room to go to a lecture seemed like far too much pressure, never mind making an appointment with the head of the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics.

The Secrets The Writer Keeps

Several months and a sneaky blog-title change later, I'm finally posting an update! It's currently one week until my last exam, and therefore one week until my summer begins (I don't understand how quickly first year went!). I haven't managed to write much recently (whether it's true or not, I blame studying), but I'm looking forward to writing more over summer. I also hope to start posting on here again, so here are a few updates!

• I set myself a few writing goals and put them up on my wardrobe:

• Therefore I will be spending June writing my second draft, July taking part in Camp NaNoWriMo to get the first draft of Book 2 started, and August finishing Book 2.
• Over the past few weeks and months, I've mostly been fleshing out the world in which my story is set, planning my second draft (from big plot changes to tiny details) and attempting to write a new beginning. Since I decided to write a new prologue and move the old one into the first chapter, "writing" for me has pretty much become synonymous with "writing and rewriting the new prologue".
• I have received detailed feedback from one of the two people who has read the first draft of Book 1, and hope to receive more feedback from the second. Already I've found that even getting just one outside opinion is incredibly helpful: it helps me to see things from my reader's point of view, to see what works and what doesn't, which details need to be toned down and which need to be made more obvious, and see problems and characterisation flaws that I wouldn't have noticed (for example, I tried to make my main character grumpy-but-lovable, and instead it just resulted in her being slightly unlikable and difficult to relate to).

I plan on posting mostly progress reports on my writing here, perhaps along with a few other things, however I'm not currently sure what. Nevertheless, I shall endeavour to at least post something in the near future.

NaNoWriMo 2014: From Heaven To Hell/Hydrena

Time for another story about a story idea!

When I was maybe 13, 14, 15 years old, I spent a lot of my time on a website called FictionPress.Net, posting stories and talking to people in the forums. The site users used to start informal writing competitions among themselves, and I took part in two. The second is irrelevant (at least for now), but the first involved starting your story with a short passage which ran thusly:

"Stop, you thief!" Panting frantically, I ran down the escalator from the heavily puffing security guard. I clutched the pack of cigarettes tightly in my hand as I made my jump to freedom – crashing into someone. I looked up to find myself staring into a Goth boy's green eyes.

I'm not sure if this was from something, or if the girl who started the contest just made it up; if I've just infringed some sort of copyright thing, I didn't mean to and I'm sorry.

From this passage, I developed a modern fantasy story about a girl who discovered a new world and a new race (by means of the green-eyed Goth boy, who was a part of this race), and ended up having to confront Death himself, and I called this story From Heaven To Hell. I made it up as I wrote it, so the plotline was a bit dubious, and what kind of character gets transported to another realm by some guy she literally just ran into and doesn't ask where she is or what the hell just happened, I don't know. But it was one of the few stories that I actually finished at that age, and despite the fact that my two main characters didn't have much personality-wise (much like the rest of my characters - guess who couldn't be bothered with character development when they were 14), they stayed with me.

I mentioned in my post about The Dragon Story that I have a habit of merging story ideas together, and so when I realised during the early stages of planning Barnabus' Balloons that I would want some sort of magical race in my story, instead of creating a new magical race, I decided to steal the one from From Heaven To Hell, thus linking the story ideas. I also mentioned that I had created a network of sequels, prequels and companion books. Barnabus' Balloons is to be the first in the main series, which will consist of four books, and From Heaven To Hell, which I am renaming Hydrena while I rewrite it during this month's NaNoWriMo with a better plotline and more developed characters, is to be the last, while The Dragon Story is to be the third. I am also planning a prequel and have numerous over ideas which I may or may not ever write.

So Hydrena - the rewrite of From Heaven To Hell - is what I am writing at the moment. We are ten days into NaNoWriMo now and unsurprisingly I am very behind (both with writing and with my uni work, but that is neither related nor the point). You want proof? Fine.

However, I am not the only one doing NaNoWriMo at my university, and we have got permission to have an overnight write-in at our library soon, so as long as I don't continuously forget to write until then, I should be able to catch up. :)

Language Is Magic

I've been at university for a bit over a week now, and started my Linguistics with German degree course two days ago. At the end of the seminar I had today, our group was asked: "why do you all want to study linguistics? What about it makes it interesting to you?"

When I tell people I'm studying linguistics, many of these people ask me: "what languages?" They assume that they know what I am talking about, but they forget, or maybe don't realise, that there is more to a language than knowing how to use it to communicate. Linguistics is the scientific study of language as a concept, from phonetics (speech sounds and how we make them) to sociolinguistics (how social factors such as class, sex, age and ethnicity affect the way language is used) to syntax (the structure of sentences). But things like that often don't cross people's minds. After all, they have been speaking their language for years; what more is there to know?

That's why I find linguistics interesting. Those of us who, for example, can't programme computers know very well that we can't programme computers. But not many people know just how much they don't know about the sentences they build and the sounds they form into words every day. It's like a hidden science, it's like a secret society. You don't know it's there until you really stop and think about how you don't need to be psychic to place images in other people's heads, you can just put one word after another in a specific way and providing that they speak the same language as you, they can rebuild the image in their heads just as you described it to them.

And the person doing the describing doesn't even have to be anywhere near you for them to communicate that image. You can make little inks marks on paper, and these little ink marks have the power to take strangers on journeys around the world, to inspire them, to entertain them or to break their hearts. You don't need magic to cast a spell on people; you just need words.

If you think about it, all language is is a load of sounds, and all writing is is some funny squiggles, and yet we can understand them. And we take it completely for granted; we don't know how we do it, and we don't even think about how we do it, we just do it. Doesn't that say something amazing about the human brain? Because nobody told you how to put a sentence together, but you still know how to do it. Well, you say, it's just common sense. So does that mean that you were born knowing that the adjective goes before the noun (eg, "the sneaky fox")? Does that mean you were born knowing that it makes sense to say "the fox will hunt the rabbit" but not "the fox will the rabbit hunt"? If we were all born knowing these things, then why does the adjective come after the noun in French, and why would "the fox will the rabbit hunt" be a perfectly grammatical sentence in German?

Language is a mystery but that doesn't stop us using it every day. Language is powerful and strange, but language works in so many ways we don't understand, and personally I don't understand why anyone wouldn't want to find out all it's secrets.