1. Leaving uni/finding a job in London

A lot of people I know dreaded leaving university and the happy life of a student, and I won’t say I didn’t have pangs of nostalgia for various aspects of Durham, but at the same time I was more than ready to leave. I wanted to see how I would do in the real world, and whilst being a student was fantastic fun, as I learnt a lot and met many great friends, it is a bubble that separates you from reality - a conscious, deliberate bubble - and you do feel like you’ve fallen out of touch with the world most of the time. I wanted to be working and living a normal working life. Hence I left with only the minimum of sad feelings, though I will always look back on those days as being fun and exciting, and far less worrying or tiresome than the real world!!
After a short family trip to Scotland (since we were up North anyway), I came back home to Canterbury, signed on to the dole and got job hunting.
I had quite a difficulty trying to work out whether to find a place to live or a place to work first, as I had neither sorted to begin with. At first, I was all for finding a base in London first, but then I decided (with a little help from family and friends!) that getting a place to live without any actual money might make it a little hard to pay the rent…so I went job hunting first. I think in retrospect that this was the wrong thing to do, as finding a place to live is in reality an utter nightmare (see my next blog entry). If you have a place to live, there are many ways to earn a bit of cash to pay your first rent - but you will need the money for a deposit straightaway (again, see next blog entry for more info).
Anyway, I got job hunting.
The first thing I will say is that I hate signing on to the dole. I firmly believe that the government makes it difficult on purpose so that less people sign on. I have signed on twice now, and this time was easier, as in London there are difficulties concerning different boroughs and who to contact/where to go to sign on etc. However, it is your right to receive money from the government as being a British citizen, and since the government will take more than enough tax off you once you start working, I would heartily recommend that everyone signs on, despite the absolute headache it is to get it all sorted (as an example - their phone system is abysmal: your phonecalls get moved around to different departments so that you have to repeat the same info over and over and actually never get anywhere). I would also ignore the jobs that they try and find you unless it is exactly what you are looking for, because often it is not at all what you are looking for and you can do better looking for jobs yourself.
Finding a job the first time around was - especially in this current financial climate - surprisingly easy for me. I was looking for retail and sales assistant positions, as I had experience of these in my gap year, and since I was aiming for London but living in Canterbury, all my applications were done online.
I searched directgov.uk, gumtree.co.uk and reed.co.uk for retail positions. By far, the least professional-looking of these is gumtree, and yet all three of my jobs I have had between then and now all came from gumtree, so it is definitely effective. Directgov was also good, but I have heard some rumours about Reed, such as their ‘forgetting’ to pass on CVs to companies thanks to some particularly neglectful administrators, and that has put me off them a bit. I don’t know if the rumours are true, but I do know I have sent many hundreds of CVs to different companies through them and did not receive one invitation to attend an interview.
About two weeks in to the jobhunting, I was offered to have an interview with The London Print Company who were looking for what they called a Sales Assistant. It actually transpired to be more of an Office Assistant position, with far more responsibility than I had had before, but I’ve always been good at interviews and it was clear I could handle the workload, so Nick (the owner) took me on. He received 150 applications in one week and said it was the most he had ever received for the role - which just shows the current financial climate in England at the moment.
I was offered 14k as a starting salary. In London especially, that is a very basic salary, probably the lowest you can get and yet live on actually, but I was just happy to get a job and accepted. It is, after all, still fine to live on!
However, the next problem was that they needed someone to start straight away, and I had not figured out a place to live yet…

Update

Well. Wow. The last time I updated it was May 2011. Now it is January 2012 and I have so much to update and talk about, I don’t know where to begin.
What I should do is tell you how I’m going to lay out my experiences in the next few blog entries, so here we are:

1. Leaving uni/finding a job in London.
2. Finding a houseshare in London.
3. Being fired (thank you recession!) and attempting to find a new job in London.

I have been through a lot, but it has all been amazing experience and I can’t wait to write it all out for everyone and show you all how you can overcome the same difficulties.

Exams, Exams, Durham, Exams and Plotting...

So I'm still at Durham at the moment, finishing my exams. I have one more to do and that is Ancient Epistolography, taught by my completely balmy German lecturer who likes to stalk me in his spare time and laugh manically when it sounds like someone might be failing his course. To be honest, the revision would probably be going better if I had gone to more than half the lectures, but this module is boring. I only took it because all the Classics lecturers decided they were going to wander off abroad this year, giving me a very small choice of modules to choose from. Oh well, revision is actually going okay despite the absolute lack of care I possess about Ancient Epistolography Theorists...(brevity in a letter is good, yes, I get it...)

As well as revision, I have been sorting out what to do next week - I am going to the AEGON tennis championships in London with my good friend Tom and my mother, and in the few days between sessions I will be attempting to get a job. Or at least give CVs out. Ahahaha. So I've booked myself into a hostel called Pickwick Hall (which I actually found on Hostelworld.com - absolutely the most indespensible website know to internet-kind) - I have no idea if it is any good, but it's cheap, small and central. I'm hoping the apparently 'kind, friendly and knowledgeable' staff will have some handy tips about places looking for work...I would say that I'll do anything but that's a lie - I'll do anything that pays me enough to actually live in London. I have some retail experience under my belt, so I'm just hoping that's enough to give me a chance amongst all the other students no doubt fleeing to London as well. And if I do find a job, I then have to find a place to live!!

I'm not feeling stressed though, because I simply don't feel stressed about that sort of thing. I feel excited and yes, maybe a little (lot) scared, but it's all an adventure and that's what matters really. If it all goes wrong, it goes wrong, but at least I gave it my best shot.

At the moment I have been finishing off Patrick Rothfuss's second in his trilogy - The Wise Man's Fear. His work is amazing - it looks like it should be just your generic fantasy, but if it was, I wouldn't be interested in it. It is about the main character, Kvothe, who has become the stuff of legends and is now hiding from the other stuff of legends - the evil stuff - by disguising himself (almost too well) as an innkeeper. A biographer turns up at the bar, having sniffed him out, and manages to get him to dictate his life story, right from the beginning - the true story. Not the legends, not the whispers, the reality of what really happened. (The wonderful thing is - they know what's happened - you don't.)
It's magnificent. Patrick Rothfuss puts so much quality into his book, into each tiny bit of it, from excellent characters to well-thought-out plots to a wonderful turn of phrase. As soon as you open the book you just get sucked into Kvothe's world. The first of the trilogy - The Name of the Wind - I finished in 2 days. It is 600 pages long and I am not a massively fast reader. I literally just could not stop until I reached the end. The author plays around beautifully with certain ideas, such as the problems and benefits of rumour, the problem with the unreliable narrator (is Kvothe overexaggerating sections? is he playing down other sections in a fit of modesty?), and really makes you question the whole idea of story-telling. The world and system of magic he has created seemes like top quality as well, though I am admittedly not an expert in those matters.
Certain characters really stand out. Denna - the generic-except-she-isn't-actually-generic-at-all - love interest is thoughtfully created, but my favourite by far is Bast, who is adorable and gives far more to the story than you initially think he will. I want to hug Bast. I want to hug him and wrap him in a duvet and then hug him some more. I also want to run far, far away from him.
I think the only real problem with this series is that it is produced very slowly. Those who got into The Name of the Wind straight away had to wait 2 whole years for the next book to come out. Rothfuss likes to spend his time making sure each section of the book is perfect. Now, I don't mind waiting for quality, but many others may do. Also, some parts of the fantasy are generic, especially at the beginning of Kvothe's story, but that's the curse of fantasy I'm afraid.

I have also just started The Painted Man by Peter Brett, recommended strongly to me by my well-read and very discerning friend Lisa. She told me it was better than Rothfuss's series, so I agreed to try it...at the moment I can't say it has particularly grabbed hold of me yet, but I am only on page 147, so I won't reject it yet. I rarely do that with books; the only one I can remember rejecting is Robinson Cruesoe, because I mean god. Way to turn an interesting idea extremely dull, Defoe. Uck.

All for now!

So hi...

Hello world, and welcome to my life...So a few things about me right from the beginning:

- I am Jenni, 22, Scorpio, short, bespectacled, fundamentally lazy, full of obsessions and crazy-ass ideas.

- I studied English and Classics at Durham University after a gap year in which I travelled around America, New Zealand and worked in Sydney for six months. As a result, I am now totally penniless and in lots of lovely student debt.

- I have been writing since I was the tender age of six, when I forced my mother into reading my 'novel' about our pet guinea-pigs (they went on an adventure to find some better grass, it was gripping stuff).

- I mostly write novels, though I am always on the look-out for short story ideas as well, and am keen on honing my skills in this direction. My attempts at poetry are abysmal and the less talked about them the better. I would classify the genre I write as fantasy/psychological thriller/horror...Basically, everything I write is heavily character-based, my writing is not particularly plot-driven or world-building, nor am I an enormous fan of books which are more interested in the plot than characterisation (Lord of the Rings is an example). I firmly believe that every book will lean either in one way or the other; a good book is one that combines the two, but that is very difficult to find and wonderful when it is found (the writers who immediately come to mind are Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman - geniuses.)

- I have not had anything published (yet) but I write fanfic often, in all sorts of fandoms. I believe that the stigma which fanfic has received over the years is unfair - it is a perfect place for young writers to hone their skills, to further their ideas and to enjoy and learn to accept criticism. I have learnt so much and received so much encouragement from people all over the world throughout the years that I could never think of fanfic as a silly waste of time or a ridiculous hobby, just because what is being written is not publishing material.

- I have a Muse who is notoriously temperamental and is as likely to bless me with sudden inspiration as she is to abandon me for weeks on end. I simultaneously praise and curse her daily.

- I read voraciously but still not as much as I would like. I am one of those rare creatures that honestly enjoys reading classical literature - from a good bit of Homer to Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle - which is probably why an English degree sat so well with me. Shakespeare is my inspiration and a constant delight. I also like dabbling in fantasy and sci-fi, but I'm pretty fickle in that department, as before mentioned.

- My music taste varies considerably depending on what mood I'm in - one day I might be talking about Rhianna, the next Holst.

- My family is minute - in this country I have a mother and a grandmother, both of whom are beautifully supportive of whatever I choose to do and have never tried to push me into anything I dislike, for which I am eternally grateful. My friends are various, from home to gap year to uni friends, but they all have something in common - they are all completely crazy and utterly wonderful.

- I am moving to London to find not only a place to live but a place to work - neither of which I have any idea about what I want or expect. So this is a true adventure. Yes...if that's one vital thing you want to remember about me, it is this - I love adventure. And this is promising to be the greatest one of all...let's see how it goes...