My first post

My shoulders were bowed by the weight of pressure, and besides I had to celebrate finally doing my tax, so here am I, Live Journalled. I might wait introductions until I feel introductory or until friends notice my presence - whichever comes first.

Some days

I was about to complain about the strangeness of my day, but there is SF on TV in the background, and so all complaints fade: I am watching Stargate while typing this.

My big things to day were a pay catch-up (three outstanding payments - I am financial for a bit!!), a meeting with someone from Varuna, and teaching. Everything else I did was haunted by flu and is better forgotten.

The Varuna guy was seriously cool. My writing appears to be more on track than I thought and he wants to see a full manuscript. I may never be a big name, but I am not being an idiot about things either. Fiction-writing is a strange industry to be in, where doing most of the right things can still lead to significantly less than a subsistence income. Thank goodness for PhDs and teaching quals, is all I can say!

Tonight's teaching was on magic and the Middle Ages. I am going to miss this class. They are just the coolest people.

I got them to roleplay a medieval coroner investigating the William of Monmouth ritual murder scenario, keeping in mind the differences between medieval and modern world views and what they have learned over the past four weeks about magic systems and stuff. The only big mistake they made was about witches - everything else they did with great aplomb. Witches and the development of the modern views of them (names, dates and how to run an inquisition trial) are now part of the program for next week. So is Merlin. They are all fixated on Merlin. Than goodness one of them is also fixated on Thomas of Ercildoune - I feel a poetry recitation coming on....

We also did a brief detour into millenialism tonight (via the seven wise and sily virgins and the Gillian translation of her favourite Sponsus song whch is, alas, probably offensive to many believing Christans), and then made a lovely foray into how magic appeared in literature. Normally I do this with readings and things, but we have spent four weeks doing such intensive intellectual endeavour that I decided to do it with a bit more fun and games. We used the Arthurian tarot pack and a bunch of story telling and pattern making to help shape an understanding of magic in medieval French litereatture. It was only a beginning, but they all took away an idea of what stories they need to read and the approach they need to read them from, and the tarot pack was totally perfect for highlighting with no effort on anyone's part some of the differences between modern and medieval views of the same stories.

Now I am in housework mode and TV mode and sending manuscript mode and gnerally wondering why there aren't more hours in the day mode.