Currently...

So, what am I up to this week?

Well perhaps the most exciting this that cropped up this week was a visitor in our garden. I don't even know which heading to put this under so I'm just going to throw it right in here at the beginning.

Yesterday morning I opened the door and noticed something strange on my doorstep, kind of like a little stone, but squishier. For a minute I thought perhaps we'd had a pheasant in the garden or something, until I turned the corner round the back of our house and came face to face with this:

Yup. That's a chicken.

Tara completely ignored it so I did wonder if perhaps I was having some sort of early morning hallucination. But, nope, definitely a chicken.

It hung out in the garden all day yesterday and all night, finally vanishing at some point today. But I really enjoyed having a little visitor for the day, especially with that cute wonky beak.

Other than chicken-watching, Currently I'm...

Reading
Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson. It's a free book on my Kindle and it's one I've had for ages. Right now I'm working through some of the books that I downloaded back when I first got my Kindle about four years ago. This is one of them. I've enjoyed the other Robert Louis Stevenson books I've read in the past so this was an easy choice. It's a collection of essays and reminiscences. Different to what I'd normally read, but I'm liking it.

Working On
My Behind the Scenes story again. I've spent the last few weeks thinking about it and at the weekend I dug it out again. I typed up the whole first chapter/prologue and realised that it's awful, but also that there's a subtler theme going on in the story than I first realised. All of my main characters are hiding something about themselves or not being true to who they really are; so it's not just 'behind the scenes' on a film set, but it's 'behind the scenes' of the people themselves.

I'm not sure if analysing your own stories is a side effect of studying English Literature, but I'm quite impressed at my seventeen-year-old subconscious for squirreling that away in the story. I'm quite excited to carry on working on it to see what else I can uncover.

Wondering
What to put my £33 worth of vouchers that I won last week towards. I had a look through the list of shops I can spend them on and considered using them for Christmas gifts, until I found out I can spend them in Waterstones and WH Smith. And I'm off the island next week. And I'm considering treating myself to something that I wouldn't ordinarily buy myself. I just don't actually know what that is yet.

What've you been up to this week?