Looking through my chest of drawers earlier I found some old books bound in cracked leather under a pile of dusty blankets. The pages flaked in my hands when I touched them, but as I read the blotty handwriting I felt a sense of a story coming together. They appear to be the diaries of a farmer by the name of James, and as a service to him I thought I’d post what I’ve found. Some chunks seem to be missing, but what’s here is, I think, genuinely fascinating. I hope you enjoy reading it.

Chapter One: The Beginning

I moved into Forget-Me-Not Valley a few years ago to take up the farm my father left me after his death. Those first few years were hard – I had to learn a new trade in a place that was completely foreign to me. I didn’t know anybody, and the pace of life seemed so different to what I was used to.

For the first year I tried to focus my efforts on making money from the farm. Wow, I remember what it was like back then; a run-down, ramshackle sort of place with a cow and a tiny house. It took a lot of effort to turn it around, but within a few months my cow was happier and I’d successfully grown my own crops for the first time. Whoever said that homegrown crops taste better should have tasted mine back then… I guess every rule has its exception!

That year went so fast, and by the end of those first four seasons I’d begun raising chickens, sheep, had a pond installed and even got engaged to my dear Muffy. Quite an eventful year!

Click here for the second diary

Here are some websites that I find interesting, enjoyable and helpful in my life. Give them a click and see if you agree.

Phil Newton.net
PhilNewton.net is dedicated to helping you get the most out of your life through various methods. Articles are regularly published on a variety of subjects, from time management to beating procrastination.

PhotoRouge
PhotoRouge is the photography website of Hannah Marshall where you can find inspiring images of breathtaking insight and beauty.

Sodaware.net
Sodaware is a UK-based software business formed in 2006 run by my brother, and includes a blog and articles to help other software developers.

The Shots Still Ringing
A fantastic fansite dedicated to the increasingly world-conquering band Embrace.

The Mean Machines Archive
A massive shrine to the video game magazine Mean Machines, including loads of interviews with old staff members – quite the feat!

As you’ll have realised if you’re reading this, www.prosody.co.uk has undergone a quite serious overhaul. Here’s the heart of what’s new:

• My blog is now powered by WordPress instead of Pivot. Pivot was great for me and I really do recommend it, but with moving servers I wanted to give WordPress a go. I may even end up switching back, you never know.
• New look for the site as a whole, mostly linked to the WordPress thing. Phil’s awesome design is gone and I’ll probably be designing the look of the site myself.
• A more integrated hub for all things to do with me. Previously parts of me have been flung to the four Internet winds, but they’re now all here – music, writings, art, the lot.

I’ve now also got up lots more content that I’ve been promising for ages, particularly the fabled Harvest Moon diaries, and in the coming months I’ll also be adding more music, art, writing and longer articles on topics as diverse as motivation and the beauty of the turns-based battle system in RPGs.

If you haven’t visited Prosody.co.uk before, welcome, and thanks for coming! You can find out who I am by looking in the “About” section at the top there, and from then on my site is your site. Have a look around, read some articles, leave a comment here or there telling me what you thought about it.

Note to everyone – the address of this site is now just www.prosody.co.uk. I’ve dropped the /blog bit, so if you could just link to the main page that would be great.

I hope you come back soon!

That’s all I can say in my current state. I did it.

I’m a big kid. I love the idea of pretend and make-believe and dreams. Every day I wish I were something else; most of the time it’s a stupid thing like a river or a tree or a duck, but there’s an underlying frustration that I cannot ever experience these things.

I won’t ever know what it’s like to fly on my own strength. I’ll never be able to sing and tweet my hours away on the wall like the blackbird that so frequently visits our garden.

Something seems unfair about this. I’m sure a real grown-up wouldn’t agree, that it’s just the way life is, but to my immature and frustrated brain I can’t seem to understand just why dreams don’t come true. There is so much more I would want to do if I could. As full of potential and talent as I’m sure I am, I can only ever truly experience the tiniest sliver of life.

Hannah says that if all wishes came true, we’d have nothing left to wish for. I don’t know how true that is, but if everyone could have what they wanted, they wouldn’t want anything else. Whether that’s a good thing or not isn’t for me to say really. I just find it annoying that I have dreams I can’t fulfill. Seems unfair.

I’d welcome your comments on this one.

There’s a fluttering just beneath my sternum, as though someone is kicking ripples in there. It’s like a gale ripping along a piece of taut fabric.

I push my fingers against it to hold it in, and I feel it push back. It feels like a rodent’s head burrowing out from my lungs.

It’s a very peculiar feeling.

By some strange twist I found myself reading an article about exactly what I’ve been thinking about recently – quitting the day job and devoting myself entirely to the creative life. Not having enough time to do both really gets to me, because I usually have loads of time to do enjoyable creative things (this is going to be dealt with in another post, “Hard Lessons to Learn”), but not recently.

The gist of the article is that you have to have the balance between job and hobbies. I want to disagree and say that it’s possible to turn a hobby into a job, and that a great many people have done it, continue to do it and be successful with it. Sure, it might not be the solution for everyone, but there are people that manage it, so why not me?

I think this article’s real “meaning” (inasmuch as it is) is that there is a need for balance in life; you can’t have all sex and no cash, more’s the pity. The thing is, and this is probably my naivete coming through, I’d much rather have a life with the balance on the sex, and not the cash. Working’s important, I know that, but happiness, achieving personal goals and being satisfied with yourself is infinitely more important to me.

Clearly I still retain idealist tendencies, and my optimism is still here despite everything, which is very encouraging. As much as it seems a teenage dream to design and create video games for a living, for example, a great many people do it and will continue to do so for years to come. Maybe I will be one of them.

Despite my recent claims to the contrary, I am still a perfectionist; I want to do the brilliant things I know I’m capable of, and I want to do them all the time or I feel like I’m just wasting time. Unfortunately this just isn’t possible, but how much is acceptable?

That all depends on how you calibrate your feelings, I suppose. My standards have always been set high because I expect great things and I don’t want to let myself down. Lowering those expectations resulted in substandard work which actually made me feel worse – my attempts to increase happiness through decreasing the time spent working clearly didn’t go well. Now I’m not sure the simplistic Play > Work = Happiness equation is even close to being true.

Now onto the topic of this post, “surviving vs. succeeding”. Currently I feel I am definitely in the former category – I struggle through each day, barely in one piece by the end of it, and then pick myself up again the next day to repeat the cycle. I’m not doing well and that makes me feel worse than anything, really; I do genuinely want to succeed at everything I do, even teaching which (at the moment) I absolutely detest. “Just surviving” isn’t an option for me – if I can’t do brilliant things I’d rather not do it at all. I know this is unhealthy, but I tend to flip from one extreme to the other and I think that’s why I’m struggling to find the midpoint between churning out rubbish and creating wonderful things.

The next question is this: How do I move from surviving to succeeding? I’m considering using Steve Pavlina’s “From a 7 to a 10” technique to help me visualise what a 10/10 lesson would look like, and how I can best achieve it. Time management is another issue I really need to get on top of – currently I have no time for hobbies because I’m working so long, but partly that is due to working inefficiently. How can I work more efficiently? We’ll see; I need to try out some systems and see what works for me.

Planning my future is something else that I should do in order to increase my happiness and productivity; knowing where you are is easy, knowing where you want to go is a challenge but plotting a path between the two takes a lot of hard work, sweat and tears.

Surviving goes against the grain with me, but it’s better than not surviving, at least. Making the upwards journey will take a long time, and who knows what’s at the top?

One excellent website for personal development is www.stevepavlina.com. I can’t claim to know all that much about Mr Pavlina, and I haven’t read a great deal of the site, but there was one article on there which was very interesting to me.

Deciding What to Do With Your Life

Obviously this is something we all think about. At my age, and particularly in my situation at the moment, it’s something I’m spending a great deal of time thinking about. We all want to make the right decisions for the right reasons, and to see those decisions through and make sure they’re successful. I’ve not got the insight or abililty to muse on this subject as Mr Pavlina does, but I will say that it is genuinely nice to read something that makes you feel in control, encouraged and energised to do what you think is best. I don’t want to be someone who plays it safe in life; there are things I want to do, things I think I would love to do, and the only thing stopping me doing them is myself. Reading that article, and others on the site, have made me see that I can do it, and even that I should do it.

When I have a more in-depth plan over what I want to do I’ll post it here. I think I could really get into this self-improvement malarkey.

I think it was partly by surrendering my ideals and allowing myself to be satisfied with the work I produced. There’s a lot of planning involved in teaching, and perfectionism is something which can easily get out of control as you strive to make every single lesson all-singing and all-dancing, with fantastic differentiation and wonderful resources. It kills you; it simply isn’t possible.

Being a student teacher is serving three masters. You have your Uni portion to satisfy, your mentors and tutors in school to work with and the actual kids you’re supposed to be teaching. You’re supposed to plan all your lessons in advance, and each lesson is to be meticulously planned to the minute. Imagine being a perfectionist in a situation like that. I’m surprised I lasted this long.

So, no longer will I spend hours doing the PowerPoints, the timings, the references. I have to allow myself to be satisfied with what I can be realistically expected to produce, which will hopefully result in an increase in happiness and productivity.

I can’t deny that I’m most uncomfortable with the whole thing – it seems I’m accepting sub-standard work – but hopefully it can help me rediscover the happiness and satisfaction that I know teaching can bring.