At The End Of The Summer

This summer has been a strange one. Wonderful, yes, but also stressful, ponderous, enlightening, confounding, and altogether that weird state between too long and too short that comes with having a lot of things bound up in it.

I'm staring down the barrel of my final year of undergraduate study, and I've been thinking a lot about that. A lot of those thoughts, much to my chagrin, have been the sort of things you wouldn't find out of place on a wishy-washy Pinterest "motivational" pinboard: I'm not the same person that I was nine months ago, would my younger self be proud of me, where do I go from here and how should I look back on all I've done before?

Unsuprisingly, I didn't much like those sorts of thoughts. That's not the sort of way I want to think about my life. Luckily, out of the wishy-washy came some exciting new developments.

Firstly, that which is most blisteringly obvious, I gave the blog a makeover. A fresh look for a fresh start. Let me know what you think, dear readers.

I've also taken down my YouTube channel. From the beginning, I realised I wasn't coming across the way I wanted to in front of the camera, and simply wasn't finding the experience enjoyable or worthwhile enough to want to continue.

However, I do have a new channel in the works - one where I will have imminently more to say, and be far more comfortable with my method of saying it. Watch this space.

I also (finally!) got around to creating a Goodreads Profile. Here, you'll find lots of reviews, ratings, and assorted demented ramblings that aren't presentable for blog-dom. You can find a second link up in the "All About The Author" tab.

Most importantly of all, however, are the intangible changes - those which will affect the future of this blog as we know it. I have hit something of a burnout these past few months, fuelled largely in part thanks to the aforementioned existential angst. But fear not! For the Leaning Tower of Plot will rise (a little, can't go mucking up the angle and costing me an excellent internet handle) and forge onward into a bold new future!

A bold new future full of what, you ask? Well ... more. More book talk, more critical commentary, more of what this blog was made for: life, writing, and everything in between.

Hold onto your hats, folks. It's going to get good.

~ Charley R

Lessons I Learned From Job Hunting

Thanks to a variety of circumstances - notably an international upbringing, a boarding school education and a crippling fear of rejection - I have never had a job. Well, that's a lie, technically I have been 'employed' across a variety of self-imposed and volunteering-based positions, but I have never had that staple of the standard youth, a "summer job". You know what I mean - those low-paid, soul-crushing, real-world experiences that people make funny videos about on YouTube.

This summer, however, saw a change in said circumstances; I had before me a long holiday, with no long periods of absence, in the UK, and myself now able to drive and thusly travel further than half an hour from my front doorstep in search of work.

As you may have judged by my absence from this blog, it turns out job hunting is a very time-consuming experience. But also a strangely enlightening one. Allow me to explain.

There's a lot that a thousand careers fairs, online surveys and helpful websites can't teach you about job hunting. They can't teach you, for example, how to react when your would-be-employer's first question is why you - a university undergrad with high grades, a magnificent academic track record and absolutely no hours on a checkout in Tesco - are applying for a minimum wage, long-hours job in a café at a harbourside train station. They can't teach you how to judge the appropriate waiting period when the person who emailled you enthusiastically asking for an interview yesterday is twenty minutes late to the Skype call and you're wondering if you should get back and put in another application somewhere else before their deadline passes.

Job hunting in practice is a very different barrel of eels to job hunting in theory - and it can be twice as slippery.

I've been trying (unsuccessfully) to land a paying job for about two months now, and I keep running into a conundrum. Well, perhaps not a conundrum, more of a disconnect. How can I be, in theory, so educated and eloquent and have a thousand tips and tricks manuals practically glued to the forefront of my brain ... and yet I can't even get a job serving people pizza, or washing up coffee cups?

Like everything else in life, I've come to the conclusion that it's a matter of practice. I used to think that job hunting was a one-shot thing - something to be done in one fell swoop before someone picked you up and you wandered off to advance your career and / or scrape together enough cash to afford that trip to Glastonbury with your friends in two weeks. Now, I think it's much like anything else in life - you have to learn how to do it properly.

As I said before, theory cannot prepare you for the thousand little human idiosyncracies that can come to life during a job interview. Nor can it teach you how to do or be everything someone wants that they will hire you on the spot. Perhaps it can't even teach you how you can be looked over for a job for being "overqualified" - although if anyone ever manages to explain that to me in a logical way, I think I'll actually eat my socks.

Practice makes perfect, I say, so I need to adjust my strategy - and stop falling into the pit of existential sadness each time an application goes unanswered in the void. I just need to keep going, keep trying, learn a little more each time, and maybe one day it will all fall into my lap and I'll have a nice little bread and butter job to keep me ticking over while I grapple with that potential masterpiece of a novel that will either pay all my bils for the next twenty years or see me sent to hospital with improperly used commas embedded in my eyes.

Job hunting is weird, and scary, and far too grown up for my liking. But I've barely got started, and I've still got a lot to learn and a long way to go.

... And yes, I was perfectly serious about the socks.

~ Charley R

Is George R. R. Martin The Slowest Author Ever?

Every reader knows the misery that comes of waiting for your favourite author to finish the next book in the series that has pretty much taken over your life.  Fans of the fantasy genre know it better than most – out of all mainstream fiction, high fantasy easily clocks up the greatest average waiting time between instalments.

Of course, the logical parts of our brains understand this; writing, editing, proofreading, marketing, revisions, settling copyrights and sorting out how many different dust jackets you're going to give the hardback take a lot of time. Sadly, that logical part is too often over-ruled by the primordial screeching monkey-child part that has been left dangling over a heart-rending precipice to match the one your favourite character was just flung off.

And no, that is not a spoiler for Game of Thrones. Even I'm not that mean.

Ah, Game of Thrones. Or, in its paper-bound incarnation, A Song of Ice and Fire. George R.R. Martin's sprawling fantasy saga is infamous for the long waits between the publication of each book. They're so long, in fact, that the next season of the TV adaptation has already caught up to and, in many ways, overtaken the books. You can tell how much stress this puts on the loyal book fans - once the formidable Night's Watch, guarding the flowering realm of the show-watchers from spoilers, now suddenly under threat from the very folk they sought to protect. Or keep in the dark so that we could laugh and feast upon their anguished, unsuspecting tears, depending how you look at it.

Our whinging is not for nothing; even by the standards of the genre, Mr Martin's writing speed is glacial. To put things in perspective: the most recently published of the Song of Ice and Fire Saga, A Dance with Dragons, came out in 2011. Its predecessor, A Feast For Crows, came out six years before.

How can you justify a waiting time like that? If it were anyone else, Mr Martin's publisher would have had them walking the plank after half that time. Luckily, the worldwide popularity of the books allows 'Evil Santa' (as he is affectionately known) a lot of leeway. Enough that he can begin a series before most of its current fans were even born, and still be talking about sequels as many of them begin having progeny of hteir own.

That said, he isn't alone in his ivory tower of agonisingly slow creative processes. The two published instalments of Patrick Rothfuss' similarly popular Kingkiller Chronicles  came out in 2007 and 2011 – and the non-appearance of the proposed trilogy's conclusion means the wait between book two and three may match that of Mr Martin's recent opuses.

However, popularity is no excuse for slow publication. The longest wait between J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books came between 2000 and 2003, when The Order of the Phoenix took two years more than Ms Rowling's usual yearly intervals. Jim Butcher's Dresden Files have been vaulting off the shelves yearly, with some even appearing within months of each other.

But, I hear you cry, but that's urban fantasy – that can't be comparable to the sheer effort of creating and sustaining the continuity of an entire fictional world!

To that, I ask you to listen. Listen to Robert Jordan cackling in his grave.

The Wheel of Time saga is legendary as a feat of dedication within the fantasy genre and without; twelve books published over twenty-two years, by two different authors (Brandon Sanderson took up the mantle after Jordan passed away in 2007). And yet, despite every circumstance thrown at the series, including – in case you didn't notice – the death of the author . . . there was never more than a three year gap between the books.

So, is George R.R. Martin the slowest moving entity since your grandmother's home-made custard? Are we justified in our rage at being made to wait half a decade just to find out if our favourites live to play the game another day?

I think not. Song of Ice and Fire fans, I have a proposition for you. Go and find the nearest Tolkien fan. And give them a great big hug.

The Lord of the Rings films appeared one after another between 2000 and 2003. The novels appeared between 1954 and 1955.

But how many years of campaigning, bargaining, editing, lawmongering and nail-biting did it take for legions of loyal Tolkienists to see their beloved Professor's rendition of the iconic Beowulf myth?

90 years.

Winter Is Coming . . . a whole lot faster than that.