Happy New Year readers! So here we are at the start of a new decade. I will admit that I had that moment on New Year’s Eve where I reminisced on the past 10 years, which for me consisted of ages 14-24. This really was the decade I grew up in; my teenage years and my college education. The same question now lingers on my mind that has had something of a long-term lease since handing in my MA thesis: What now?
Though I have never been a big fan of New Year’s resolutions, this seems more significant as the beginning of a new decade, especially in a time of such personal change for me. So I did what I always do when I am trying to get my head together and organise myself: I made a list. A list of things that I wish to accomplish this year, from applying to PhD programmes to finally getting my drivers license. As I previously stated I will also be continuing my job search in earnest, there is no point in simply giving up just because something is more difficult than you anticipated (see I’m sounding more adult already).
Moving away from all the talk about personal development and goals for the quarter-century year of my existence for a minute and returning to literature. The 1920s have captured my imagination since my undergraduate degree and now it is officially a century since that era of creativity, where names such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and many more published some of their most famous works. 2 years time will mark the centenary of the publication of Ulysses, something for a passionate Joycean scholar like myself to look forward to. So does this mean I intend to move to Paris and set up a salon like Gertrude Stein’s where the great literary and artistic minds of this generation can meet? I can dream can’t I? It does however, strengthen my resolve to continue both my academic and creative writing. I have been attempting to discipline myself back into a daily writing schedule like the one I had while working on my MA thesis: 500 words per day. This has been difficult but if you don’t reach your goal one day it should simply serve as motivation for the following day. I can announce that I have officially begun work on Part 2 of my novel.
On lighter notes I have managed to keep up with the exercise routine I took up shortly after submitting my thesis, to shed some of the extra pounds gained due to the sedentary lifestyle that sitting in a library for hours daily reading and writing affords. Aside from improving fitness, regular exercise has mental health benefits and now it feels less like a chore and something I have just integrated into my daily life. Always keen on sharpening the mind as well as the body I have also started another little literary hobby. I specialise in novels and for the past 2 years most of my university modules focused on that literary form. Thus I haven’t had a lot of time for other forms of writing, particularly poetry. As a Leaving Cert English student I put more effort into the poetry section of the exam than anything else, making large A3 mind maps for each poet I studied (I’ve still got them somewhere), so poetry was obviously a big part of my emerging passion for analyzing works of literature, yet as I progressed through my degree and found that novels were my forte I read less and less verse. I have chosen to rectify this in the past few weeks and have bought some very beautiful poetry collections from old favourites such as Emily Dickinson and W.B. Yeats and Romantics whose works I discovered at college such as Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. I have set myself the task of reading 1 poem every day and making a list of all that I read. Just don’t ask me to write any poetry myself!
So those are my plans for the New Year, I wish you the best of luck in all your endeavours this new decade old sport.
Featured image: Improvised New Year’s banner by the hand of yours truly
The Scholar’s Notebook 
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