Beware me today, for I am full of teenage angst (which really isn’t as fun as Wizard angst, props if you get the reference). Revision is slowly divorcing my soul from my body and I am trying to keep thinking about that wonderful moment a week tomorrow when my exams will be over… and then I will have the wait for results.
Revision is so hard.
Why is revision so hard?
It’s like, all the stuff you hated learning the first time comes back to haunt you, just because it can.
My next exam is eleven days away. I NEED TO REVISE.
I can’t revise. I give up. I can’t do it. It’s too hard!
No! I must continue revising!…. BUT IT’S SO DIFFICULT!
Alright, alright. We have come to the end of this gif story on revision, and after arguing with myself and trying to convince myself to revise (or, alternatively, not to revise), I have overcome the mental block, and I am going to rise up, with pen and paper in hand. I shall force my brain to concentrate, I shall work tirelessly, and this next gif sums up nicely what all that means.
I’m going to put the pen and paper down, grab my Pooh Bear and go back to bed.
I feel like I’m finally getting back into the swing of writing! I’ve just entered a writing competition with a piece of writing I’m rather proud of. I’m not sure what the rules are about posting your work elsewhere so I won’t post it here yet but if I can in the future I definitely will, but I’ll explain it – it is essentially, in 750 words (I actually struggled writing to a word limit!), a day in the life of a bench. Yes, you read that correctly, a bench. It sounds crazy but I’m actually quite pleased with how it went, and it ends on what could be described as a “cliffhanger” but it reflects real life I think.
So, it’s a good feeling to be getting back into it, but at the same time I know it’s just temporary relief from revision (relief I can’t really afford at the moment but I’m hopeful that having got the need to write something that isn’t about Freud or the working model of memory out of my system, I can get back and concentrate on revising and hopefully get the best grade possible in my exam.
Talking of exams, they have a knack of disrupting things, don’t they. Just when I feel I’m one step closer to finding out what’s wrong with me – I got the date for my scan – I’m faced with another setback, in that the date is the same day as my Psychology exam. Obviously the exam has to come first – I can’t really re-sit it – so I have to wait for another appointment which, knowing my luck, will either be the day of my English exam or when I’m on holiday. Sigh.
Welcome to June! Hope it is a lovely, sunny month for you all. For us, the weather isn’t looking so promising – we’ve just emerged from a heatwave (well, a British heatwave – highs of about 32C, nothing compared to the usual 40C temperatures of places like Australia but hey, a lot of us are pale or ginger over here and we don’t deal with the sun very well) and entered what looks set to be the British summer, plenty of rain and cold temperatures and not much else all summer! Personally, I don’t mind – I’d like nice weather, but I don’t want it to be sweltering all the time. If we can have a week of nice weather for when we go on holiday, that’ll be peachy keen.
I hope all other aspects of June are happy for you all, just like I hope every month is happy for my lovely readers and followers 🙂 for me, the month will consist of finishing my exams and struggling to adjust to life without homework or revision for the next three months, and starting to worry about results day no doubt. I’ve also got the sponsored midnight walk on June 30th – you can find out how to sponsor me on the page called, well, “Sponsor Us” (at the top of the blog), and please do sponsor us because it’s such a worthwhile cause – so I’d better get in training for that, and hopefully this will be the month where I really see a major improvement or, even better, the complete disappearance of this pain and illness 🙂
So, pinch and a punch, first day of the month – happy June, everyone!
Sorry I’ve neglected this blog so much recently. I knew exams were going to be mad but I had no idea how much. College has been an epic fail thanks to this illness so I’ve been revising like mad to make sure I have a chance of getting into uni! Add that with trying to have a social life, and yeah – it’s been crazy, and I think I’m starting to burn out. All this revision is catching up with me, I’ve ended up with one hell of a cold which, combined with having awful pains in my back every time I sneeze, isn’t fantastic. Really hoping things will get sorted soon, or that if they don’t I can maybe apply for special consideration because of how ill I’ve been.
On a brighter note, it’s sunny outside! Yeah, I’m inside revising but I’ve got a t shirt and shorts on and it’s lovely and warm and bright outside, which cheers me up a bit and makes revision a bit more bearable. I just hope that by the time my exams are over we’ll still have such nice weather, so that I can actually enjoy it – especially on holiday for my birthday in July!
I think the wait until August is going to be a really nervewracking one – before I was so confident for my exams, but now I’m terrified because although I know I am prepared because of the amount of revision I’m doing, I still feel somehow like I should be doing more (not sure what else I can do, really, other than go to college, which doesn’t really feel like an option the way I feel at the minute!). So expect either no posts at all as I spend all day, every day rocking backwards and forwards in a gibbering heap because I’m so nervous, or lots of frightened “ohmygosh I’m gonna fail” posts. Normal service will be resumed in September.
So, I have been doing essays and work, but I need some procrastination, so I’m going to post up the five videos that have been keeping me going through revision, in the hope that you might enjoy them and even find them useful whilst you’re writing/working/doing whatever else you’re doing/not doing anything even though you should be doing something (like me!).
1. Nick Pitera; the One Man Disney Movie
2. Mike Tompkins; “Forever” (Chris Brown cover with every sound you hear made by him!)
3. Train; “Drive By”. Train are just amazing anyway.
4. Tangled; “When Will My Life Begin”.
5. Brother Bear, “On My Way”
I shall sum up what today is using my favourite method of expressing my emotions online. Warning, gif overload ahead.
Yeah. So that’s me at the moment. Don’t ask.
Today is going to be a revision day for me. Revision days are always a funny kind of day, because you start off really motivated like –
And then your revision comes at you and you’re like, “I’ll start in a bit” –
You drag yourself to your bag to get your revision notes for a different subject.
Then you look in your bag and realize just how much revision you have to do.
So, you start writing. You manage two minutes, three at the most, and feel like you’ve just climbed Everest, cured world hunger, brought about eternal peace and written a 10,000 word dissertation on the preservation of cute widdle hedgehogs in the Forest of Dean.
… then you realize how much more work you’ve got to do, and just how soon your exams are.
This cycle repeats itself throughout the day, and this will form my day in a nutshell. It will end like this.
For those of you who don’t speak Welsh, a “pwdu” is to sulk, and apparently, my pwdus are rather frequent and quite funny from the way people seem to laugh when I’m sulking. Today, I would say I am in a pwdu of epic proportions, and I have no idea why. Well, I do sort of know why – I’m struggling without co-codamol, I’m on ibuprofen but it doesn’t quite have the same effect as the co-codamol did, so the withdrawal effects are taking their toll on me.
I’m snappy and miserable, there’s nothing I want to do and even my boyfriend seems worried I’m fed up with him. I’m supposed to be helping my brother with his revision because it’s in Welsh and our parents don’t understand it but the mood I’m in, if he got a question wrong he’d probably find the textbook being launched at his head. I’m tired but I don’t want to sleep and I need to drink more but I can’t, I don’t even want to eat (which is unusual for me), and I just want to throw things at the walls. My laptop is safe because I will never throw Lucy at anything, I love it too much, but my phone is fair game which is why it’s safely hidden away and I’m refusing to let myself get it because I’d be lost without it if I did break it.
So, there’s not going to be any fiction writing done today, I think that’s pretty certain. I’m struggling just to write this blog because my words aren’t coming out right and I know how I want them to sound but they don’t sound like that when I write them down. If something really annoys me today, expect a very angry and incoherent post from me, but otherwise, I’m not sure how much writing I’ll actually get up to today, because I can’t see this pwdu fading any time soon….
I’ve actually managed to refrain from starting Book Three!
Alright, that might sound a little stupid, considering I only finished book two yesterday, but if you know me and my writing style, you’ll know that I don’t like to leave big gaps, even though I really should. The sensible thing would be for me to leave the writing until after my exams, but that’s never going to happen because a) I love writing too much, b) it’s what I do when trying to unwind after revision and c) I’m fairly confident I’ll get the grades I need for university anyway. I’m not going to let the writing take over and I’ll probably take it a lot slower than the first two books, but I’m still going to carry on writing.
What I am doing, is writing a kind of prequel short story that takes place about forty years before the actual story begins, and so far it’s going quite well. It’s quite weird, really – I used to write fanfiction for Harry Potter, and my style of fanfiction writing is very similar to the style I’m using in this short story – as in, it’s not actually part of the main plot, but it’s developing the relationship of two of the main-ish characters way before the story began. It’s like writing a fanfic for my own novel, which is quite odd.
Most authors seem to really dislike fanfiction, but I’ve always thought that one of the things I’d look forwards to the most if I was to ever become a published author would be reading the fanfiction my fans write (if I was to ever get any fans, that is). At the same time, I realize that if they started doing slash fanfiction (as in, putting the two main female MCs together and completely disregarding canon), or made everyone completely out of character, or worse, did a – *shudder* – High School AU version, I’d have to fight the very strong urges to send them a strongly-worded email advising them to re-read my books. I’d fight it, because I appreciate that my book would be in the public domain and people want to interpret the characters as they see fit, but I’m such a control freak/perfectionist, and I hate things that aren’t canon, I think I’d have to stop myself from reading any fanfiction about my novel!
Sometimes I think I’d like to get back into writing fanfiction – I used to really enjoy it. However, I love the freedom that writing my own, original story gives me. I don’t have to stick to a plot or characters that have been written by someone else (I know, you can do AU fanfics but like I said, I only want to write canon fics), I can create my own characters with their own personalities, their own worlds, their own lives and rules and things like that. But I’m not going to say no to writing some fanfiction at some point, if the right idea came along!
the life of a moomin 