New Year

I can't believe that the New Year is almost upon us.

Well, the new university teaching year, at least. It's not as much fun as the real New Year - fewer fireworks - but it's still quite exciting. And terrifying.

Soon the streets of Durham City, shaken from their summer hibernation, will be swarming with students new and old, the former recognisable by their bewildered looks as they wander the twisting streets of the Peninsula in forlorn attempts to locate lecture halls and/or colleges and/or bars. Amidst all this you might see harried lecturers rushing about with faces scarcely less bewildered, forlornly attempting to locate lecture halls and/or offices and/or pubs.

As the kid says at the end of Terminator: viene la tormenta.

On Saturday I drove out to Stanhope, a merry little town in the Pennines, and spent a solitary morning up in the hills. It's late enough in the year that the moors have a touch of autumn about them, but not so late that it feels bleak. The ground was soft to walk on, the heather still warmed by a purple hue. It was good to have some calm before the storm.

Strange to think that four years have passed since I arrived in Durham. It was meant to be only a temporary teaching post. Mind you, that was fine by me at the time. I'd just finished a PhD, which involved living in poverty through my 20s. I think the most extravagant thing I bought during that decade was a bread maker.

Three whole years of employment? Seriously?

To a post-doc, a three-year post is like gold dust. I also figured it would give me a chance to decide if the whole academia lark was really what I wanted to do.

My other career option, if 'option' is even the right word, was writing novels. The one good thing about seriously wanting to be a novelist is that it makes something like medieval history look like a rational career choice. Something to fall back on.

As it turned out, the temporary job became a permanent one, and the left-field plan to get a book on the shelves of Waterstones also worked out. Both happened last year, within three months of each other. It was a year of big changes, good and bad.

Of course, this means that I now I basically have two full-time jobs. This is why the blog got so quiet over the summer, as I buried my head in teaching prep and redrafting the second novel. Luckily there was a lot of crossover between the two.

I don't want to say too much about the second novel before it hits the shelves next year, but it's epic. Truly epic. For all the hard work it's been, I really, really love how it's shaping up, and I can't wait for it to get out into the world.

Ruins of the imperial palace, on the Palatine Hill in Rome

In the meantime, there's the Durham Book Festival coming up next month, which is going to be awesome. On October 12 I'm on a panel with the classicist Peter Jones, author of Veni, Vidi, Vici - should be fun!