Going to Liverpool!, or Neo-Victorian Cultures: The Victorians Today

Hello, sad, neglected blog.  Today I have a revivifying post full of good news.

I found out a few days ago that I'll be giving a conference paper at the Neo-Victorian Culture: The Victorians Today conference running from 24-26 July at Liverpool John Moores University.  This is exciting because 1) I've never been to Liverpool and 2) I'll get to talk all about Alison Croggon's novel Black Spring, Wuthering Heights, adaptation, fantasy, and feminism!

I reviewed Black Spring here - well worth a read for Bronte fans and fantasy lovers.

In the draft programme, I see I've been placed on a panel called "Fantasizing the Victorians"; one of the other panelists is going to be talking about Terry Pratchett's Discworld.  Clearly this is going to be a great experience.

In other news, I had a really productive Hilary Term after a de-motivated and quite stressful Michaelmas and I think I'll write about some of the strategies I used that I found helpful in the next bit.  Now that the vacation has hit, I'm struggling to get some of my research and writerly get-up-and-go back, but I hope to blog soon on academic matters.  (PS - I also decided to completely restructure my thesis last term - very exciting!)

And in other, other news, Tim and I are heading off to France for a bit over a week in April.  I'm deep in the midst of booking places to stay and figuring out transport, but we're hoping to stay in Paris, Amboise (in the Loire Valley), and Avignon.

The New Regime

Yesterday was my first official day of unemployment.  I've come up with a plan for this grey zone between the end of full-time work and the beginning of full-time study.  It goes something like this:

Everyday until we leave for Britain (hopefully around September 9th or 10th, but all this is up in the air until we have our visas in our hot little hands), I will aim to do the following:

•  Be functional by 8:00 am everyday (which shouldn't be too hard, since that's when Tim leaves for work)
• Revise my novel for at least 1 hour or approximately 1000 words
• Spend at least 1 hour working on my current academic paper (undertaken sort of for fun but with the view that I should be attempting to publish something at this point in my academic life - it's on Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White and discusses the themes of female madness and emasculating revenge, with reference to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre - fun!)
• Spend 15-30 minutes working on both French and Latin
• Read for fun (at least 1 hour per day)

All these items add up to approximately four hours per day.  The rest will inevitably be spent packing in the days ahead.  I'm very hopeful I can complete the current draft of my novel in this time, so I can survey this new and (I think) much better version.  I'm also hopeful I can make good headway on the paper, as I suspect I won't have much time for it once I start school and I actually think it might be rather good.

Books.  I'm currently in the midst of reading three books.  I started on Flaubert's Madame Bovary because I've owned a copy for years and felt it was time and feel I really ought to read more foreign literature.

But then a friend recommended Catherynne M. Valente's imaginative and hilarious The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, so I started on that and am maybe a third of the way through and enjoying myself greatly.

But then, my dad loaned me Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island, which charts the author's valedictory tour of Britain and which is also hilarious.  I've been gobbling it up, using it as mental preparation for our move to fine Britannia.  Also, I'm very pleased that Bryson and I share a horror of ugly buildings, especially modern monstrousities in the midst of lovely, old architecture (brutalist architecture on the U of S campus, I am looking at you).  However, I think I will be so overawed by the nice British buildings that I won't care quite so much about the dodgy ones.