Taking The Leap

Something very big and very scary happened to me this week.

After months of groaning, grumbling, chasing up data I never knew I had, and agonising over whether this sentence would be better suited to a comma or a semicolon, I finally pressed the big red button and sent my university application out into the big wide world. As I type this, I know it is out there, shooting through cyberspace, on its way to the inbox of university admissions officers and professors.

Within the next few days, I'll be able to start tracking my progress. I'll possibly be called for interview. They'll contact me for marked essays for them to examine.

They might even set out the grades I need for a place.

I don't know whether to be excited, or scared. And to be honest, I don't think my brain does either.

I'm not a person who likes to leap before they've sussed out the extremities of the jump they're about to make, but here I didn't really have a choice - no matter how many hours I spend hunting out facts on a university's website, I'll never be able to find some magical page that tells me whether or not I'm certain of a place.

Meanwhile, after a few months' panic in our respective lives, Miriam Joy and I are back to work on St Mallory's Forever! and working towards the closing stages of our first draft. After that it'll be back to the drawing board for extensive editing and redrafting. Then will come the kerfuffle of sending it off to Mark and Saffi for more peering and poking, and then . . . who knows.

They're both big jumps. Very, very big jumps, with no visible safety net and plenty of room for disaster.

But, as they say, the person who never took a risk never got anywhere. Taking the advice of Lady Macbeth (which is something I would not much advise in any but the most extreme circumstances) I shall screw my courage to its sticking place, walk to the edge and set my sights on the other side.

I'll even put on my War Face. That'll help.

~ Charley R