Working on material for the ECA for A363 and MA

I know no-one ever takes advice but if I had one piece for students it would be, think ahead, don't just react to the course as it goes along. Treat assignments as if they were commissions. Find out as soon as you can what's involved and start thinking, planning, researching. So when the assignment comes around and you go blank, at least you made some notes when your brain was halfway normal. A363 has an ECA, so does the MA in the form of the dissertation. I know I will have the option of writing a substantial piece of fiction or a critical essay for the MA, I know I will take the fiction option. I know in advance I will take the beginning of a novel option for A363 too. So, even this far back in the process I am looking at what I can start writing for these important assignments. Unlike A215, when building my confidence was important, A363 just needs a good pass for my sanity, I can live without the 90+ marks I was going for before. I just want to do well on the MA, I don't need a distinction. I mostly want to create a good advanced draft of a novel.I've decided to look in detail at the YA novel I started, work on that.

I'm feeling strangely homeless as we wait to hear if we've passed our checks, if we can go to Winchester and rent a house there. The process has been so difficult. I'm wondering what it will be like to set up a separate home, to walk into a university full of people the same age as my children, and face a cliff face of learning how to write, how to read differently. I've asked my daughter to stay a couple of extra days, to help me pack the right things to make the house good for the boys, for me.

Meanwhile, the writing has stalled, in the practical difficulties. So, today, I get back on with writing new stuff. I've set myself the task of writing some new words, even a first draft of a short story or poem, that's actually new rather than redrafted old stuff. My magpie rescue is declining gently, and I have to make the decision to put him down, soon. All part of moving to Winchester, I suppose. I am going back to basics, and writing a freewrite about the bird.

Birdbaths and blogs

I started the day with a bird bath. The magpie we rescued is refusing all suggestions that he might like to splash in the dog bowl full of clean, fresh water provided. It's a first for me, most birds love to bath especially if they can cover a wide area with splashes and preferably poo as well. I got a plant sprayer and started squirting him gently on the worst bits, below the tummy, where he tends to sit in poo. I'm trying to teach him to perch - which he is doing at the moment just to show off. 'I can perch if I want to,' he is saying, 'but I prefer to sit in a puddle of poo.' All corvids are bloody minded. Magpies have a reputation of being the worst of the bunch. And he hasn't got a name yet because I am still not sure he isn't on a one-way journey to the vet.

I'm gently pottering through A363 chapter 3, working towards the TMA which I hope will be a short story (there's bound to be a short story at some point! Surely!)

I started with activity 3.1, looking for a news story and came up with one on the BBC website. Two people had crashed their car, which burst into flames but two men rescued them by bashing in their sunroof. The exercise made me look at where the sources actually came from - the people concerned didn't write the article, there were only secondary sources available. But the story was written up to be as dramatic and accurate as the reporter could make it - if made exciting to read so his editor would print it.

The next section looked at research - what efforts we have to put into making a piece seem real. Sarah Water's wrote The Night Watch and the research may not make it authentically historically accurate but it feels right for the 2010 audience. In my romance writing era I had to look carefully at language etc. to make a Regency period piece seem a bit Jane Austen like but not too old fashioned. Georgette Heyer's regency novels and full of archaisms, yet have a very thirties and forties energy and post-suffragette lively characters. We're living in a  post-pill, post-sexual revolution world, how can we make a Regency heroine who sits on her sprigged muslin arse and waits for Mr. Right (or Mr. Darcy, for that matter) to ask us to marry us. Even if we then exercise our little power and say no, thus committing social suicide. Heyer got it right, because she did masses of research but I don't think many historical writers do. I was completely convinced of Water's world.

We then looked at Liz Jensen's War Crimes for the Home also set in WW2. Again, the little details make it seem spot on, creating an authentic feel. I have ordered both books, both dragged me in. I chose Lindy-hop from the list of topics to research in activity 3.4 and came up with several ideas for a story, just from the research which was riveting. I can see this is a rich vein of potential ideas for original stories. Just this one idea got me into racial integration in the early 1930's, the cultural message of the GI's during WW2 (also in Jensen's book!) and a wide range of other sources.

I was surprised to find that Stef Penney when she wrote The Tenderness of Wolves had never been to Canada, but good research and a powerful imagination put her there. There's hope for the widely read but thinly travelled me, then!