Sunny September

I've booked a couple days annual leave from my marketing job and I am writing this blog post in a coffee shop in town, something I loved doing before the pandemic and I've not really done since. Mostly because I have a full time office job and the last thing I want to do with my free time is sit at a desk and write more stuff when there's so much fun stuff to do, but also because every coffee shop is busy and loud on a weekend with people not wanting to sit and write. This Monday afternoon there are lot's of people on their laptops, or reading on their kindles etc. The students of both universities in my city are all back now too, so I don't look or feel out of place during the week.

I have tentatively started a new project. It is a fantasy - not a Booktok smut/fae fantasy (even though I am reading a lot of this right now, so no judgements) but one where I've taken some sort of vibe and a couple character names from something I started when I was 19 and never finished (because I started uni I think). It's early days of course, but I think it will be a fun nano project, given the time of year it would coincide nicely after the planning phase (preptober?) and then I can join some friends of mine in November. I've missed a few weeks of writing club and ironically, I don't think anyone will be available tonight, but I'll be back to it next week.

As well as this, I finally heard some feedback from my rejected PhD application. They said they didn't have evidence of my completion of a long term prose project. Given that I've studied film and television thus far, and a script is totally different to prose when it comes to writing the thing, I understand where they're coming from and I think it's fair. The supervisor I've been working with has suggested I either do the PhD as purely academic/theoretical (which I'm very tempted by, I won't lie) or to reapply for Autumn 2024 and in the meantime write a collection of short stories and get them ready for publication. So today I have the goal of figuring out some sort of plan for the short story collection. I think I need some time to figure out what the next steps are with the application, whether to keep the creative element or not, but this way I can work on the creative project and not have to start afresh later on. I don't want to rush.

I don't want to do a PhD at any cost, either. I love my current job and don't intend to quit anytime soon. Ideally I won't quit until I can teach full time towards the latter half of my PhD. My manager, and the wider marketing team are some of the kindest people I've met in the workplace, and for the first time ever I have a job that doesn't make me hate being alive at the same time as paying me enough money to enjoy existing. It took me until I was 31 to find a job that gave me both, that's not something I will give up easily. It's like when I finally found peace and enjoyment in being single, it took someone really special for me to want to be in a relationship again. But it's this job that means I'll do the PhD part time for the first few years, until I have redone my Uni-teaching training and got that up to date. I won't ever take another marketing job.

But with these short stories, I have three already that have been worked and edited (and published but I can use them again now) so I feel like I'm off to a good start. I've found a few more on my hard drive, but they're mostly either warm up exercises or things that need a lot of work. I've been thinking about perhaps rewriting some of my short films into prose format, that would give me at least three more stories. That means I'll be about a third of the way through. They all have a common theme, which matches my PhD project too, so that's good.

I also stopped at a bookshop in the city today and got talking to the woman who works there about my project, and she gave me some recommendations of short story collections to look at. I've got a few at home too, so I can do my research. We'll just have to see what happens. I'm not worried either way, if anything this might be a really good way to get me to stick to a writing project after all this time. I'm hopeful.

In non-writery news, I've been going to a gym class for the last 7 weeks for women who want to get strong, and it's been really good. I'm starting proper PT classes in October too. Hoping to smash the last 12 weeks of the year. Joining this gym has been the best decision I've ever made. It's kept my mental health to a whole new high standard, so even my bad days aren't so bad. My ADHD is way easier to control, I'm enjoying being social at least once during the week, and I am really enjoying feeling strong. I'm going to start marathon training after Christmas with the PT too, so that will give me something to focus on before I start the PhD next September (if everything goes well in the meantime).

I think I'm finally starting to feel consistently positive. There's been a real shift the last few weeks, I don't know if it's the September sunshine or the positive changes in my life or the fact that I really love autumn/halloween which is right round the corner. But things seem to be getting a lot better. I'm finally out of the funk I've been stuck in for the last couple years and feeling like myself again, but better, stronger, more able to keep everything in a balance. I've even gone back to a regular skin routine (ha!)

I hope your September has been as positive as mine, and as always, don't tread on the flowers.

F x