One Month In

It’s been a month now, or just over to be counting true, that I have been living in the city of the dreaming spires. I figured now might be a good time to have a look back and see how it has all gone.

I’ll make no bones about it, from the first I have loved Oxford. I love the buildings, I love the vibe, I love the area. I am at the northern edge of my geographical comfort zone (till you reach the Borders anyway) but it still feels southern enough for me. Being only an hour-ish from Southampton and London by train does help. A lot! I have yet to explore the greater Oxfordshire area, but I’ve only been here a month and I don’t have a car (or know anyone with a car) – give me a chance.

As for the job. Oh, the job. *sigh of contentment* I have been having meetings over the past month with various people from different departments around the division and they all keep asking me the same questions:
1) How am I enjoying Oxford
2) How am I enjoying the job
3) How did I get into publishing
4) Why did you get into publishing

My answer to 1) and 2) is still at the bouncing-up-and-down on the chair, squeeeeing like an excited toddler hocked-up on Halloween candy, stage. I quite simply haven’t stopped grinning from ear to ear since I walked through the door on my first day. There’s got to be a down-side around here somewhere, but I have yet to stumble across it. I reckon it’s hiding in the bottom of the author contracts filing cabinet (my nemesis), waiting to jump out and attack me. In the manner of the bogarts from Harry Potter, it is probably going to take the form of a freakishly important interest list that slipped down the back of my In Tray, never to be seen till this moment… It may not sound scary to you, but to me, that’s like total collywobbles time. That, and credit control running after me, pitchforks waving, yelling “you set this customer up as a 97 when they are obviously a 99!!!”

Worst-case scenarios which have clearly been influenced by the subject matter I spend my days surrounded by (kids books can be really scary!) aside, I am loving the job.

How and Why I got into publishing are questions whose answers I am still working on. “I just love books” is a pretty safe bet. It is nice to be surrounded by people who – in the case of my boss on Friday night, literally – throw titles at you and demand you have great conversations about them. Getting more into it, I keep coming back to the last couple of years working for SCC. Time and again, we worked with clients who had only the most basic levels of literacy, if that, and they kept bring up 1) how alienated from mainstream life they felt and 2) how this alienation at least contributed to the assorted lifestyle choices which had them coming to our offices at the end of the day. There is no doubt in my mind that education is the silver bullet to so many problems. Part of that is getting children hooked on reading, and getting them hooked young. How do you hook them? By creating beautiful, funny and engaging books that they want to read.

The best bit of my job so far was last week when, as a result of a massive tidy out of the office (as an aside, I think it might finally have hit them that when they hired someone who liked to organise, that’s what they got), I had a huge pile of old proofs and slightly battered books. It was the recycling or the waiting embrace of some hapless infant for them, and I chose the infant. I spent a happy half hour sorting through the pile, picking out those I think he will enjoy, and those I think he SHOULD read. I am not expecting all of them to be read, or enjoyed, but even if just one sparks an interest in a new author or genre… The desire to go down the library and see what else there is out there… Then that was a good day.

Corrupting new minds. Mwhahahaaaaa. Yup, that’s why I got into publishing *devil*

OK Cas, I can hear you all mutter, there has to be something that isn’t going so rosy, because, well, this is you we’re talking about. There’s always something.

I am missing the folks from Southampton more than I thought I would. I hadn’t realised quite how meshed I was in certain networks, till they were no longer just down the road from me. Even if I didn’t see them every day, just knowing they were there made a huge difference. I have never been a big one for labels, but I am clearly more “alt” than I had figured, because in Oxford I am surrounded by lovely, lovely people – who are all very normal. Or rather, all very wacky, but in their own Oxford way, which isn’t quite my way. For example, I am the only one I know up here with any ink or multiple piercings, let alone cropped purple hair! I certainly can’t imagine any of them rocking out to NIN at the Dungeon!

I am comfortable around the people here and a making good friends, plus picking up old friendships, but always I am feeling a certain subtle push to tone down bits of me. There aren’t the people, yet, who I can totally be myself around. It is a little bit draining, so I find myself dashing down on the train to badger Neko for tea and corsets (not a euphemism). I am not expecting it to be like this forever, however. I know for sure these things take time, and that it took time for me to settle into Southampton. I will find “my people” here in Oxford. In the meantime, I am spending a lot more time on Facebook!

Will I stay here in Oxford? How can you ask me that after just a month! Right now, I am loving it here. The city is the perfect blend of town and country – not too big, not too small. The job is one with prospects in a field I know is for me. I am 26 now and yes, certain nesting tendencies are starting to make slight nudges in the back of my brain. I want to settle down. I want a place of my own, to decorate as I will, and to have a pet cat. The student style of relocating every six months/year no longer seems quiet so fun. I want to get my stuff out of storage. I want all my books in one house, not scattered across three counties! At the same time, I get itchy feet. After three, four years in a place I feel the need to find somewhere new. New horizons. New people. So I have just moaned for two paragraphs about how I have yet to find people I can be myself around, but I am loving the process of finding them anew. The thought of a whole life in one place appeals to the 2.4 side of my nature, but mostly it is giving me the heeby-jeebies. Perhaps what I really want isn’t a place, it is a person. Someone to travel on with me. Now there’s a thought…

Anything else? Well, I fit into a pair of size 14 jeans for the first time in many a year. And the Aspiration Trousers! They are a leetle snug still, but with a tunic over the top they look ace. So what if the silly diet nurse’s scales say I am not loosing anything. My dimensions are slowly, surely shrinking, and that is good to hear finally.

P.S. I’m getting another tattoo. Don’t tell my father.

Sunday Roast: When was the last time you went Wahoo!

Seriously? Think back. When was the last time something made you go “Wahoo!” involuntarily? If it has been a long time, then you need to do something about it, because everyone needs a Wahoo! moment.

For the curious, I have had not one, but two, Wahoo! moments in the last week. It has been a good week 🙂

I don’t actually own any Threadless t-shirts, because the cut is all wrong (I detest things tight to the neck), but this design is just awesome!

I want this chair. The chances of me ever getting this chair? Slim to none, but I still want it. Or one of them Aeron thingies. Or actually, I’d just settle for a properly adjustable one that doesn’t make me feel like a tactical device has exploded in my lower back after I sit in it for more than half an hour 🙁

I remember Windows 3.x with great fondness. It was my first ever OS. To be sure I had played on the few earlier machines my brother and father had, but it was 3.x which was installed on the first PC that was mine (one of my brothers cast-offs). So it saddens me to hear Microsoft are finally stopped licences. Also though, I am amazed it’s kept going so long!

There is a new study under way to see how yoga helps with bad backs. Anecdotally, I would agree – my back has always been better after periods of gentle, toning exercise, not just yoga. Which is why it is a bugger that the cheapest yoga sessions I can find in Oxford are £8 a time. Roll on the New Year and the gym opening up at work, that’s all I can say!

And this one from Moose. As she says, the My Name is Earl effect?

Roll on the movies…

Valkyrie – I am really on the fence about Tom Cruise. As a person, I think the man is a twit. As an actor, he does have moments. More to the point though, I think I want to see this film, because I am just intrigued as to how they go about simply telling the story.

Confessions of a shopaholic – yes, bubblegum fluff, but the trailer made me laugh out loud a few times, and that is always my benchmark to putting it in the roast. Definitely a DVD though!

Angels & Demons – I DO NOT WANT TO SEE THIS FILM. I just had to say that off the plate. Also, I have never seen The Da Vinci Code and have very little desire to see that either. What amuses me about this though is that A&D is meant to be the PREQUEL to TDVC, but it’s being packaged as a sequel. Someone watch the film and tell me how it goes please?

So I shouldn’t find Leo DiCaprio attractive, I really shouldn’t. He isn’t my type, all that pretty-boy-ness. But… *whimper* I am finding him attractive, and a damn good actor!
Revolutionary Road – if I can get memories to Titanic out of my head, Winslet and DiCaprio make a brilliant pairing.
Body of Lies – bad facial hair not withstanding, some tasty action. Plus an aging Russell Crowe. Could be worse…

Nobel Son – just… so screwball it hurts!

And that really is it for this week. The time has come for me to emerge from my nest of blankets and face the cold, wet, windy day to buy some groceries. Bleck.

What makes a good writer?

People I respect, trust and love in differing proportions have told me, many times, that they like how I write. I have a style, it seems, that is “lyrical, easy and a joy to read” (a direct quote from an essay/short story I wrote a year or so back). Welcoming; funny, others have said when grades weren’t riding on the product.

My own writing aside, for it is phenomenally hard to judge your own worth, I know that in turn there are writers who I like and writers who I don’t. I seem to innately know what makes a good sentence, though I am often times hard pushed to articulate and analyse precisely what grabs me about certain writers.

As an aside, given my line of work, I am fortunately getting rapidly better at this!

At a stab I would say it is the voice and personality good authors bring across the page. Words should flow easily and be a joy to read to the point you don’t know you are reading. Rather you are watching the story unfold in your mind with no conscious effort. Great authors take words and ideas and play with them till they make your brain sing. Each time you read them you get something different from the piece. From the comfort-blanket-fluffy of a decent chick lit, to the tense suspense (can I DO that to the English language?!) of a brilliantly plotted thriller…

There is no excuse for bad writing, as I frequently yell at a book or the TV screen at yet another awful offering with wooden dialogue and paint by numbers plotting.

People think it is hard, but it is not, is it? I just write down the words I hear spoken in my head. I speak, so I write. Moose mumbled that she couldn’t write like me. Who would want to? Surely it is better to write like yourself? In my last job I was the proof reader and copy editor of choice for the whole office, and a few heads of service from the next office over as well. I never quite understood why people felt they needed my help, but clearly the words just fit together for me.

But I am still not sure what makes a good writer.

It is not a strong adherence to grammar or rigid sentence structure; I certainly couldn’t pick an adverb out of a police line up. It isn’t even a varied vocabulary, though it certainly doesn’t do any damage. When I helped people do rewrites of their work, the first thing I always did was get them to put the pen and paper away and just talk to me. Tell me what they wanted to say. Once freed from the idea they had to sound “impressive” on the page, or be the next incarnation of Shakespeare, they would find their own voice. Their own pattern and what they then wrote invariably sounded true. My job was then nothing more than acting like a spell-checker with legs and a cute smile.

Maybe then it is the sense of flow and rhythm and a pattern to the words. I repeat: if you can speak, you can write.

I’ve been vocal in the past, and was vocal just last night, about my loathing for Dan Brown (he of Da Vinci Code fame). I shall stress once more for readers newer to Bright Meadow that I have no problem with what he wrote (unlike my Renaissance Historian landlord), rather my hatred is reserved for how he wrote. Or more precisely, for the execrable excuse for prose he vomited onto the page. Certain people should never be let in front of the word processor, let alone find an editor to take them onto their list. His writing is just so stilted, with a jerky rhythm, and dialogue that is the literary equivalent to badly dubbed Japanese samurai movies.

*shudder*

In contrast, a book I started reading last night: Crowboy by David Calcutt. From the first line I was hooked. I found myself speaking aloud in the character’s accent.

“So I’m outside the city one evening on me usual rounds, sorting through the leftovers and picking me way through the day’s dead. Not that there’s much to be took. The best of the fighting’s over now. That all happened in the first few weeks after the soldiers come, and what with the city having took a good battering and the best of its people dead or run off, everybody’s got themselves settled down not to a good long siege”

Whole chapters, the whole book, written in the accents, the very voices, of the characters themselves. That is hard to do. It is tricky enough to find your own voice in writing. It is that much harder to be consistent with the voices of others, especially in varied and non-standard dialects.

Maybe this need for a coherent voice is partly why I dislike so many first-person narratives. So few writers can pull it off, most of the time it just jars as I read.

I am becoming something of a writing snob. There are so many great authors out there, but they are drowning under the weight of the mediocre. Why should I waste my precious time on a sub-standard product? Quality speaks over quantity every time, or at least it should. I know a book is good when I find myself slowing down from my usual break-neck reading pace, to savour what is written. When I get to the end of the book and instantly go looking to see what else the author has written. When people have to throw things at me to get my attention. When I miss my bus stop because I am engrossed.

That is the sign of a good writer.

I just wish I could pin down exactly what they did and how they did it. Because it is more than just a “voice”, I know it is. It has to be. It can’t be that simple?

Sunday Roast: a thief in the night

I sit here on my bed, hair still damp from my shower, listening to Disturbia on LastFM, and as I look out across the back gardens of central Oxford to the grey skies above, I wonder how to introduce the roast and the lovely month of November.

Then I realise I have already done it.

Welcome to the eleventh month of 2008 people. Hasn’t this year flown by so quickly, and yet seen so many changes? I wonder what the last sixty-one days have in store to enthrall us all? Only one way to find out, I guess, and that is to live it. To the MAX! as the advert would have it.

The last few days have seen my head go a little bit screwy. One minute, everything is glorious and the next… ooops! I think it hit me that *crap!* I am in the process of making a new life in a new city and that my safety net is over an hour away by train. It also hit me that I’ve got the most ink of anyone in my current acquaintance by far – not that this is the be-all and end-all, but it comes to something when I am the most alt in a crowd, not the least! Worry not, I shall do my best to fly the flag and make it a point to scurry back to Soton as frequently as possible for regular doses of the odder side of life 😉

I think the time has come for me open the lid on the veritable Pandora’s box, which is our Internet…

I have always had a thing for short stories – I love how they just present snippets and leave you to make up your own mind. They are also really hard to do well! So I like it when others come round to my point of view

Graphic novels aren’t just about superheroes. If you haven’t read Maus yet, I strongly recommend you do!

I love it when I discover new blogs: Margaret and Helen – two American ladies who have been friends for 60 years, with great insights into modern life (their take on the current election is refreshing and honest)

And that is, rather surprisingly, it for the blog side. Now for the bit I know you all come for really, the movies:

My Name is Bruce – I am enjoying the absurder side of life at the moment. This film just looks delicious

Defiance – Daniel Craig being all heroic… How is that NOT going to be a good film?

Were the World Mine – see my afore mentioned comment regarding the absurd. Plus, great social commentary

The Reader – and to end with a trailer for a film that is genuinely intriguing me. I love that I can’t get the whole film from this one trail. I am hooked and I will be getting it on DVD (because the chances of it making my local Odeon are slim-to-none, let’s face it!)

And c’est tout with the links. My hair is now dry, thanks in most part to it being only a few inches long, and the weather is not actually raining on me, so I think I shall go to the covered market and see what veg I can pick up to keep me fed through the week.

*hugs*

Sunday Roast: Save me from a villanous imagination

I just braved a look into my Sunday Roast bookmark folders and nearly had a heart attack; because I haven’t roasted for a few weeks they have become somewhat swollen. Bursting at the seams might actually be a more accurate description! Which leaves me in something of a dilemma, because if I post all of the links I have been saving 1) I am going to be SO out of date and 2) you are just going to get swamped.

So it is time to be ruthless… Turns out, ruthless means no news articles. Cool. Turns out it also means no blogs/sites. Not so cool. However, I do have lots of great pictures and movies for you.

Whilst you are enjoying them, I am going to go and wash my brain out a few times, and tell it sternly to behave itself. There really are certain people you shouldn’t be crushing on. I need to find an EDLO in Oxford, and right quick!

Some awesome graffiti in Singapore

One of these days I am going to get to see the aurora. Pretty please?

Sometimes, you just have to check a picture hasn’t been photoshopped

Penguin!!! (yes, I am still obsessed)

Notorious

Hank & Mike – just… bizarre

Choose Connor

Changeling – chilling and awesome

The Spirit – I’ll admit I wasn’t sold on this before, but it is starting to grow on me a little bit

Good Dick

Let the Right One In – like Twighlight, but darker, goryer, and with subtitles

Push

JCVD – just… I want to see this film!

Gran Torino

Last Chance Harvey

Transporter 3 – and I know there will be no plot and very little dialogue, but I like Jason Statham, and things blowing up, and fast cars. My mum goes to see Mamma Mia as a feel-good film. I go to see Death Race, or Transporter…

Sunday Soup

The very important question you need to be asking yourselves right this second is:
Is there a roast in the glorious Cas, under the haze of cold/flu and Lemsip? Because I am not sure there is you know. Rarely have I felt less glorious, for I am sick again. I don’t think I managed to fully get last weeks lurgy out of my system – rather, it just lay low for a few days then sensed weakness and returned full force.

*sniff*

What other news have I got to entertain you, this cold and somewhat dreary Sunday afternoon?

Well I think I might have made a mistake when I told the Brainy Snail that one of the things I wanted out of Oxford was a man (or at least lots of potentials to have fun dating). See, it’s been a year or two since I was in the same city as the Brainy Snail: I’d forgotten how gods damned determined she can be when given a mission. If you never hear from me again it is because I have gone into hiding to escape all the men she is lining up to throw at my head! Yes, I talk the talk, but now we’ve got to see if I can walk the walk, or just retire and jibber in fear till I become the crazy-dateless-wonder-cat-lady.

I should be rejoicing, surely, that there is someone in my life who is so committed to my well-being. I am, secretly, on the inside and I am sure I will prove to be a challenge she is more than capable of dealing with. If this time next year I am still single, it will not be for want of trying on either of our parts.

But it is just, right now I feel about as appealing as… Nope. There’s nothing there. I have got through half a box of tissues in the five hours I have been awake so far today and there is no image I can conjure with the magic of my command over the English language that will do justice to the mankiness that is me. I look in the mirror and am constantly surprised it doesn’t jump off the wall and run away to cower behind the wardrobe in fear. It is very hard to summon enthusiasm for lunches where the friend-of-friend is to be persuaded to bring along his friend, when the thing I am most looking forward to is another in an endless procession of mugs of tea…

Hmmm, wonder if I can persuade my lovely landlord to make me a cuppa… (He needs a blog name I have just noticed)…

Back on rambling track.

Yup, that has decided me. I am not roasting today. Roasting requires energy and wit and enthusiasm, three things that deserted me like so many rats when the Titanic of my immune system started taking on water. Instead I am going to succumb to the lure of the kettle, then take myself back to bed and encourage you all to take a step outside your RSS readers for once and admire the glory that is the new Bright Meadow. It won’t always be this pink, but it will always be this fantabulous, thanks to Tam.

Sunday Roast: make this cake and leave me alone

Originally posted by dive-angel on Flickr

I have spent this weekend fighting off the dreaded lurgy, which is not surprising considering I have moved to a new city full of new germs and students, and that 90% of the people at work are going down with suspiciously flu-like symptoms.

My poor, battered immune system is doing its best, bolstered by thumping doses of echinacea and endless cups of tea, and so far I have escaped the worst. But this weekend I have slept LOTS and spent the rest of the time sniffing in a haze, feeling like I am hungover without the joy of a great night out the evening before!

Which is why I am not roasting this week either – my bed and more tea is beckoning. So I shall leave you with this awesome recipe I found on Flickr:

3 minute chocolate mug cake
Ingredients

1 mug
4 tablespoons flour (that’s plain flour, not self-rising)
4 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons baking cocoa
1 egg
3 tablespoons milk
3 tablespoons oil
optional: 3 tablespoons chocolate chips mini chips would be the best
optional: 2 tablespoons walnuts (cut into small pieces)
small splash of vanilla

Method

Add dry ingredients to mug, and mix well
Add the egg and mix thoroughly
Pour in the milk and oil and mix well
Add the chocolate chips (if using) and vanilla, and mix again
Put your mug in the microwave and cook for 3 minutes at 1000 watts. The cake will rise over the top of the mug, but don’t be alarmed!
Allow to cool a little, and tip out onto a plate if desired
serve it with custard or vanilla ice cream – yummy 🙂

Just the thing for when you’re feeling not on top of the world.