I’ve enjoyed this week of class! It definitely feels like the calm before the storm, but I took time to get some rest this weekend. Here are some fun things I found in the class announcements:

Buss, Robert William; Dickens’s Dream; Charles Dickens Museum, London; Source

I was thrilled to come across this picture in the course announcements! Charles Dickens is my favorite “classic” author, and Great Expectations is my favorite novel of his. We read Great Expectations in my British literature course that I took as part of the Honors at Oxford program. (I think I was the only one in the 10-person class who liked it but I understand my tastes are strange.) During our class, we actually went to the Charles Dickens Museum, and I instantly fell in love with this painting because it captures the way worlds and characters unfold in a writer’s mind. I took a picture of the original painting, and I bought a coffee mug with the painting on it. I consider it a sort of good luck charm and use it on heavy writing days to invoke Dickens’s spirit.

Left: Dickens’s Dream. Robert William Buss. Charles Dickens Museum, London. Personal photo.
Right: Dickens’s Dream on a coffee mug. Personal photo.

I also saw this cartoon by Tom Gauld that I absolutely love because I CANNOT keep my desk organized or clan to save my life. I do most of my writing from my bed because of it. I thought it would be fun to list some of the crazy things on my writing desk like the picture does. There is a fidget cube, a bunch of paperclips that I bent into squiggles during a Zoom class, several sticky notes with half-finished to-do lists, a couple of candles that I’m too afraid to burn, a few bottles of infused olive oil that I forget to take to the kitchen, and a pile of books, of which I have only read three.

Tom Gauld’s cartoon on writing desks. Source
Dickens’s writing desk. Charles Dickens Museum, London. Personal photo.

I wish I had a writing desk as cool as Charles Dickens’s!

My favorite video from this week’s announcements was this cool Ted-Ed video about fictional languages. I hate to keep bringing up the Oxford thing, but we learned a lot about Tolkien and his obsession with creating languages (and maps) while we were there. As a fantasy writer, I am terrified of the idea of creating a language complex enough to be spoken or written. It simply does not sound fun. However, it’s so cool that fictional languages can operate like real ones! I think I’ll stick to inventing a handful of words here and there, but I don’t think I’ll be experimenting with grammar or alphabets anytime soon.