So, after the initial flurry of excitement that came with creating this website, I am now back into my regular life and am wondering how to keep it going. I've changed the design, I've posted a few things (including my shitty notesapp poetry - sorry!), and I've even got my cute little music player working - what now? I guess the first thing to do is to work on accessibility and compatability, especially with phones. So I'll get on that. I know there's a lot of information about how to keep things working on old browsers as well but I don't know how essential that is for an amateur site like this (maybe I'm wrong and you're all reading this on windows vista or something but I don't know.) Also, I am wondering what the best way is to post large amounts of writing. At the moment, I'm just typing it directly into the HTML, but I'm wondering if that will make these files ridiculously long. Who knows!
Anyway, that's all computer stuff - now I'll get into what you all really want to know about: my personal life. To begin with, I knew that this was gonna be a long week. I'm coming up to the deadline for a final project at university, I was waiting for an important email that I wasn't even sure I would get (more on that later) and I had pulled several late nights working on this site. Everyone I know was, and still is, running around like mad trying to organise things and write essays. Luckily, I had meetings for the first few days, so I felt alright, probably cos I was just sitting around and listening. But then Wednesday came and with it, the inevitable. I crashed - hard. It was just one of those days where I felt tired as soon as I woke up. Unfortunately, this was also the day that I was supposed to be out doing legwork for one of the projects, in this case location scouting. Now I'm not saying that I'm a hero on par with the greatest Spartan warriors, but I did get a bus to the crappiest part of town while suffering through headaches and nausea, to stand in graveyards in the freezing wind making vague comments about "texture" and "vibe." So actually I am kind of saying that.
The scout itself, thankfully, was pretty interesting. The graveyards gave me a weird kind of pleasant melancholy which I didn't expect, especially since they were all abandoned and the stones were collapsed as if there had been an earthquake (the most recent ones showing dates from the 1950s.) Why "pleasant," I couldn't say; I suppose I was just indulging in a bit of harmless morbidity. The phrase "Memento Mori" came to mind. After that, my friend and I got glared out of an unfriendly working mens club for some reason. There's nothing obvious that they could have had against either of us apart from our age and the slight middle-class neutrality of my accent, so it was very bizarre. Needless to say, we will not be pursuing that as a location. My friend seemed to be halfway between amused and disturbed for the rest of the day and they kept bringing it up - possibly because they're not used to being excluded from anywhere. They're very socially capable. It was even weirder that when I looked the place up later, it had rave reviews. Everything after that was pretty unremarkable but those two experiences made it worth being there. Oh, and also later seeing online that someone has been writing essays on the bus stops in that area claiming that the Taliban have ruined it by shipping in heroin? Or something? I'd be surprised if it was that nice of an area to begin with.
The next day I spent an hour putting leaves in a bin bag. This was for a different project, and was a last minute request by another student who for some reason has decided that we must collect the leaves now. I haven't asked whether he thinks they'll all disappear in the next week or whether he is concerned, if that is the case, about them possibly disintegrating in the bags. I just went to the park, put them in the bags, and took them to his house. I only hope that they don't get in people's eyes when they're being blown about on location. Also, I have discovered that five bags of leaves is surprisingly heavy. Either that, or I'm incredibly weak - a possibility which is not out of the question. The rest of the day I spent writing essays, then I went to a huge shared house to watch 24 Hour Party People for fun research with a bunch of other students. The person who put it on is genuinely convinced that it applies to her project but I don't really see how. I went home just after the film ended because I still felt pretty much as bad as the previous day in terms of health.
Today, Friday, I woke up feeling pretty good, surprisingly. I guess going to sleep early-ish last night fixed my problem. I spent all day planning for the leaf project and part way through got a very good email which I will explain now:
A few weeks ago (maybe two and a half) I got an email from an online magazine that I had sent a story to all the way back in February 2022, asking if I had seen their acceptance. I hadn't, and I couldn't find it. To be honest, I think they just forgot to send it to me. So I emailed back right away asking them to resend it. They didn't reply until today, which felt like a very long wait considering that it's my first ever publication, but now I have it! I have a contract to sign and I'm gonna be published! Obviously this is very exciting but it also feels quite strange. I don't know how proud to be. I am happy, of course, but it's a really, really, really, miniscule magazine and it's also (just my luck) closing down. How good do you really have to be to get into a dying magazine? I think I'll feel better when I get into a real printed one and hold it in my hands. Still, it's a good first step and something to put in my author bio (something that's pretty hard to write when you haven't done anything.) I'm also pretty happy that I managed to get into anything before I graduate, even if it's only just before.
So that's a great ending to a long week. Once the story is out on that website, I'll probably repost it here, though without linking to the magazine since I'm (obviously) using my real name.
-S. (February 3rd 2023)