Travel in Stygian

A quick word about the title – don’t.

Now that that’s out of the way, I can move swiftly on to some good news. I have received three out of four unconditional offers from the universities I applied for to do a Masters course. One of which was the one I was hoping for, which was the Management of IT course at Nottingham. Another bit of sort of good news is I might, possibly, have a part-time job starting soon. The interview lasted about five minutes, at the end of which I was told, right, you’ve got the job. But I’ll only be starting work there when the current part-time person leaves/gets another job/gets bored/gets ill/dies in a completely innocent and non-circumspect way, none of which I’d wish on them. Honest.

The job centre is grating on my nerves at the moment. Because of the length of time I’ve been claiming for, I now have to go in every week and have to be willing to commute for up to an hour and a half. And it’s not as if going in every week will help any more than the fortnightly trip. Either they’ll say there’s nothing going, or they’ll say that there is something going, in which case I’ll say yes, I know, because it’s the only thing going. More often than not I’ll have already applied for it. The sooner I start work and stop going to that gods-forsaken building, the better.

Anyway, enough of me complaining, and with news out of the way, I can get to the main part of the post.

My thoughts recently have mostly been on writing. Truth be told, I haven’t actually written down all that much, but simply thinking about it is giving me inspiration, and at the moment I’m just writing down some of the better ideas that crop up because I know I’ll forget them if I don’t. The main focus of my ideas has been on characterisation, which I think some authors (I’d name names, but none immediately spring to mind) tend to overlook. It’s all about empathy. If you can’t empathise with a character, you don’t care what happens to them and you end up losing interest in the plot. Even if the plotline’s a good one, it won’t help if the character doesn’t grab you by the shirt and pull you head first into the pages. So my focus at the moment is making my characters relatable. Of course, not every character will endear you to them. Some are downright nasty. Which is all well and good really.

The best thing though, in my experience of writing, the absolute best thing that can happen is when a character (your own creation, whose every detail you thought you knew) surprises you. Sometimes I’ve found that, even as I’m writing, characters will take on lives of their own. It seems odd, but my characters do surprise me. And this spurs me on to challenge them further, see how they react, what they do, and I quickly find that I’m not so much writing the story as being drawn along with it, pulled into the world I’ve created. It’s as though all I’m effectively doing is watching a film and recording it in words. This is the job I want, this is what I really want to make a career out of, but reality gets in the way. So for now, it will remain a hobby, and for now, that’ll do for me.