It’s Friday, so please join me and other Catholic bloggers over at ConversionDiary.
~1~
As usual, my life and my evenings have been hectic, big and full of life. As it’s a Friday, I won’t be going out tonight. I might actually watch Lewis when it airs tonight. Or sleep.
Sleep is good.
~2~
We’ve got another open day tomorrow, where I’ll be working with our Quidditch team and Southampton’s to put on a bit of a show for visitors. Then food fun, because I’m totally an adult self who doesn’t buy pizza every week. xD Plus, I’ve got to work on my Hallowe’en costume. I’m thinking clockwork girl, which is easier said than done.
~3~
AJ Ayer’s linguistic phenomenalism is the focus of my madness studying. Urg. It’s really hard to be focused these days.
~4~
To fill this nice blank space – a mimic of my mind, indeed – have an Abney Park video. I’m excited for their new studio album, even if Spotify is not yet up to date with their dieselpunky 2013 album Circus at the End of the World, which contains brilliant songs like The Anthropophagists’ Club. Yes, you read that correctly. Great song.
~5~
Although my cold was said to have disappeared into its dark annual past, I suffered the vengeance of a sore throat this entire week, which put such pressure on my chords that my head voice has been hoarse a lot. Sadly, I struggled in the beautiful random carols we’ve been looking at, but the Duke Ellington is going swimmingly my way.
~6~
Writing! An exclamation point because I wrote a thousand words today alone, even if the rest of the week was not so full of productivity. The president of the Creative Writing Society at Reading invited us to her ‘Scribblers Support’ group, effectively one of those sit-and-write meet-ups. Because of not sleeping well and being slightly sleep-deprived, I only set myself the goal of 500 words in an hour, but one I started writing, the fog cleared from my mind and I stayed on for another hour.
Today’s extract is from the first chapter, as Jess and her roommate Meg acclimatise to the rush of their college bar. I have officially bordered the chapter off – and, though it has a bunch of scenes, it’s shorter than I expected, word-count wise.
~7~
The swill of the new people settled on her skin like humidity. It suffocated her with heat and breath and pulse – and Jess had no escape but that of running from the bar. Retreat versus exploration. Bleh.
And the noise! More than anything else, the noise was a buzzer in her ear. Not the ring of perennial pop-songs from the jukebox – in fact, those managed to fade into a white noise – but the surge and lull of the passing people invaded her ears and spooked chills from her belly-button to the dip between her collar-bones.
She scratched it and eyed the girl across the table. Voicing that to Meg would be as easy as draining the contents of her glass, and perhaps a little more tranquil, yet—
Jess opened her mouth, then clamped it shut.
“What?” asked Meg.
Jess shared a smile with her. “Nothing. I was just—nothing.”
Alexandrina Brant 