Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

It’s been a long week.

For­tu­nately, it’s ended on a rather bright note; we were woken up this morn­ing by a phone call from the Human Resources depart­ment of K’s employer, and guess what? You know that long, drawn-out, slog of an inter­view she did on her birth­day? Well she’s just been placed in the new pos­i­tion! Squee!

She doesn’t start straight away as they are await­ing her CRB check, which is ridicu­lous really when you con­sider that they’ve already had one on her BECAUSE SHE’S AN EXISTING EMPLOYEE. But then again, noth­ing shocks me any­more when it comes to the red tape and money-wasting, paper-shuffling, carry-on embraced my these sorts of organ­isa­tions. The job means more hours, more stress, more trav­el­ling and more respons­ib­il­ity, but see­ing how ecstat­ic­ally happy the news made K will make up for any future hair-pulling, I’m sure.

The tim­ing of events worked out badly this week. K had taken it as hol­i­day in cel­eb­ra­tion of our 7^th Anniversary, which should have been lovely, except I had a mon­strous assign­ment due today wherein I had to write a 2000 word piece of fic­tion with an accom­pa­ny­ing 500 word report. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the entire point of this exer­cise was to pro­duce some­thing fit for pub­lish­ing in a lit­er­ary magazine. The story is fin­ished, gran­ted. It being fit for the eyes of oth­ers and fit for print? Ques­tion­able. So that’s where most of my time got sucked away: scrib­bling and pan­ick­ing as I had recently been suf­fer­ing a com­plete “block”.

Monday smacked me right in the face as I hadn’t got­ten any fur­ther than a bullet-pointed list and two really rough char­ac­ter out­lines in my Scruff Book and was still without a chosen pub­lic­a­tion. It didn’t help that I had never actu­ally writ­ten to a spe­cific genre or audi­ence before, I’d just writ­ten the sorts of things that I would pick up and read (if it happened to not have my name on!). This time, I was writ­ing for an “audi­ence”, a “tar­get mar­ket” with their expect­a­tions and the well-worn lit­er­ary con­ven­tions used within the con­fines of their beloved genre. Should I play to those well-worn con­cepts and run the risk of a re-hash? Should I try and sub­vert genre and run the risk of fail­ing and ali­en­at­ing my audience?

Then there was the manu­script. Each pub­lic­a­tion wanted it format­ted dif­fer­ently: some wanted double-spacing, oth­ers wanted single-spacing, some would only accept a serif font with inch-wide mar­gins, oth­ers couldn’t give a shit if you scrawled in green Berol felt-tip so long as you pas­ted it in the “body” of an email when sub­mit­ting. I had to brush up on my copy-editing skills (ha) and my grasp of punc­tu­ation. Thank­fully, I think I’ve finally mastered the mys­ter­ies of the semi-colon thanks to this here book. What can I say? It only took 18 years in Education.

In the end, it was a Hor­ror story. No doubt con­trived and prob­ably not very Hor­rid. Or, if it is Hor­rid, it’s prob­ably more to do with my ineptitude as opposed to my chilling plot twists. Bugger.

This is my last chance to try for a Dis­tinc­tion on this par­tic­u­lar course. If I don’t hit the top band of marks on this one, the most I can hope for is a Grade 2 Pass, which is great and I’d be stoked if I got a Grade 2 on a 9 month long, level 2 course like this, but a Dis­tinc­tion would just rock my tiny little world.

Des­pite my story hog­ging the week, we still man­aged a day out and about at the week­end. Fun and games included a visit to a local Wild­life Garden and Breed­ing Centre where we got to see a Snow Leo­pard and lots of Giant Tor­toises. (I heart tor­toises, they fas­cin­ate me — I don’t know why — I just think they look like tiny dino­saurs.) We also went for cof­fee and ice-cream at BB’s, which is my new favour­ite cof­fee place. You HAVE to try their ice-cream with real, ground, cof­fee in it. It is Heaven in a paper cup. I promise.

Then, there was the shop­ping where K enjoyed try­ing on clothes in “skinny” shops. Yes, that’s right. No more SimplyBe. In fact, today K wore MY jacket. And it fit.

Some­thing tells me today was def­in­itely her day.