"And Lorraine would have a smile on her face that made her look a little crazy."

Argh, I've completely dropped the ball somewhere down the line here. I didn't manage to pull myself together last week long enough to actually do the third part of the Renaissance story, and here I am a week later and I'm still flitting around like a fool. Which I am good at, admittedly, but there it is.

I'm not sure what it is, my inability to finish my Blog Fest story. I was finding it interesting to write, after all, but for some reason I just wasn't able to commit myself to either getting it written on time or giving feedback for what I was reading, and for that I apologise to anyone who's stumbled across the blog as a result of that competition. I think personally it's just because I've been very much all over the place the last few weeks -- and to be honest, my life's been a bit of a state since the very first day of it. I still haven't quite pulled myself together, and I suspect I won't manage that until Christmas at the very earliest.

Still, I have been doing a few things since I wound up here in Western Australia, and one of those was applying for the Master of Arts in Creative Writing at Victoria. I have absolutely no idea whether or not I'm going to be considered anywhere near good enough to be accepted into it, but I've finally laid my heart on the line and sent in the application. Considering how long it's taken me -- applications have been open since the first of October -- it's amazing I finally got there. I have a terrible fear of rejection, which is just one of the reasons why I struggle to finish anything I start (hello, blog fest! -__-). It doesn't help that I see the opportunity to do the MA as a way to get out of the lifestyle I shoehorned myself into back when I accepted my placement into pharmacy school in 2000. I should always have been a BA student, but I told myself to do the "sensible" thing. And here I am, doing very non-sensible things as I try and find my place in the world again.

Of course, I am writing. The other day, not long after I arrived, I wrote a ten thousand word short story to explain to myself the backstory of two characters, only one of whom plays a role in Greywater, and then I finally got around to working on the novel itself. I've got over a hundred pages through the manuscript and added ten thousand words; it existed in a piecemeal fashion, you see, and so what I am doing is not only filling in the gaps, but reading back on the discrete scenes that existed already and working them into a rolling narrative. It seems to be working, because in the deeper hours of the night when I'm holed up in the little office with the lighthouse blinking in the distance beyond the window, I love my characters. I love their story. I become so deeply involved I can't see why anybody else wouldn't want to read my story, because it's so damned fascinating to me. Then, in the daytime...well, it's almost five in the afternoon and although I have been writing today, I just can't sit down for more than half an hour at a time because I feel it's all a load of rubbish. Such is life, I suppose.

But yeah, despite the radio silence of the last week I am alive, and I am writing. I suppose I'll have to wait and see how it goes from here.