Study, Job-hunting, Rain and Caffeine [Shiv]

So…

In approximately 24 hours the M.Litt in Publishing Studies class of ’09 will be walking out of our exam. It’s a strange thought. When sitting the final exams of my undergraduate degree I remember thinking; you’ll never have to do this again. I guess the lesson is never say never.

I’m about halfway through Inside Book Publishing and haven’t even looked at my lecture notes (some of which are still haphazardly strewn on the floor of my room from when I ‘cleared’ the desk last week). I’m on my third cup of tea this morning and have run out of milk. But it’s raining far too heavily for me to leave the house to get some. There’s something poetic about the slight bitterness of black tea and my slight bitterness about the process of job hunting.

As I’m sure most of the class are, I’m writing cover letters and emails to beat the band. With few responses. I was lucky enough to get an interview with Intellect, journal publisher in Bristol. A 12 hour round trip and even though they seemed to like me, I didn’t get the job. Now I’m facing a similar situation trying to get to Oxford for an interview with Taylor and Francis. I’m honoured to get an interview (that sounds a bit sycophantic I know but they’re huge and probably have tonnes of uber-qualified candidates) but I’m apprehensive about making that trip, going through pre-interview and mid-interview nerves, either feeling devastated or getting my hopes up only to have them quashed again. And getting back up to Scotland will be a nightmare the day before our end of year party and results.

I really ought to stop whinging and get back to work. I guess the mild bitterness about job-hunting is bleeding through and becoming exam apathy. Then again, I’m just out of practice at procrastinating.

I’m looking forward to being finished on this course, though I’m going to miss my classmates. Entering the real world and getting a proper publishing job is going to be exciting and scary and wonderful. Just going to have to face the rain as well as the studying.

whither my attention span? [Laina]

I’ve been thinking. A lot.  And that’s all well and good on a rainy day when I can afford to procrastinate just a little bit, but when there’s Twitter and RSS feeds and email and Facebook and blogging, where do you draw the line? There’s too much to know!

This morning, I read this post which I think I came by via @timoreilly on Twitter. It’s all about how much cultural stuff there is now, and how we can never get through it all and perhaps don’t consume things with the same excitement and relish that we used to when we were younger. I have a stack of books that remain untouched and swathes of songs I’ve never listened to on my laptop – is it just greed or obsession with novelty that I’ve got so much stuff and, seemingly, so little time to enjoy it? I can blame uni, for now, for my lack of fiction reading. Laughably, the need to concentrate on using the right words for assignments keeps me from listening to music as much as I used to. But how much am I really concentrating anyway? I have nine tabs open in Firefox, four columns in TweetDeck and 859 miscellaneous unread things in my RSS reader. There’s just more stuff being produced than any of us could possibly consume and enjoy. John Boyne’s monthly reading stack positively baffles me.

Maybe most of us come with this built in urge to hop about from one thing to another, or at least those of us who spend a certain amount of time online reading other people’s words and putting our own out. Does it mean we’re just better multi-taskers? It’s not like it affects our work ethic; when there are things to do, they get done, and for the most part the flitting about is to a purpose. Ok, failblog isn’t the pinnacle of my education in publishing, but it’s a break from the few dozen newsfeeds I follow every day, and that’s alright too.

This post is reassuring. It says I’m doing it right, right? Selling your soul to the internet is the way forward.