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It’s A New Month!

Which goes hand-in-hand with today’s post, but in the meantime, this sentences here is to tell you to flip your calendar.

All Packed Up

With the results out and none too disastrous, I took some time to pack up the notes and textbooks yesterday, so my desk looks slightly neater and the shelf is now empty waiting for the new term. Probably should have done that a couple of weeks ago, but I kept having my mind on the results, so I just didn’t dare to touch it for a while, almost as if I would jinx them or the like.

Present

That packing up reminded me to splurge, since my results weren’t too bad. Of course, you know that this sort of thing works either way, and I would have told myself to cheer myself up with some spending if they were bad. I’ve been picking a present. I was thinking of the Planet Earth series on Bluray, though the idea of getting a couple of rare photography books has also surfaced. I think in the end, I’ll go for the combo of the documentary plus Nick Brandt’s On This Earth: Photographs From East Africa [via Amazon]. Someone pointed me to the book yesterday and I have to say that the few low-res shots I’ve seen from it  look spectacular.

Still thinking about it, though, mostly because I reviewed my spending for the past month and it’s clearly a little higher than I would’ve liked.

June!

Yes, apart from all that clearing up and rewarding of myself, the arrival of June will hopefully coincide with other “new beginning” things. I stopped at about 50% for Bukit Merah yesterday, and I have to admit that the last couple of days haven’t been particularly fruitful in terms of writing. All been rather workman-like. So I reckon that this is a good place to take a substantial break before diving in again.

In the meantime, I’ve designated June as submissions month, and seeing as to how I haven’t got too many baskets to put my eggs in (yeah, there goes your daily awkward expression), I figure I’ve got to make them count. At the same time, I really think it’s not healthy to obsess over The River much longer, so it’s really time to take the plunge and hope for the best. I don’t know how to go about this, especially given the perhaps slightly unique local scene, but there’s a certain now-or-never to this, and I’m not going to sit around asking silly questions anymore. Bah, you only live once, right?

Certainly not quite as comfortable as sitting in a chair banging out the words, but there isn’t a way around it. It feels kind of like waiting for a job interview, in fact.

I haven’t got a plan of action yet, but at the very least I’ll be needing to clean up a couple of spots in the submission version, and I’ll also have to go asking for some guidelines from anyone who might even be mildly interested in this. If nothing else, that’s some kind of start, right?

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© 2009 a modest odyssey.