It’s the start of the academic year, and in a day or two the road will be jammed with cars and buses on the way to and from Broadlands School, at the top of our road. In just over four weeks I’ll be registering at uni, and students and staff alike will be catching up with people they haven’t seen since the heady days of May.

The days are noticeably drawing in – it’s almost pitch soon after eight o’clock in the evening and now we rise in the dark as well. On sunny days especially, there’s a bitter chill in the early morning air — especially venturing down into the valley with Alice.                                        

Alice, drying out...

Mist hangs heavy on the ground, and the long grass in the fields is so wet that I need to wear wellington boots to keep my feet and legs dry. Alice takes most of the morning to dry out, and the wet fur smell of damp dog fills the house if I forget to open the windows.

Tomatoes are ripening on the vines, and at night lying in bed the quiet is broken by the constant thud of apples falling from the tree onto the lawn.  It’s a beautiful but elegaic time of year, as we (mostly) unconsciously start the clock counting down to a new year.

Yesterday I had to shoot into Newton Park to drop off my second consecutive change of course form, as I managed to balls-up the first. Because my academic grades were insufficient to qualify for the BA course, I had to take the DipHE in the first year as the equivalent of academic probation.

So last week was about changing up to the BA course, but the more I thought about it, the more I debated whether to continue with Media Studies, which is interesting but demands most work for lowest return in terms of grades. So I’ve switched from a joint to a single degree, but that meant printing out and completing a second change of course form, which meant a second consecutive visit to the Ghost Town (cue the Specials aka) that is NP.

While I was there I printed out my interim timetable, which was immediately obsolescent  as soon as the Head of Department signed the change form.

So unless I can suddenly access the timetable network remotely, I shall need to make a third visit to the site!

Meanwhile Kate’s taken the day off, which meant a lovely lie-in; with no alarm I slept through until the decadent hour of 7.30. So now I’m running about two hours late. Not that I’m complaining, you understand — the extra sleep was loverly…

The bad news is that the Newton Park buses only run every hour in the holidays, and my train arrives about two minutes after one leaves. Go figure.

So to pick up assignments and drop a change sheet in, I need to be there before twelve, when the office closes. Fun fun fun…

And the other bit of news is that I’ve passed my first year.

For anyone who is interested the full results are:

I think we’ll be going out for tapas tonight!

Because this is the last, the very last time I should be going into Newton Park for over four months, all being well.  Next week I start a 3-week holiday before going back to work at one of the hospitals in Bristol; sadly, we’re at least a month, ideally two from my being able to take the summer off and write literally full-time. Maybe that’ll happen next year.

So what have I learned?

As I told Carrie Etter when she asked me that question, the thing that I’ve learned is how to really, really think about things. I’m not talking about the odd bit of neuron-firing that we all substitute for thought, but the brain-stretching stuff like; how can we believe anything what the mass-media tell us when each information provider has an agenda of their own? How do I generate ‘heat’ for my writing career? When was the time I was I most happy in childhood? Can I write a sonnet to order?

I don’t have the answers to any of those, apart from the last one, which is yes, although unsurprisingly it wasn’t very good.

Sadly, by the time I go back, the leaves will be starting to go brown. But in the meantime, here comes summer…

The day was terrific but exhausting; Ashley Pharoah gave the 9am script lecture, then I spent the day with friends before heading back to uni to give the 5pm guest lecture with Gareth L Powell.

In the morning Pharoah talked about the bizaare genesis of Life on Mars, the rare pleasure of actually ending a series ( Spin-off Ashes to Ashes finishes on the 21st) rather than handing it over to someone else, as Russell T Davies did with Doctor Who, or just having it axed by the network.  He also talked about his agent, and the fact that scripwriters cost their agencies an average of £10,000 per client. I’m sure that that’s less for literary agencies, and perhaps comes down the more clients an agency has, although conversely, the less they can do for an individual client, but it’s an interesting insight into the pressures on an agent. That’s something that most writers rarely think about.

Co-hosting the 5pm lecture with Gareth was a very, very different experience.  

In actual terms there were only about 30 people there (Gareth estimated 20 to 30, I thought 30 to 40, so let’s go with the middle figure) but the shape of the auditorium, which rises away from one makes even that low number pretty formidable. I suspect that not all of the audience were SF fans, since attendance is theoretically mandatory — though it was the end of the academic year – so I wanted to give them a flavour of proper SF. Gareth went for a lighter approach, and read a short story which went down well, while I read an extract from Winter Song which is perhaps -with hindsight- a little tech heavy, although perfect for a con. There’s a moral there; think about the nature of your audience. But it showed them just how diverse SF is. 

Gareth gave them some very tips on writing, which you can read about here, while I talked a little about a typical day, and both of us fielded the ‘where did that story come from?’ which is still a good question to ask.

The whole experience  was pretty draining, and offered an insight how it feels to be a lecturer. Some of the questions were tough ones to answer on the hoof, and there were several occasions when I wished afterwards that I’d just had a few more seconds to think before answering — but I felt that I had to keep one eye on the time.

It would be profoundly interesting to go back in a year’s time and repeat the experience, to see whether the experience feels any less overwhelming, and whether any of the students have gotten into SF and/or fantasy.

And then tonight I co-present the 5pm Creative Writing Lecture. I’ll be reading from Winter Song, and taking questions on SF, writing — whatever. I may not be home until 7.30, so we’ve decided to give the theatre a miss tonight. Just as well — it’s been a long year and at the moment I feels like I’m running on empty.

Still, one more week, one more seminar, and two more assignments and it’s all done until the Autumn.

Meanwhile, I’ve reviewed Gareth L Powell’s debut novel over at Suite101.

And the second part of the memory thread that formed such a serendipitous moment, given Damage Time’s imminent publication, is here. This is specifically about deleting memories, the parallel to the novel’s ripping them.

If this all seems a little breathless, it is; this Tuesday seems especially frantic as the Uni timetable is all over the place and I have to be out of the door in about five minutes…