Two months!

It's two months until the start of term, and things are moving along sporadically. I've been allocated a place in halls, and though I'm wavering between accepting and declining that offer, it is very nice to know that I most certainly have a place to live in September. On the finance side of things, the US Government has decided to change the way they do stuff with student loans, which is delaying my funding and starting to slightly worry me.

I'm told we (those of us on the course) should be receiving reading lists by email soon, which will be good to hear. When I went to Brookes for my interview, Beverley Tarquini mentioned two books to me, both of which I'm sure will be on the syllabus. The first, Inside Book Publishing, I purchased a couple months ago. I've been reading a few pages here and there and I think I'm on chapter 5 or 6 now. I have never been this interested in a textbook before. Everything I've read so far has been fascinating, which, frankly, is somewhat of a relief as it means I am doing the right course after all. The second recommendation was Alison Baverstock's book on marketing, and now that I'm looking for it I realize she actually has several, but I think it was How to Market Books: The Essential Guide to Maximizing Profit and Exploiting All Channels to Market 4th edition. Alison Baverstock is actually one of the reasons I had a difficult time deciding if I was going to do my MA at Kingston University (where I did my BA) or anywhere else. You see, programmes everywhere but Kingston seem to use Baverstock's book when they cover marketing. When Kingston covers marketing, they use Alison Baverstock the person.

Any way, I digress. I still need to get How to Market Books: The Essential Guide to Maximizing Profit and Exploiting All Channels to Market 4th edition, but I'm holding off on that until I know it's that one and not Marketing Your Book: An Author's Guide: How to target agents, publishers and readers (Writing Handbooks) or Are Books Different?: Marketing in the Book Trade.

In the meantime, I should be done with editing hopefully tonight, but tomorrow at the latest. That's a huge relief as it has been taking up the majority of my limited free time, which has been especially frustrating as I've been dying to write for the past month and just haven't had the time. So I'm looking forward to being able to write again, and to being able to read for fun again. Between January 1st and the end of June I read about 30 books, but this month I have read a big fat zero due to time constraints and impatience brought on by the inability to write.

I've been so busy with work and editing that it honestly seems like grad school is going to be (comparitively) relaxing. Of course, I'm saying that on the slowest day I've had at work in three months, a day so slow I've had ample time to write this entry.