November has turned out to be even busier at work so far than the first week of term, so mainly been working and collapsing. Partly due to covering a colleagues job as well as my own. Lots of teaching, including an experimental teaching method which failed miserably: used a free online document editing software (www.etherpad.com) to create some online documents, then split class into group to add their comments on information sources to the documents. Software worked well and has some nifty features, but it meant the students were anonymous and turned into 12 year olds by posting comments and links that ranged from silly to obscene. Ah well, apparently 1st years don't want to be treated as adults.

Doing NaNoWriMo again this year, already managed twice what I did last year (at 13k), but not pushing myself as been too busy/ill. Just doing it as a fun way to get myself writing fiction again.

Enjoyed the Women in Comics event last month. Some great talks and met a few people whose work we weren't familiar with. Some leads to follow up with regards to a possible comic conference at work, and stuff for Caption.

Also enjoying the new writers group we've joined locally. A good bunch.

Looking forward to catching up with people at Thought Bubble and MCR.

In Decembr we need to revamp websites and get the new online strategy for Factor Fiction in place. Not looking forward to trying to update wordpress and comicpress, as I killed the site and shed lots of tears last time I tried!

So, the last month has been a little insane in terms of stuff to do and places to be. Mid-September there was FantasyCon, where we failed to win the British Fantasy Award for best comic but it was great to be shortlisted. Went to some interesting stuff, including talks by Brian Clemens, Jasper Fforde and a panel on pulp fiction/archaeology in fantasy/sci-fi/horror. I'm always a bit shy at FCon because although we know some people it's not the same as waking into a bar at a comic con and knowing 80% of the people in there! Picked up lots of good books from the speculative fiction small press plus some freebies. Just started reading Conjure by Mark West from Rainfall books.

Work is hectic, as it always is for the first few weeks of term... not helped by the fact that the other science librarian has moved over to be the full time document supply and repository manager leaving me to look after eight departments (instead of three) on half-time hours. Promised they'd advertise the post asap but everything in academia moves slowly so unlikely to have anyone in post until after christmas. Ho-hum.... getting better at saying no due to being overloaded. Managed to do seven hours of induction teaching last week and have another six hours to do this week. Decided to do interactive induction lectures, which have mainly gone down well apart form with the Computer Scientists who just stared at me in stony silence so I had to abandon the interactivity! Not looking forward to the other four hours of teaching I have with them later this term.

Work and creating a 1980s scrapbook present left me very exhausted last week, which meant arrived at BICS already fairly zombified. Not helped by me forgetting to check the hotel booking before we left... meaning we turned up at the wrong travelodge and them got pretty lost in the centre of Birmingham trying to find the correct one. Meant we missed the Friday night launch party but sounds like we didn't miss much. Got to the venue in time to set-up on the Saturday and we were later joined by Ellen Lindner. Had nice table mates in teh form of Mal (Fallen Angel Media) and the Bostin Heroes crew (who overwhelmed me with their energy & enthusiasm). Sales were slow but got a chance to catch-up with a few people. Have come back with bruises on my knees because the tables were so tightly packed that we had to climb under it to get in or out. Deserted Jay on the table several times due to having an asthma attack and then running away with Mags to have a cuppa.

If Saturday at BICS was slow then Sunday was completely dead & we sold a handful of issues. Confirmed my opinion that after ten years of table manning I'm burnt out on cons (not including Caption). Luckily we'd already decided that we won't be having tables net year as we're too broke to continue doing that, or printing comics. So, the current plan is to continue to do issues as free pdfs and weekly strips online instead. Will probably still do Bristol Con in order to visit badasstronaut as much as anything, and of course we're still on the Caption team.

In other news, just read the latest Felix Castor novel by Mike Carey (The Naming of the Beasts).. damn good read as usual, plus it ties-up the current storylines. Also joined a local speculative fiction writers group, which looks like it should be really good fun... like-minded individuals. We write at the group... as Damien makes us be quiet and write and then go to the pub to chat afterwards. Started working on script for some motodraconis artwork last week at the meet.

So, generally been feeling very ill with all teh stuff going on, but on the good side I haven't actually completely collapsed from it like I would have previously and have managed to make it into work each day. Yay.

One of the rather unintentional side-effects of being ill so much the last years is that my teaching practices (teaching information literacy skills) at work (Uni) have become very stale. It's much easier to just stick to doing things in a traditional/or already written way when your confidence and energy are low. I'd even abandoned using the cephalonian method of library induction despite having had some success with it previously. I was very mean in one session where I still employed it despite only having had 3 students turn up (there should have been about 60).

So, I decided I would try and improve things a little bit for the upcoming academic year... nothing majorly experimental but at least try and make things less boring/a little more interactive. My asthma has been playing up in the last 24hrs so I worked at home today, which gave me the opportunity for a good think and read some literature in order to come up with some things I could do. 

Decided to include using electronic voting handsets (also known as clickers) in smaller sessions (we only have 50 handsets) to gage the level of previous experience with resources at the start of a session, quick quizzes to test comprehension during sessions and to get feedback at the end. In bigger sessions I might try using coloured strips of card for voting when I can't use the handsets.... as I suspect due to the doubling of student number on some of the courses I support I may have to do sessions in a lecture theatre instead of hands-on in a computer lab.

Might replace some of my talking with an online tutorial with quizzes that students can work through, while I adapt the session to meet the needs identified with the voting at the start. Also going to put more emphasis on critical analysis, as many students feel patronized when you're trying to teach them how to search resources.

Probably ought to be posting this to our work blog instead of this one!!