To blog or not to blog

Exams are coming up fast, and I still need a few more months so that I can actually learn what it is I'm meant to know — this does not augur well for exams. Especially when I do silly things like driving to Joy's place to check if my new Threadless hoodies have arrived yet, or doing the daily crossword, or... well... blogging.

A lot's happened in the last couple weeks. Well, actually, not much has happened, but one significant event has happened at least.

I'm now living with Dan.

Sort of. And finally! All my furniture is still at Joy's, and my mail's still all going there, but it just makes more sense to have all my clothes, computer and study in one place while I'm doing exams — and for that place to actually be where I spend my evenings and weekends.

So my stuff is now all here at Dan's, and he's cleared half of the double garage for me to park my car in, and moved half his furniture out of his room to make space for mine, when it gets here.

While clearing my stuff out on Saturday, I found so much random junk that I'd forgotten about or assumed I'd thrown out or used up, it was great — but that's always the way when you move, isn't it? I'm burning to unpack more of my stuff — currently all sitting in boxes in Dan's spare room — but I need to study more than unpack.

I'm extremely worried about my exam tomorrow. I know very little about whatever we're supposed to be writing essays on (the paper's called The History of the World, like that helps). I have to write four essays, and I honestly don't know if there's room in my brain for four topics. I normally like to have a back-up topic or two, but there's simply no room in my brain for more — the information would fall out.

On a brighter (but no less stressful) note, we had our NaNoWriMo kick-off on Saturday. There were seven people there — a vast improvement on last year's total of three. This year we even had an eleven-year-old come along — participating in the Young Writers programme, which is great. Another participant turned out to be a Massey student, who's in one of my papers during summer semester.

Angela was and is a veritable godsend. She even brought along a guy from work that she'd helped talk into it, and was great with talking to the quieter participants and keeping the conversation going. She even left work an hour early so she could be there. By the end of our meet-up, she was even thinking of writing her own short story as well — she wasn't originally intending to participate in NaNoWriMo, but if you're going to help out with organising it, it makes so much more sense to be writing as well. So yay for Ang.

And my grandfather's eightieth birthday is this weekend, so after my exam on Saturday morning I have to journey up to Taranaki (hopefully with Dan) and do the family thing for the weekend before sitting my last two exams! Madness, I tell you.

So when the lovely Dee from NZ Book Month emailed me to tell me she's put an article on NaNoWriMo on the NZ Book Month site, and to ask me whether I'd be interested in blogging for them during November, clearly it would have been madness to say yes.

I doubt anyone will be surprised to hear that I happily said "Yes", and will shortly be tearing my hair out over yet another time commitment. I can't even keep this blog up, let alone another one!

Ah, life's fun. I need to go study for my exam now. But isn't it cool? :-)

Update: NZ Book Month blog