Begin at the beginning

I am so out of the habit of writing to my blog that I no longer write even when I have things to say.

For the last four weeks I have been getting back into the swing of student life. I have classes from 9 to 12, Monday to Friday. We study a wide range of topics related to the publishing industry; copy editing methods, grammar, design, manuscript assessment, inDesign usage, . . . the list goes on. In the afternoon we can stay in the classroom and do our assignments.

The Cuba Mall campus I am studying at opened for the first time on the day that my course started. We were the only class there. When we started, we had tables and chairs in our classroom and nothing else. There were a couple other classrooms like ours, and the other half of the floor was boarded off because it was not finished. Two weeks later computers were installed in our classroom. An assignment we had to do was postponed because of the lack of computers. The other day we finally got a projector and screen, although we still only have a portable whiteboard, not one on a wall. The other half of the campus is still not finished. The buskers outside on the street drive us crazy. But despite all those problems, it is a nice campus to study at: it is light and airy in the classrooms; it is clean and new; the computers are good with big screens; and the location is good - we can walk out the door of the building straight into Cuba Mall, a busy and unique area of Wellington with many cafes and eateries, bars and small shops.

There are seventeen people on the course including myself. Everyone gets along well because we are all have so much in common, which is a good thing because of the amount of time we will be spending together this year. Every day we have a half hour morning tea together in the small cafeteria. We drink tea or coffee and have a good ol' chin-wag before getting back to class for another hour.

On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday this last week we had no classes because it was Writers and Readers Week, a part of the International Festival of the Arts which is happening this month in Wellington. We each got three free tickets through our course. On Wednesday I went to a talk called The Big Questions. It was supposed to be a talk about popular scientific publishing. Rather than talk about the publishing of science, the talkers talked more about the scentific issues that they had covered in their respective books. Having studied science at university, little of it was new to me, but still it was an interesting talk to listen to. On Thursday I went to listen to the author Ursula Dubosarsky talk about her books. I had not heard of her before. She is an Australian author of children's novels. I found her talk to be so fascinating that I went out yesterday and bought one of her books, The Red Shoe, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. Afterwards, I bought a ticket to a talk called Art and Text which was about blending the written and visual media. Dissappointingly, the speakers seemed more interested in using lots of big words to show how intelligent they think they are than in saying anything actually meaningful to the audience. Stupid academic posturing: I had no bloody idea what they were going on about half the time, and I'm not stupid. On Friday I went to listen to NZ writer CK Stead talk. He had many interesting things to say: I found his talk to be rather enjoyable. I will have to go out and buy one of his books too.