September Catch Up!

Good Lord, it's been ages since I've posted on here! I have lots of reasons why, so I'm gonna tell you all about them, because why not?

• READING

I've been reading a lot, ever since my mum bought me a Kindle for my birthday. It took me a bit to get used to, because I'll admit it, I am a bit of a book snob - I prefer the weight of the book in my hands, the feel of the paper beneath my fingers, the smell of the pages as I turn them. I think it adds to the reading experience, that it grounds the thoughts and emotions a story takes you through in something tangible, real. I'm also a techno-failure; technological stuff tends to fail around me quite a bit, for no reason I can ever work out. HOWEVER, I've kind of fallen in love with my Kindle recently. Partly because it's so easy to get a new book and start reading it immediately (although my bank balance has protested that fact this month), and partly because LGBTQIAP+ fiction is so much easier to get ahold of. Bookstores tend to just keep a small collection in their one tiny little shelf, and I sometimes find Amazon hard to navigate to get to the stuff I want. But all these little Recommendations For You and links to Amazon Kindle buttons on Goodreads makes it a lot easier for me to find the type of stuff I'd like to read on my little Kindle. And over the past couple of weeks, I've read about 30 M/M fiction books! And it's been awesome.

• LECTURING

I'm going back to lecturing next week! It's been two years since I've done it, as my overseeing professor went on a sabbatical to write her next book, but now she's back, which means I am too! I'm so nervous, but also really excited, because I get to sit around and talk about my favourite things for 12 weeks, and watch my students have their minds blown as we go through the course material. What do you MEAN Supernatural is a Christ Narrative? Listen and learn, little grasshopper. So yeah, for the next 3 months, I'm going to be chatting about Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, and a load of other contemporary entertainment and their connection to Christianity. I can't wait to have our first little discussion about my own Atheism (it always comes up, and they're always so surprised, bless them).

• BOOKCLUB

gracerene and I have just started up a very low key, hopefully very fun, online bookclub! I hope y'all will want to come and join in; we're starting in October, and we're gonna read a book a month, and then all get together to talk about it! Come and talk about books with us!

• WRITING

Unfortunately, I've kind of... stalled on my Erised fic. My main problem is that I'm not sure where it's leading, and while I'm used to writing that way, it usually helps if I have some idea, but this time there's nothing except for a few scenes I can see in my head. It's frustrating, so I tried to turn my hand to the few Owl Post gifts I've signed up for, and they're not working for me either. And then of course there's my original fiction, where I know how I want that to play out, but for some reason the words just won't come. I'm hoping that if I just leave it for a few days, I can get my head into the space of teaching again and then the words will just come to me whenever I have a break from that - it's worked in the past, so maybe I'll get lucky again? My recent bout of insomnia hasn't been helping either - it's been 10 days since I've had a decent night's sleep, and I'm about to lose my mind I'm so frustrated. Oh, well, can't be helped I guess!

So yeah, that's me. What have y'all been up to recently?