About Me

My photo
Tokyo, Japan
In 2011 I graduated with 1st class honours in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. I lived in China for nearly two and a half years, where I was working as an English teacher. I just moved to Tokyo where I will be spending my time teaching and writing. This blog is about my experiences of TEFL teaching and living abroad.

Tuesday 15 December 2009

Feeling Festive

Ho ho ho and all that!
Hope everything is going well for everyone at this festive time of year. Myself, I've been pretty busy, only had one assignment to hand in but lots of other writing to be getting on with too. I've just started my next car writing assignment, this one is about 'Used Jeeps' which I am loving a lot more than the last one I had, definitely more to talk about this time.
Really looking forward to having a week at home for the Christmas Holiday, hoping I'll get a lot of writing done. There are so many things that distract me from writing here, so it will be a nice break to go home and just chillax with the family and do a bit of my own thing. Hopefully get some reading done too, I've been neglecting Mr Dawkins recently, though I've got the that halfway point in the book where everything is starting to get a bit dull and samey, so fingers crossed it will pick up soon! I'm reading a fair bit of children's fiction for an essay (which I really should be starting...) so that is great fun, nice and light hearted (even though the subject is..umm...death) so that's been pretty cool.
That's about it from me, I'm pretty wary of what I'm posting up here at the moment, work wise, what with plagiarism and stuff, I don't want to loose marks at Uni because they think I'm stealing, that would suck! But fingers crossed I'll have some stuff to put up here soon xxx

Sunday 6 December 2009

So here it is...December

Doesn't time fly? Deadlines upon us and all that jazz. I do like winter though, it's nice to be able to sit indoor reading or writing, locked up in the dark without thinking 'I really should be outside enjoying the weather'. So roll on those dark and dingy months.
What have I been up to recently? This week it's been all about the submissions. I entered a competition called Bright Young Things, which is being set up by the Eden project to showcase talent of all kinds. In the creative writing section, I entered a poem about global warming, from the perspective of a polar bear. I had most my information from watching David Attenborough's 'Life on Earth' series, but I also did a bit of specific research for it, which was good. The final project wasn't fantastic, I don't aim to win the competition, it's just good to be doing things really. Make me feel like I'm achieving. The other thing I entered this week was a competition run by the 'Writing Magazine', which was to write the text for a picture book aimed at very young children. This was a bit of a sneaky bonus (or so I thought) because I was writing one anyway for my writing for children class, but as it turned out, the competitions word limit was 200 words, whereas my piece was into 400 words. Eeep. Editing is easy...to a point. But when you have to cut out over half the material, that's pretty difficult! 200 words is nothing really. But I managed to do it and keep the main structure of the story together. So I've sent that off too. Hurrah. Looking forward to seeing what reaction I get for the full piece, as I haven't really written things for children before.
What else? Well, reading, I've been reading a lot of children's books (which I'm allowed to count on my reading list as it's not for fun, I'm technically studying them, so naaah). In January I need to write an essay on a theme or some such to do with children's writing, and I've chosen to look at books that help kids come to terms with death. So I've been looking at things like 'The Sad Book' and 'Badgers Parting Gifts', lots of lovely morbid books for my back round reading. On the whole it's fun though, and it's interesting looking at it not only from the perspective of how a child would see it, but also how adults do too.
No closer really on the completion of my next publication, though I have a fair idea of the things I want to go in it, so it's all about getting more work shopping time to fix things for it. Busy busy, as always.
Oh yes, and of course, Christmas is super soon. YAY!