Love of Lights

I think tonight finally calls for a long-awaited introspective post about a certain gargantuan change that has occurred in my life. The move to university has been a curious one that has marked a few interesting things about myself to myself -- some typical and some atypical. Firstly I'll begin with the move and freshers week. Freshers week happens twice as fast as any other week in your life -- but not "fast" in so typical a sense: it intensifies time; it feels as though 7 days were actually filled with 70 days worth of experience. It's excruciating and embarrassing to say, but I fell in love in those 7 days, with a girl who goes by the name of Annie. She deserves a post in her own right, so I shan't insult her with a few non-committal lines here. Just know that I feel intrinsically attached to her -- had you let us meet in any possible world or at any possible time, were I the same person and she the same person, I'd have felt this same attachment. It...

Before we get to the post proper, I must remind myself to make a post soon about the fact that I succeeded in getting into the university I wanted most, and that I'm moving there in 3 days! Okay, here is the post proper (copied and pasted from tumblr because I wrote it there first): september 4, 2012 - july 21, 2020 I’ve just struck a deal with my friend—or rather a bet, or a goal, because there’s no exchange coming out of it—in which we agree that we will have each sold at least 1 novel by the age of 26. This isn’t a deal concerning publishing — you don’t need to be published to sell 1 novel (we’re talking about just  one  here, not as in multiple copies of one story — just one novel); this is more an incentive to have completed something, to have completed it to a standard where we’d be content with somebody reading it from front to back. 26 for both of us is 8 years away which is actually plenty of time. 26 in my head seems a lot sooner than it really is, but it...