Mmm...mochaccino....

Yum yum yum, coffee is gooooooood. I'm sitting in Clements in the student's union at the moment. Right at the window with the sun on my back, drinking my most favourite of coffees... It's a pity the bloody screen's got massive glare. But anyway.

Just had to purchase an internet voucher because I forgot about all of this stuff I had to send to my dad to print off for Scouts. I don't have enough time to go home and do it because I have doctors and crap to go to this afternoon.

I've also become a Baha'i. http://www.bahai.org will explain it better than I can, but basically it's about how we've moved beyond the reach of the current world churches, and Baha'u'llah was sent as another manifestation of God to unite the people of earth. It's hard to explain, especially as I'm only really new to it, but it really makes sense to me.

But enough about that.

I got a letter from the literary agents Capel & Land and they said that they were really interested in my stuff, but weren't taking new authors on. That encouraged me to no end. Maybe I'm not absolutely rubbish after all! I'm still chugging away with Child of Light. It's taken over from all of my other projects, but then, it is the one I'm trying to get published. Unfortunately my Baha'i information meetings are at the same time as my creative writing group, so I'll have to give the group a miss for a few weeks and see how the Baha'i thing goes.

The new job is going well, but will most likely only be for a month or more. Getting up some money, but I don't want to mess up my university work. On a positive note in that arena, I got two good 2.1 marks for my modules last semester. Now I really need to get working on my dissertation. Waaah!

Brr...

It is very cold here today. We had snow on Saturday, and I ended up being late for work because I couldn't get my car de-iced. And I laughed when B&Q were selling anti-freeze and ice-scrapers.

I went to a friend's birthday party on Saturday night. It was good fun. Got really hammered on Sambuca, which I shouldn't have done, but oh well. I was driving two of my friends back to Belfast, but I had to pull over on the motorway so one could throw up. Re-entering traffic from the hard shoulder is scary!

Have to get some sleep soon. Working at 9.00am. Saturday was ridiculously terrible. I only started a week ago and they had me training another girl! What was more unfortunate was that she couldn't speak much English... Hopefully I'll be left to my own devices this shift.

I told me it was a bad idea

Blonde...did not work. I'm back to being a brunette. My hair turned orange! Not ginger, but actually orange! At least I won't have to worry about my roots growing back and looking daft.

By the way, here's an excerpt from chapter one of my fantasy novel. It's the very beginning.

The chimes above the shop door twinkled as the last customer left. Imi took a ring thick with keys from her apron pocket and locked it. She sighed as she hefted a heavy beam across the frame, and put her keys back. The smells of the powders, pastes, and liquids that lined every shelf of the apothecary became stronger as the last tendril of fresh air escaped under the door. Imi reached for a thatch broom and began brushing the sawdust-covered floor. She hummed as she swept away the remnants of another day's work and placed it into a wooden pale.

Imi went about her chores with her mind running through the shop owner's evening routine. People came from all around the empire to get their claws on Madame Krodge's wares. They were rumoured to be the purest in the world. Imi chuckled softly and lifted the full bucket. There was nothing special about Krodge's ingredients; the old woman just made people think there was. Imi shook her head and smiled as she walked behind a heavy wooden counter and tipped the pale into a large cage. She watched as her herd of smotchings – small and agile creatures harvested for their organs – rocketed around their home and dove into the pile of floor-sweepings. Now that Madame Krodge was bedridden, Imi ran the shop in her stead. The heavy money belt sitting on her waist spoke of the trust the woman had in her. Either that, or of the fact the old boot would personally hunt her down and behead her if she disappeared with it, crippled or not.

A sharp bang on the door made Imi reach for her dagger. She went to the large front window and sheathed her weapon when she saw two men cradling a bloody and limp body on the doorstep.

'Miss Imi! Madame Krodge! Please help!'

Imi swore under her breath and fumbled with her keys. She threw back the beam, thrust the key in the lock, and the two men leapt into the shop, dragging the body between them.

'Thank the Goddess!' One exclaimed.

'What happened?' Imi asked sharply, pulling the body out of their grasp to lay it on the floor.

'We found her in the woods. We thought she was dead, but look!'

One of the men pointed out the shallow rise and fall of the woman's chest. Imi already had her hand on the woman's heart. She jumped to her feet and snatched several vials and boxes from a the shelves, and ran around the counter for her twine and needles. The rodents were racing around their cage, smashing into the sides and squealing. Imi turned and saw that people were pressing against the windows and seeping in through the door.

'Keep them all out!' She bellowed.

The two men immediately ran to the entrance and began pushing the threatening tide back.

Blood was spilling across the wooden floor from a deep slice in the woman's abdomen. Imi recoiled as she saw something wriggle out of the wound and fall onto the floor, drowning in the blood. She gulped back sour bile as she pulled the woman's ragged shirt apart. She bunched the material up and pressed the cleanest part against the open gash. The woman did not stir. Her face remained pale and her eyes were still open and rolled back. Imi could feel a dull pump from within the wound. She felt a chill rush to her hands, permeating the material and into the woman's chest. The sound of the crowd was beaten back by the shouts of the two men keeping them at bay, only for them to be overpowered and toppled over like a paper boat in a storm. The men built themselves up again, and pushed back. The rodents were still squealing, battering their mesh cage with brute force. Imi breathed in blood and sweat and pressed against the gash until her shoulders ached. The cloth became saturated, and she removed it. The wound was still gaping like a wide toothless smile, but the bleeding had already stopped. Imi threw the cloth aside.

She pressed her warming fingertips around the exposed flesh, looking for any more wriggling intruders, but found none. She moved aside and mixed a foul-smelling paste from the ingredients she had brought with her. She coughed and tried not to gag as she lathered it onto the open wound.

'I need some help,' she said, looking up.

One of the men ran to her side and knelt down, staring at her with wide eyes.

It continues on for there, but I thought I'd just paste the first few pages. I'm hoping I'll eventually find a publisher who wants to take it on. So far it's been rejected by about five different agents, but I'm not surprised. I'm only really submitting it at the moment to make me actually write it, so I can work on it and improve it and submit it again.

I got my Creative Writing (Prose) module mark: 63! Yay! Bumps me up a little closer to a first.
My new j0b is going well. It can get busy at some points in the day, but mostly it's quiet. I'm running the espresso bar myself so it gives me a lot of time to think about my books.

Oh, and my fifteens went down a treat.

Stupidity of the Day: Writing on laptop, tried to use PC mouse to move cursor. Oy.

So I joined a writers' group...

Yup. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it. The person closest in age to me is in their thirties, and they're all very...I don't know...critical. I know that's a good thing. I mean, you'll never improve if you don't get criticism, but I can't help thinking that if I submit anything, they're going to maul it to death. I feel paranoid about being there. I feel as though I don't belong, kind of like I'm not good enough. The stuff they had brought along was good. Not exactly my cup of tea, but I can appreciate it. It's more literary fiction than commercial fiction. I'm much more of a commercial fiction gal.

In other news, I had my first university class of the new semester today. It was good. Chauver's London Poetics. I'm looking forward to it, as I am rather a fan of medieval literature, especially Chaucer. I've never read Troilus and Criseyde before, though, and that's what the bulk of the first half of the semester is on. So that'll be interesting.

The Guinea Pigs are grand. Fed them kale for the first time since before Christmas and they were popcorning all over the place. They do love it, though I think it's disgusting.

I'm also going blonde. We'll see how that turns out. Likely bad, especially when my brown roots start growing. But I figure that I'll be able to dye over the blonde with a colour closer to my own when that happens.

Did a little more work on my fantasy novel today. I'm getting to the first major plot point when the characters' town gets pillaged, and they're taken prisoner. Hopefully I've done a good job of working up to it, and it's enjoyable. I'll upload the chapters soon.

Off to make fifteens!

It's ten to one in the morning, and I start my new job at nine a.m. And what am I doing instead of resting my world-weary head on my pillow? Blogging.

Hmm.

Anyway, my name is Rainey, and this blog has been created in a vain effort to get me to continue writing my novels. I don't know how. I mean, it can't exactly poke me in the side repeatedly chanting, 'Write, write write!' in my ear, nor can it really do anything. But it is late (or early). And it seems to make sense to me.

To tell you a little about myself, I'm twenty years of age, living in Belfast, Northern Ireland. I'm at Queen's University studying English, and probably should be working on my dissertation. Representation of the Self in Renaissance Literature. Yeah, I know, it's boring. I don't even like Renaissance Literature. But apparently I'm writing ten thousand words on it. I suffer from a variety of mental health conditions including a recurrent depressive disorder and borderline-Borderline Personality Disorder (meaning I just fall short of a definite diagnosis).

I have four permanent house-guests in the form of Guinea Pigs -- two bonded males and a neutered male living in sin with a female. The first two, Bill and Ben, were sold to me as 'brothers', but there's no way they're littermates. Neutered Cookie is incredibly aggressive and tries to mount anything and everything in sight, except Heidi, who has breathing problems, and usually just smacks him in the face with her arse. Don't know if that deters him or not, though... They live in a block of wire flats under my bed (my bed is one of those top bunk with no bottom bunk jobbies).

I'm working on three novels and a play at the moment. The first novel is a fantasy book called Child of Light. It's becoming increasingly feminized. Female protagonists living in a matriarchal world, with two goddesses at war with each other. Oh, and they're lesbians, kind of like me (I'm bisexual -- or greedy, as manys a person has called me).

The second is a story from the point of view of Dominic Kelly, a nurse born in Dublin, raised all around Ireland, who attends QUB, falls in love with his best friend, and subsequently gets his heart broken. He's an affable chap, my Dominic, but nothing seems to go quite right for him, bless.

The third is an untitled autobiographical account of my mentalness. Well, as autobiographical as any autobiography can be. What I remember may not actually be accurate. Memory is unreliable. So perhaps it should be semi-autobiographical. Or maybe just fake.

The play deals with mental health issues too (hey, most writers just write the same thing over and over. Take Jane Austen, for example. Or Stephen King, in my opinion). I've quite blatantly stolen a dramatic technique from Brian Friel in his play Philadelphia, Here I Come! wherein he has two actors play 'public' and 'private' versions of the main character, Gar. I have three actors playing the same character. One is the 'everyday' version, the true character. Another is the vehemently negative and self-harming version, and the final character is the voice of positivity. The idea is that as the character's mindset changes, the actors slip on and off stage as fluidly as possible. I'm trying to visualize how it feels to be in such a position.

So it's now thirteen past one, and I'm getting a bit tired. The pigs are safely tucked up in bed, and I feel that it's about time I joined them. Not in the cage, obviously. I don't find hay comfortable, or nutritious.

Thanks for reading. Hopefully I'll be back.