2014 Is Pretty Cool

Busy busy busy!

Just over three weeks until I fly out to the USA now. This shitty weather better blow over though because if my flight's grounded I have no idea what happens. I'm not gonna try and hide the fact that this holiday is a personal journey to 'find myself'; since I crashed and burnt in regards to getting into university, the path my life has taken in the last seven years has suddenly been altered significantly. I no longer have an academic goal to achieve and after over a decade of strict regimen and a linear curriculum, I've ultimately landed in the comical situation of having too much choice. Adult life has been thrust upon me much earlier than I expected and the transition was incredibly sharp, cushioned only by the fact that my parents didn't kick me out and asked only for a meagre rent to cover my food costs.

Travelling to America is going to be fantastic; dropping myself head first into a new world for seven months with no real goals or destinations, I'm hoping, will give me ample time to have some sort of revelation as to what I should do with myself when I return to England. All I really know is that I want to work for myself, I've spent enough time in a dead-end job already to know I hate having a boss, so potentially I ought to learn a trade at college or something. I'm keeping my options open, even immigration is a possibility if my girlfriend likes the idea of having me around indefinitely.

I've decided I ought to brush up on my Spanish whilst I'm in America, I really would like to speak it at a conversational level and I remember a little from my school classes, hola, me llamo STM, etc. I might even get the chance to use it since there's such a higher concentration of Spanish speaking people in MO compared to ... Hertfordshire. When I get back to England I might try and learn a little Japanese as well. Something to keep me busy and something that might come in handy seeing as my next trip I'd like to commit to would be in East Asia.

Has anyone ever seriously set out to write a novel? The planning process is more fun than writing the bloody thing, in my opinion. I've got maps everywhere, alternate history timelines, geography, demography, a creole language, politics, economics and god knows what else. Pages and pages of Word documents. A conservative estimate for the amount of time I've spent working on this so far is something in the region of 10 hours and that's before I've even considered writing the first chapter seriously. I've really got a good feeling about this, it's a relatively original plot in the sense that I haven't knowingly bastardised any existing novels to get to where I am with it now. To give a little away, it's a dystopian story set in a country bordering China and the Japanese Empire, cue shenanigans.

Any way, that's something to work on when I'm not seeing sights and touring around. So this is definitely the busiest I've been in a little while. Yay for 2014.