The Sun Will Come Out

I've been in Edinburgh for five months now, and I think the novelty has finally worn off. That's not to say I'm not enjoying my time here anymore; I still love the city and I am so happy I'm here. But I'm starting to miss home - my friends, my family, the crepe shop on Murray Avenue. My UK friends are beginning to think about what they want to do when our program ends. Spoiler alert: none of us know.

And that's not a bad thing. We still have time to figure it out! But when the whole world is your oyster, how do you decide where to go?

Tea & Sympathy Cafe

The days are getting longer here, finally! We've actually had a few sunny days, which takes the edge off the cold. The hills are capped with snow, the temperature hovers around freezing, and the wind is relentless. We've had a few snowy days, but nothing has stuck. In fact, it seems to go from perfect, soft snow flakes to freezing rain to clear, sunny skies and back to freezing rain again in the span of an hour.

As for school work, there is always more to do. My latest story was a short sci-fi tale that can be summed up with this line: "Even on Oksana's worst days, she comforted herself with the knowledge that whatever mistakes she made, they would never be as bad as accidentally creating carnivorous worms the size of city buses." You read that right - in this story, scientists were trying to genetically modify worms to digest plastic as the next big step in reversing global warming. Obviously, things did not go as planned.

This story was for my Young Adult Fiction class. Every week we focus on a different genre, so every week we write a short story in a different genre. For crime week, I wrote about a locked room mystery (the fan favorite character was the janitor, Al, who was just trying to do his job). For fantasy, an uprising in a world in which magic works through music. This coming week I'll need to write a contemporary realism romance. We've gone from a 500 word allotment to a 1,000 word allotment, which is strangely freeing but still not nearly enough words.

Hula Cafe (featuring this random girl)

I'm also still working on my major project, which is a sort of mythological crime story. I have this semester to smooth out the rest of my plot problems, and in May I'll start writing it! Other assignments include a 30 minute script, which I'm writing about a business woman who quits her job to hunt Bigfoot, and a presentation on literary inclusion in disadvantaged communities.

Outside of class and homework, my time is somewhat occupied by absorbing stories (read: watching Netflix). Even though visual storytelling is a completely different beast from literary storytelling, Netflix is largely how people consume stories today, so I still find it valuable as well as enjoyable.

There are aspects of these stories that really stick with me: a superhero who consults his priest on whether or not taking the life of a villain is justified, an alpha werewolf who is more powerful than other alphas because he chooses not to kill, a teenaged superhero who doesn't realize the villain he's fighting is his dad, and the unlikely power imbalance between a king and his servant, who is secretly the most powerful sorcerer in history.

I hope to write characters that fascinate people the way these characters fascinate me. Readers will stick with a bad plot if they're attached to the characters, but even the best plot can't carry uninteresting characters.

Typewronger Open Mic Night

Recently I attended an open mic night with some friends in a bookshop called Typewronger (a play on Typewriter), and they pressured two of us to perform some poetry. By this I mean our friends stood in a circle around us and chanted, "Peer pressure, peer pressure, peer pressure," until we gave in. I read all the same poems I shared in my last post, and it was fun! It's always beneficial to practice sharing my work with a crowd.

One of the things I've been looking forward to most while I live in the UK is traveling. Originally when I saw my classes were only on Thursdays and Fridays, I thought it would be so easy to pop over to Ireland or Wales or England for a few days at any time. Essentially, I forgot I was doing a Master's program. Just because it's creative writing doesn't mean it's not difficult or time-consuming work. There will be time for traveling, especially in the summer, but that time isn't now.

In other news: I've been added to the scripture reading rotation at church, I'm working on an application to get a mentor, I bought a new purse, my friends and I started a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, I have plans to visit the U.S. in July, and most of my money goes into ordering food for delivery from Byrons.

Edinburgh is familiar enough now that I'm not keeping track of every new coffee shop or restaurant. However, we did discover a chip shop down the street that I can't get enough of. It's called The Dam Chips: Amsterdam style chips served in cones with ample toppings. The food is delicious, the owners are very sweet, and the only drawback is that there's no seating, so we have to eat our chips in the cold on the way back to the flat. It's a small price to pay.

February is a difficult time of year. It's been cold and dark for too long, and there's still more coldness and darkness to come. But here's what I'm looking forward to: at the beginning of March, my brother and sister-in-law are coming to visit me! I have a sixteen-day break in April! My sister might visit me for our birthday in May! The coming months might seem far away, but they will be full of beautiful and wonderful things!

I hope my excessive use of exclamation points cheered you up, because it certainly did the trick for me. Our lectures last week were all about how terrible the publishing industry is, and how we won't make enough money to live on via our writing. In a word: disheartening. But our love of writing makes it worth the effort. I keep having to remind myself that I won't produce anything publishable for several years yet, and that's okay. A lack of immediate success is not the same as failure.

Book recommendation: The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness. It's been a while since I've read a book this good. I could not put it down! It's the story of a young boy who lives in a human colony on an alien planet. When they settled there, the humans caught a virus that killed all the women and made it possible for everyone to hear every man's thoughts all the time. It's the first in a trilogy, and a really phenomenal read!