Money and value

I have just had a royalty statement, and my Margaret book has earned £42.62 in royalties! I never thought that it would ever pay off the advance, which, although small in relative terms, seemed rather generous to me. So now I am an author who has not lost a publisher money! And I have £42.62 more than I did before. This is the sort of money which feels like it's worth more than its actual amount in pounds and pence.

The wierd thing is that it has sold over 500 copies overseas in 2011-12, far more than it has in previous years. So that's a bit odd.

In non-medievalist news, I have now been a professional Java programmer for just over two months. I am getting a tad more secure about it, though there are still tons of things with which I need to get to grips. I'm really enjoying the wierd feeling that I'm learning a new sort of articulacy! When I'm more settled down with Java I'm going to learn about Aspect Oriented Programming, and also Functional Programming, which seems to be Hot Right Now. I'm probably going to be doing the Sun Java Programmer Certification at work, and I'm going to make a few Android apps.

But I'm still going to be a medievalist again from time to time, I think. I do really want to finish off my charters book. I've started unpacking some of my book boxes labelled "Academic storage", and although I might do a bit of deaccessioning, I don't think I can part with most of them. But goodness knows where I will put them all. Plus it's possible that by the time I get round to anglo-saxoning again all this Java will have pushed all the Latin out of my brain.