I miss you all. Working ten hour days at the moment and am absolutely exhausted, but there's sunshine in England and I start an MA in two weeks (alongside my full-time high-stress job) and I can't wait.

Actually updating my blog now (as of today), come and see me: http://regencyroses.blogspot.com/

I haven't written here in a long time. I love my little LiveJournal with all its history, but I also feel that I tend to use it most when I'm frustrated with things and I'd like to get out of that angsty teenage pattern.

So, I've created a brand new quite public blog for the adult me. I feel very silly doing this but I'm a bit desperately stuck in my writing and in some parts of my life, and I'm hoping this will help with writing inspiration and, an entirely different motivation, help my family and others so far away stay connected with my life.

Also, I have the flu. I've been at home from work for three days with nothing to do.

It's on Blogspot, so probably most of you won't ever read it as it won't come up on your LJ friends pages (see, my LJ makes me negative, this is something I have enough of already!) but I hope that a few of you will.

The address: http://regencyroses.blogspot.com/

I'm not leaving LiveJournal, I still read my Friends page very regularly and still will, and may very well come back and write on here when I need to moan semi-privately. :)

These days, the writing occupies a space in my head where it never quite goes away. It's always been like this really, and in some ways it's a pain, because I can have such a busy day, be so productive, and yet not be satisfied because one more day has gone by without words on the page.

I can't explain it to people who aren't writers, and all of my writing friends live across an ocean at least. There are times when I wish they were here, but then being around non-artists may be partly what keeps me sane. My husband draws beautiful landscapes for birthday cards and used to play at least four different instruments, but he's a historian at heart and now a lawyer by training. He's good at the objective and the practical, and he helps to pull me out of the depths of my artistic self-doubt more often than he realises.

There is this huge draft of a novel lying on my hard drive and in a blue and white striped lever arch file, 300 pages of it. It's just a little novel at its core but it feels too big to keep in my head all at once.

The other stories are there - my Norfolk novel is a few chapters in but I need the landscape in front of me and the accent fresh. This weekend, we hiked out onto Dartmoor, climbed on the tors and camped by a rushing river that gained a foot in torrential rains overnight. We saw a baby calf just hours old, its mother licking it clean, and hundreds of sheep, set loose to graze on the moor, spattered with dye to mark out the different herds. Dartmoor is one of the last truly wild places in England, I think, and the huge rock formations that are the tors fascinate me. Sunday morning, we forded the risen river to get to Great Mis Tor, which was shrouded in fog on the horizon. It would appear and disappear before us until we got there and climbed up, reaching one false summit after the next until we got to the top where there was a grassy plateau. The rocks on the tors always look strangely lived in. That's a magical place if ever I've seen one.

I've had a Dartmoor novel in my head since the first time I went to the moor, and have been saving it for the move to Devon. So maybe I'll tackle that now.

But my day job is so intense, such hard work and the level of responsibility is so much higher than I'm used to. It's expected that work be at the top of my list of priorities. And it is, that's what I wanted, something where I'd feel it was worth me turning up 9-5 every day. But my writing always comes first, and there's just not time for it all!

Jessika Williams from Interlochen was just on Doctor Who. How weird is that?

So everyone I went to Interlochen with is having children.

Does this scare anyone else?

Just now, I woke up thinking about things, in particular an Agatha Christie play I read once called The Hollow. I had a big fat collection of her plays that I read just as voraciously as any of her novels during my Agatha Christie phase. That phase began when at twelve years old I decided to volunteer in a nursing home reading to old people, and the elderly woman I got wanted Agatha Christie. I only went a couple of times and then just stopped showing up, partly because the old lady kept falling asleep and I didn't know what to do when that happened, partly because I had to get a tuberculosis test to work there and I was scared of the little three-pronged needles.

Anyway, the Christie stuck and I read them all. I used to stand in my room and read the plays aloud to myself, practicing the voices. They were just the sort of plays I liked, filled with a quiet sort of calm but lots of suspense, lots of menace trembling underneath the surface.

All this makes me remember that when I was little I wanted to be an actress as well as a writer although I've not got remotely the right sort of personality or any sort of natural talent. Some elderly eccentric relative left a box of old clothes that we used for dress up - I wrote the plays and my siblings and friends were all recruited in. For years, whenever I saw my cousin Martha we'd closet ourselves in my room or hers and come out a few hours later to cast our siblings. The Kidnapping of Princess Caroline was one of my favourites, from the slightly more mature period of our writing (age eleven I probably was) but Beth and Amy (the official title, we always called it 'Aunt Josephine' after the most memorable character, an evil Aunt who suddenly turned kindly and handed out candy. Obviously one of us had been reading Little Women...) There was a stage though, this was very young, when I thought my destiny in life was to write and act in plays. One of my worst disappointments was when I'd written my masterpiece, a musical based on "The Twelve Dancing Princesses", complete with songs, and cast from various children I managed to seek out in my homeschooling days, and my parents announced that we were moving to Washington State for a year and the whole production fell through.

I think what I'm trying to say is that going to Interlochen really does pigeon-hole you for a while, especially if you're someone like me who's not particularly extroverted and not terribly confident. There was no way I could have pretended to be an actress at Interlochen - at Interlochen you can only do an art if you're very, very good, or think you are. I'd tried to learn violin lots of times as a child but moving around, bad teachers, and the fact that I didn't practice meant I'd never gotten very far. Interlochen meant I didn't try to get any further.

I love writing and it's been the most important thing to me for as long as I can remember. It's all I've ever wanted to do, and in a way desire doesn't actually come into it because it's something I need. Whatever I do, and maybe this is a little bit sad, I'm happiest when I'm writing, and when I go long stages without it I feel the loss, it's as if something's missing, as if, however busy I am, nothing quite matches up. As I'm coming to the end of the degree, a sort of relief is setting in. Even though I have to go full-time at work, my hours at home will be my own for the first time since in I was homeschooled in fifth and sixth grade and did nothing for two years but read five books a day and write and write and write. I can't wait to throw myself back into my writing.

Moreover, I want my hobbies back. I loved Interlochen, really I did, but if you're in any way dedicated it knocks the hobbies out of you. It's only okay to do things there if you're already the best at them. I want to learn the violin again, perhaps move into a village with a tiny theatrical society that wants to do Agatha Christie. I want to, this has always been a dream of mine, learn to read Egyptian hieroglyphs so I can read all of the tablets in the British museum without looking at the plaques.

And I want to write whatever I like. I want all of that freedom.

I've just applied for a job as a publishing assistant at a children's book publisher in Somerset. I would love that job. Otherwise, the plan is to stay at NHS Direct until they get rid of me, or find a different job in the NHS I think if that doesn't seem viable.

My writing class was so nice to me on Monday. I took in my first chapter which I really thought was absolute rubbish, and all I really wanted was for them to tell me whether or not I need to start it over from scratch. They said no and in very kind terms. I was most pleased and surprised! And then I went to my tutorial afterward with my teacher and he said some really nice things as well. He said that if anyone should do the MA I should, and this was so good to hear especially after the depressingness of my writing dissertation. I did perfectly well on that in the end, nothing spectacular, but a quite respectable mark. It was all a fairly demoralising experience and my confidence in my writing, always a little unsteady, was quite shaken. I'm feeling much better now. I would so love to do a masters, but of course the money makes it impossible. Oh, at times like these I wish I was English!

The quality of my LJ entries seems to be deteriorating however. Oh well.

Life is busy, very busy.

Simon and I celebrated Valentine's Day today instead of yesterday. We walked around the Sainsbury Centre which is a small museum on campus that has recently reopened and has some incredible art and ancient sculptures, that sort of thing. Then we went for tapas at La Tasca and came home to spend the afternoon in bed drinking rose wine, eating Lindor chocolate, and watching The West Wing. It was very nice.

I got my creative writing dissertation back today, a good 2:1, so I'm happy. I would have liked a first but it's marked very fairly, I think.

Wedding plans over the next week as we go to Devon tomorrow evening. The rotas have fallen out that I have five days off work in a row so we're going to stay till Wednesday which should be nice. The reason for the visit is that we have to see the vicar on Monday and basically, from what people have told me, explain why we've decided to make this commitment. I've always wanted tea with the vicar, so quintessentially English, but now I'm scared. This one is an old retired Reverend Cannon that they've had to get in from elsewhere as the village vicar has recently moved to New Zealand so he'll probably be very traditional.

We're going to try to get the invitations done while we're there and plan out the menu - we'd thought a cold lunch on the lawn and then some hot things at the dance in the evening, and I'm thinking at the moment lots of salads and things for lunch, and some with an Asian twist that my mum can eat as she's slightly intolerant to wheat and doesn't like to eat it. Maybe some sushi and some bread and cheese, East meets West style. And lots of wine of course. Then more traditional - mini quiches and Simon's mother's delicious vegetarian sausage rolls in the evening. I think it will be fun. And my dress is gorgeous. I'm just worried that all this sitting around doing work/talking to ill people on the phone is going to make me fat and I won't be able to fit into it.

Alice comes to visit for her spring break and I'm so excited! She and Lauren and I are going bridesmaid's dress shopping and Alice says she wants to go clubbing so we'll induct her (gently) into the oh-so-exciting Norwich scene.

Not much writing getting done - although lots of thinking about the novel. Have just handed in my first chapter today for workshopping the week after next and it's such a mess but I'm hoping they'll be able to give me some advice. My class is really good this term, spot-on with their comments and all really excellent writers. I talk far too much in class, but I've been a bit starved for writerly contact for a long time and when I get the chance to talk about something I'm that passionate about I can't seem to stop.

I'm going to apply for an editorial assistant job at a children's book publisher in Somerset, just for fun. I probably won't get it, particularly because I'd not be able to start until June, but it sounds perfect so I might as well apply. At the moment, my career prospects are mainly leaning towards staying in the NHS if I can and still probably doing teacher training a few years down the road when the silly government will let me. Simon's made it through a number of stages in the graduate recruitment schemes and then been cut from the late ones which is disappointing although he's done really well, and better than a lot of people. I don't know what the government is talking about, trying to get more graduates. Seems to me, there are too many graduates for the number of jobs! He's got testing for GCHQ next week, which is the one he would really like so we'll see how that goes.

All this is really getting written because I have to get up and go to the shop to buy makings for stir-fry. And I don't want to. Plus, I've had half a bottle of wine, although I don't seem to be feeling the effects. Lovely wine, Ernest and Julio Gallo White Grenache, you should have some.

I am thinking about writing which is almost as good as writing but not quite. (Or not at all really, but I'm trying to make myself feel better.)

I've printed out the first four chapters, and on paper it's not as bad as I thought. Simon is being the best boyfriend ever and drawing me maps and floor plans of actually believable castles (being engaged to a history student is coming in handy) and of course all this help is pushing me to the proper restructuring that needs to be done. He is also going to help me plot my final battle as the fact that he has rearranged my castle means that my convenient way of getting the main characters into the castle is suddenly not quite so easy. Yes, I'm rubbish at battles. I know what I want to happen of course, and where I need everyone to end up, but I'm not one hundred percent certain how these things normally work.

It looks like such a huge project, as the novel is full of inconsistencies but looking at things again, I think the major ones are easily smoothed out. The first seven chapters do definitely need a complete refashioning, but after that I think the problems are on a smaller scale. More showing, less telling in places and honestly there is no need for a page explaining how someone feels.

I'm rewriting the first chapter for my workshop at the moment, but the question is do I now go back and rewrite more or do I push ahead and go for the last eight chapters, despite all the inconsistencies in the lead-up? I'd been leaning towards the first, but I'm thinking now I may go for the latter as long as I can get the geography straight in the head, finish it all off and then go in and try to fix it. I've just calculated about how long another eight chapters will be and it's looking like about 340 double-spaced pages.

That's a lot of pages. So they'd better be good.

I miss LiveJournal.

I start lots of posts but don't ever finish them. I don't know what to do with myself at the moment.

It's quite likely I have mono. Rubbish.

So much work to do but I'm sitting in bed in my dressing gown at noon with Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen all around me but no actual reading going on.

I nearly exited this entry as well. I can't write beautifully any more. Could I ever?

Last night I went ice skating for the first time in years and it was good fun but my body is currently badly bruised and I have great pain in my right arm.

I've almost finished my essay, almost there, and I've been going on about Christina of Markyate and Heloise of Abelard and Heloise fame for about four hours now so that my head is spinning with sexual innuendo and God. Really, it's not that good an essay. I've been scared to write it, finally got down to work, and realized there's not a lot you can say in just 2500 words.

I'm going to attempt to cook pasta e fagioli, my favourite soup with tiny pasta and cannelini beans in it, but this all depends on whether or not my arm works well enough to chop.

I'm worried about a few things at the moment, but my strategy is get through one thing at a time because I just can't handle too much stress at once. So, finish the essay. Cook. Sleep. Wake up. Edit essay. Go to work till 11 PM. Taxi home. Sleep. Get up on Monday. Hand in essay. Go to the doctor. Go to work till 11 again.

There are better things in there somewhere, I hope, like spending time with Simon, doing a bit of work on my creative writing dissertation in a non-stressful way, and I have a great desire to bury myself in a really good YA fantasy novel right now. Something that puts the magic back in life or just reminds you that it's there.

I think maybe I need a walk in the moonlight, or a breath of cold fresh air. I've not been out of the house all day. Maybe I'll go out tonight, wear a short skirt, drink tame Archer's and lemonade. I hadn't planned on it, but I might just need some music, a bit of alcohol, and some time with my friends.

Today I decided to walk home from work because it was a lovely autumn day and I'd been sitting in a call centre since half past seven this morning. I just started walking, thinking I'd just get on the bus somewhere along the way if I got tired. I stopped at Asda and bought some rice cakes and some jaffa cakes and makings for cheesecake and then I walked along and walked along and walked along. It's all of three miles from work to home if you go the direct route but obviously I don't know the direct route as it took me two hours. I wasn't worried though as I always vaguely knew where I was and there were buses going to the city centre all the time if I got stuck. So I walked along and ate rice cakes and jaffa cakes and every once in a while I sang a song quietly to myself such as Scotland the Brave, or one I made up about people playing golf. I saw lots of parts of Norwich that I've never seen properly before. Eventually, after much wandering, I made it home. It was a great adventure so I thought I would tell you about it.

I think I may be a very strange person. Either that or I have come up with a very effective way of essay procrastination.

I just wrote lots and lots and lots of e-mails. Lots of them. I'm trying so hard.

I miss LiveJournal. Maybe I should start to write in it every day.

But after all of those e-mails I've not got a lot left to say.

Oh dear. Oh dear. Got an e-mail from adviser. Must start dissertation. Now. Oh dear.

In other news, have started good new job at NHS Direct. In bad news, it's only temporary till February when our site may be closed down. I do dislike the government sometimes. Seriously.

Oh and I have to do full time training for the next two weeks.

Which means no time for dissertation.

Oh dear.

Today is the first day of classes although I have none and Lauren and Simon have gone off with their schoolbags and their bus money in the rain. For some reason, I woke up this morning with this shaky feeling in my whole body that's only just starting to go away.

It's my last year and I want to make it a good one although I've not really got a job and I've been pestering temping agencies constantly for work although even calling them once is something I find really difficult to do. These things have to be done, I suppose.

We went out on Saturday night and a drunken person in a van tried to run us over near The Stores Pub on Dereham Road. Don't go there, 'tis dangerous.

I got paid on Friday and the money's trickling straight through my fingers into house bills that aren't mine to pay, and tall stacks of medieval books. Why did I take a unit in the one thing I'm not very good at it? I know exactly why I did it - to prove to myself that I can do well at it which means I'm going to have to work pretty bloody hard.

And my creative writing dissertation? It's meant to be just a 6,000 word story which I can do with my eyes shut. So of course I've decided to do a modern adaptation of a section of the Faerie Queene (which I haven't read and is about 2,000 pages of poetry in an archaic form of Elizabethan English) just to make it more challenging. Why?

And the thing is, I don't seem able to start my dissertation until I've got a first draft of my novel done and dusted and it's not done yet.

Busy days.

So yes, I'm getting married. Did you know?

I have a diamond ring and a tiny little country church waiting for me to walk down the aisle. I'm so young, oh dear I'm so young, and I never thought I'd be married so young. In generalities, the very hugeness scares me a little, but then I think of it in specifics and I have no fears, no doubts, and feel just so certain and so safe and so right.

Are any of you in England next June? Do you want to be? Let me know.

I've been under a lot of pressure lately what with my third and final year of university looming over my head, the desperate need for a new job as my current one is failing me spectacularly, the fact that the other couple in our Norwich house has split up and Ant has now moved into the dining room that I was so looking forward to having and am currently helping to pay for with money that is so hard-earned and in such short supply. The real fears are the future, though, the way we've got to both graduate, find jobs, find a place to live, and have a wedding, all over a two month period. I wouldn't have chosen to do it quite this way, but it may be good, getting so many of life's major stresses over with in one go.

And the thing is underneath it all I'm not really afraid. Other people's fear, older people's fear, influences me but it's important that I don't get too caught in it. I believe with all my heart in the fact of life as an adventure. My stepdad is always saying that you create your own reality, and I do agree with him. Cynicism has never helped anyone and neither, I will agree, has naivete. I believe in a world where you can have your eyes wide open and still find magic around you and I don't think all the pressures in all the world are going to make me think otherwise. So there.

I've been at work all day again. My novel is progressing. The writing isn't as polished as it should be, but then for once I actually have a plot, and when you're working out the story you can't necessarily stop for just the right way of expressing something. That's second draft, I think, once I've worked out for sure what that something really is. In the meantime, I have to tone down my fear of not being a good writer and just keep going. I want a finished draft by the end of the summer. I'm getting excited about my writing dissertation, it's going to be something totally different.

The world feels so serious sometimes, and I'm doing my best to not focus on the serious things so they don't weigh me down. I spend so much of my time going around with this huge weight on me, most of it my own fault. Do any of you have any idea how much I worry about things? I am so scared about my health, whatever little thing happens to me. I think I've possibly got a bit of a hypochondriac mentality anyway, and after my dad died it's gotten ten times worse. But I'm taking control. I'm solving my problems. I'm getting on with things. I'm not obsessing about all the money I haven't got to pay my tuition, or the fact that I thought I had a career all lined up for myself next year and now I haven't. I'm just going to work to make back the money that Clarks overpaid me in June and to put aside the tiny bit of savings at the end of it. I'm writing because if I can make a career out of this, and soon, then I might just be all right, and I may be able to have the life I really want after all.

Simon and I want our house in the countryside, and I want to get up in the morning and eat breakfast with him and then put on the shoes I saw at Clarks today that would be perfect for teaching, and go to work. I want to teach the things I love, and hope that one or two children will listen. I feel the need lately to be put together, to present myself capably, neatly, well. After school, I want to go home and write for two hours, and make dinner so that when Simon gets home we can eat together and curl up on the sofa and watch movies. Some nights I would like to go to a concert or the theatre, sometimes I would like to go out for dinner. On the weekends, it would be nice every once in a while to go sailing, or work in the vegetable garden, or something like that.

In the summers, I want to be able to write all the time, to go to a little French chalet and climb rocks in the Alps, and then do a chapter in the evening and drink lots of rose wine. Or a Greek island - I've always wanted to spend a summer somewhere Greek with lots of olives and swarthy men and sea, and write in the heat. I want writing summers, romantic summers. And winters with fireplaces, and my library with the stained glass windows.

I'm determined. Don't think it won't happen.

I'm living in Simon's parents' house for the moment, although Simon has been in France for the last three weeks. Today, he comes back but for most of the day I have the house to myself. I must do lots of cleaning and lots of writing and work on the English course I'm doing for my brother. He's reading James Joyce, Graham Greene and Virginia Woolf. It's good for him.

My life is so confusing and so strange really. I don't ever feel American, even when I'm in America. My novel's at 45,000 words but it's been stuck for the past few days as I'm at one of those point of view switches which always hold me up for a little while. I'm working at Clarks in Exeter and am absolutely exhausted all the time. I'm tired of shoes. Do you ever do any of these things? If so, you should be shot. 1) Hold up the shoes to the light, decide there slightly different colours, and ask your shop assistant to bring out all available pairs so that you can mix and match the perfect pair. 2) Ask for ten pairs of shoes at once and then complain when it takes a little while to climb up ladders all over the stockroom that are twice the height of your shop assistant's head. Or, even better, leave before she comes back loaded down with pairs. 3) Realize the shop closes in five minutes but decide to stay for another half an hour anyway, trying on all the pairs in the sale, and then just take one, no shoecare. Shall I go on? I am so tired of people.

Some things have been good though. I went to a jazz concert in the picturesque country church with Simon's parents. The quintet ranged between the ages of forty and seventy and were amazing. We drank wine and ate cheese and biscuits and people that I did not know kept coming up to me and asking about my new job. You know how villages are in English books? Yeah, it's actually like that.

I have other things to say but have suddenly run out of energy to say them... Maybe later.

I've finished my exams! How amazing is that? That's two years of university out of the way. Only one year left to go which is just incredibly scary. What do people do with the rest of their lives?

There was a really fake art teacher on Neighbours just now who said "The only people who call themselves artists are amateurs." Neighbours is silly, we all know it is.

No more Shakespeare, no more Dickens, I've passed the first year that counts toward my degree and already miss it a little.

I want to write. Can you help me do it?

Have you noticed that all my entries lately are longing for something? It's because it doesn't seem to be much good just to say it to people again so it feels helpful just to put it out into the void.