It's over 9,000!

Good morning. It's 6:52 a.m. and this blog is going to be neither long nor, I expect, coherent. I only slept for four hours last night, even though I went to bed before 10:00 p.m. The problem is that over the last three weeks I have done so little exercise or any sort of energy-draining activities thanks to my stupid, stupid ankle injury, my brain is still full of energy and continues to tick long into the night. The clock read 00:50 the last time I looked at it last night, and I think it was another hour before I truly fell asleep.

Ugh. I feel so awful right now. Hopefully some breakfast will straighten me out, and when I get home on my break today I will plan some sort of energy-sucking activity with Justin so that I can go to bed completely and utterly exhausted and hopefully sleep the whole night through. Is it sad how blissful that sounds? Perhaps not.

Anyway, the real reason I came on here to blog was to celebrate the fact that I finally did what I've been wanting to do for so long - I finished planning the murder of the King in Eloquence. I'm so excited and happy and satisfied that I actually got a writing goal done, but due to my exhaustion I don't think my excitement is going to transfer very clearly onto the page ... er, screen. So you'll have to do some imagining or something. But the point is, it's pretty good and if you look to my sidebar you will see my Eloquence word count ... IT'S OVER 9000! Hehe. I completed chapter two and FINALLY someone has actually spoken the words, 'The King is dead.' Took long enough. I came up with the idea for this story a year and half ago, and it's only now that I'm getting somewhere with the actual writing of the plot.

Well, I think I'd better stop here because my writing is soon to drift off into total rambliness that makes even less sense than it does now, and I have to leave in just over half an hour for my class ... ugh, Monday mornings are not much fun. But at least Hannah is being lovely and doing me the favor of dropping me home on my 4-hour break so that I can spend some time with Justin today :) That's something to look forward to.

Tata.

The Cave.

Also a wonderful song by Mumford and Sons, but in this case I refer to my bedroom, which is becoming a bit of a cave seeing as I've had to spend so much time cooped up in here, thanks to my injured ankle. But all is good.

It's the last day of April today so I'm endeavoring to at least match the number of posts in March, if not better it.

I spent the better part of my afternoon printing photos and cutting up magazines to cover my wall with bits of lovely. I've finally covered one entire wall. Like whoa. I'm wondering what I'll do once I run out of free space... Here's some photos for you, just because I love this little space in the universe that I call mine :)

The complete wall. Pretty, isn't it? Particularly loving my newest editions, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield, hee.

The novel planning/Baz Luhrmann wall. Featuring my Romeo and Juliet poster, some Empire articles on Baz and his movies, my Buckingham palace research and Eloquence plotline, and plenty of free space to add more stuff :D

And this part of my room has all my favorite things - my kitty, my bed, Coldplay, the best of Marvel (ie Ironman, Spiderman, and X-Men), the Scream trio, and the first glimpse of Carey in The Great Gatsby. I get shivers of delight looking at all the goodness on my walls.

Right. Now I must find out what is on TV tonight and hope that there's nothing tempting so that I can get some writing done :) Tata. Hopefully I'll think of something good to make an 8th blogpost of the month, but if not, I will be back in the early days of May, fear thee not.

"If you were lucky enough to find someone who loved you, then you must protect it.” ~ Princess Diana

 Good afternoon.

 I bought my first bottle of champagne last night and we cracked it open in honour of William and Kate, along with some chocolate fondue with fruit and marshmallows. It was a lovely evening, and it's fun to think that one day when William is King I'll be telling my children that I remember the day they got married, and how a third of the world was watching them on TV.

I'm not even kidding when I say I was dreaming of weddings all night. Kate's dress was just gorgeous. I love it. What's disappointing about the fact that I love it is that now everyone's going to want one like that. I mean, there's nothing to set a trend like a royal wedding. I was looking at pictures last night of Diana's wedding and of my mother's wedding, and even though she was married ten years after Diana, Mum's dress does have a striking resemblance, so I'm willing to bet that Kate is what will be 'in' for the next ten years, unless Harry gets married soon and his wife wears something even more splendid.

The photo above of Kate and her sister Pippa was my absolute favorite of all that I have seen online so far. Such a beautiful moment between the sisters, and the photographer's framing of the young man in uniform attending the car door just makes it even more striking. I'm sure that will be one that Mrs. Middleton will hang on her wall. What a great memory. I wish I had been there to photograph that wedding, because there was one moment that I saw on TV that no photographer actually captured as a still frame. But it would have been amazing. It was after William and Kate came out of the abbey and they got into the carriage and drove down the street past the thousands of thrilled onlookers, and after a few moments of Kate and William waving and smiling, the camera panned and rested between the two drivers of the carriage and focused in on Kate, and it was beautifully framed because everything else was blurred and only her face was clear, with that gorgeous tiara of the Queen's sparkling on her head. The moment that I would have loved to capture was just then, when she lowered her hand and her eyes and just then, she realised. That was when it hit her. It was done. She had married him, a prince. She was not Kate Middleton anymore, but Her Royal Highness Princess William of Wales, and it wasn't just a long title anymore, but who she was. I saw it flicker on her face for just a moment, and then she raised her eyes once more and smiled at the crowd. That moment would have been the photo to top them all. I wish I had been there just for that.

"I'm not crazy, my mother had me tested!"

What up.

Well, it's pretty much winter now so I'm enjoying the last few days my holidays holed up indoors with my Ravenclaw hoodie on to keep me warm. Hoping to get a few more decents blocks of writing in before TAFE begins on Wednesday.

So I'm finally getting into the serious planning of Eloquence. This has included and will include: combining several vague floorplans of Buckingham Palace to create a half-decent map of the interior; timing the minutes that the murderer will have to complete his or her deed between the different phases of a lunar eclipse; creating obscure steampunk weapons with which to assassinate the King of Collinsmere; researching poisons that will put someone to sleep; and taking all the game pieces out of Carcassonne and Monopoly to use as the thirty-one characters who are present in the palace at the time of the murder (and that's not including all the servants).

I think it kind of looks like a combination of a battle strategy map and a game of Cluedo. Thanks Mom for let me take over the world dining room :) 

This my Princess, and her dashing partner at the dinner party, Prince Gareth of Auchterwilde.

 Yes, I have been spending my weekend plotting a murder, no I do not plan to use any of my findings to assassinate the Queen of England. Promise.

God is good. ALL the time.

Hello! I have returned. Only briefly, of course, because I woke up this morning with a better idea for the beginning of one of my stories, and I have to go and write it down.

Once the term starts again I plan on getting into a proper "writing routine", but thanks to my weird TAFE schedule that will prove much more difficult to do than say. Wish me luck!

For now, this is my new writing strategy - I will go to bed every night with my notebook by my bed, and when I wake up in the morning I am not allowed to get up until I write one sentence. Just one. That's all it takes to make sure that I have at least written something today. If I want to do this, really do this ... if I want to becoming a real writer who actually finishes books and gets things published, I need to work hard. Ugh. Once again, easier said than done.

Here goes nothing.

P.S Happy Easter! Remember Jesus and all he has done, our Savior and our King :)

RAWR.

Hello hello. I've been forcing myself to write today because I didn't want to feel like I waste the entire day... my stupid ankle has continued to create a barrier between me and the outside world, so it was home again from dawn til dusk for me today. It's okay. I finished my website assignment so I'm pretty happy :) I also wrote 1000+ words of a story, so all is good. I created a book cover for one of my stories, and I really love it and I wanted to post it on NaNoWriMo to ask for opinions, but the site has been down all day! Some lame Amazon hosting error. Ugh. Hopefully it will be back up by the morning.

I ordered some more books online yesterday but I don't think I beat the holiday break so they won't get shipped until Tues :( oh well. I'll probably have to wait about a month for them because Book Depository is a little hopeless when it comes to postage and handling ... probably because they don't charge you for it! So I guess it's a win-lose, or something like that. I got two more books on the Victorian era to add to my growing collection, plus a novel called It's Kind of a Funny Story, by Ned Vizzini. It's about a teenage boy who has depression, so he checks himself into a psych ward for a week and meets some weird but friendly people. It's sounds strange when I say it like that, I mean you're probably thinking, 'Erin, why on earth would you want to read a book like that?" but I stumbled across is online and as far as I can tell it has a happy ending, so I'm hoping it will be a nice little odd 'feel-good' sort of story. Here's hoping. The problem is, whenever I order a book online it's all I think about and all I want to read, so now when I look at all the other lovely books on my shelf that are waiting to be opened, I think, 'but I don't want to read these books right now...' Hmm. Maybe it will just take a bit of force, like my writing did today. Like I said it's probably going to be nearly a month until I see my order, so that's more than enough time to get started on something else.

By the way, I just made this poster and I'm going to print it out really big and hang it on my wall. 

Anyway. It would appear that I am now nearly out of words. So I shall leave this post here and go back to trying to force some more writing. One of the worst things I can think of is suddenly NOT being a writer anymore, and even though it's hard I never want to stop, so I must press on during the difficult days.

Tata! :)

This is a story....

Good morning. I've done a shamefully small amount of blogging this month. And last month. And the month before that ... you get the idea - I've been a bit hopeless about this blog ever since I got back from America. It was hard to blog while I was away and so I've found it difficult to get back into it now that I'm home. I suppose I need to get better at it again, because blogging is such a nice outlet for writing things that aren't about characters or TAFE.

Speaking of TAFE, I'm here now, even though it's the holidays. I decided I'd spend the entire day in the library, because they keep it open for students to come and get their work done before term starts again. It's quite nice here right now, with just the hum of the electric tube lights and the murmur of a couple of interior design girls in the corner to keep me company while I write. No one is using the computers, which is quite amazing. Usually you get here in the term time to get something printed and every single computer is being used up by event management students and the graphic design kiddos all trying to finish off their stuff between classes. Grr. When it comes to computers, the set design students aren't nearly as annoying as anyone else, because if they're in the library it's so they can sit in the corner and fiddle with toothpicks and PVA glue. I think they have the most fun out of anyone here.

So, I came up with a new story idea the other night. Rather, I got slammed in the face with something epic, and in the middle of a CoD game I dropped the controller and scrambled for a pen and I wrote something down. I'll share it with you. This is what I wrote:

This is a story about a tiny town in which nothing had ever happened. 

It's about Lucy and the day the circus came to Chesterfield, and how the rain hadn't kept her and Noah away. 

It's about a lost boy called Marcus, who wasn't really a boy anymore.

It's about a girl with too many secrets, a magic box, a firebreather, and a code of cards. 

It's about a magician whose magic is real. 

It's about a dangerous plan, a locked door, and Lucy's search for the key.

And it's about finding love in the darkest of places. 

Well, I don't really know where all that came from because as far as a true plot ... I have next to nothing. But these characters and these images and feelings have come bursting into my head and I must write about them. I'm excited. I think this story is going to be one of discovery. I won't plan any more than what I have just written. I will just write, and see where it takes me. Off to go do that now. Be back soon :)

"What are you imagining right now? That place can be as real as anything."

What up. I'm on holidays now, yayness!

Two things to blog about.

Number one is Suckerpunch. I won two free preview screening tickets thanks to Empire magazine, how cool! So I went with Hannah and we pretended that we were skipping our TAFE lecture for 'educational purposes', because in the last lecture we had heard from a guy who had worked on some motion tracking in the film. Pretty cool. We also had this awesome story cooked up that was exactly like The Big Bang Theory, where I had a cousin who was a genius celloist and he had invited me to his private concert in The Middle Of Nowhere and because I can't drive Hannah was going to take me. It was foolproof. But unfortunately we couldn't find the teacher to tell him, so we just went anyway.... :)

On to the "review" of sorts. Basically, I was disappointed. From a writer's point of view this movie WAS TERRIBLE. I wanted to scream "WHERE'S THE CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT?!" and stomp out of the theatre demanding a free copy of the soundtrack. Because THAT was cool. Honestly it's worth seeing just for the special effects, art direction, costume design and the music. There were a couple moments where I leaned over to Hannah and said, 'That's all 3D. That is all 3D. How do they even do that?!?' And we're both completely jealous that not only can Emily Browning act, she can sing, too. It's her voice in Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This), which appears at the beginning of the film. So yeah, worth watching on the big screen for all that. But don't expect any character development or proper explanation of the plot. You'll be watching a bunch of scantily clad superheroines fire up the big guns and slash monsters to death ninja-style, which is totally awesome. Also, be prepared to get a little bit uncomfortable wondering what on earth is going on in the "real-life-but-not-real-life" scenes (you'll get what I mean if you see the film) while the girls are in Fantasyland. Yeah, the tiny scrap of plot that is present is a little messed up. I toyed for a long time on whether to give this 3 stars or 2.5, and I've had to settle on 2.5 because as much as I want to give it more for the visual and auditory side of things, I'm a writer at heart and I just can't let it go how much of an EPIC FAIL the writing was. So, sorry. That's all it gets. But don't let my measly 2.5 stops you from going to see it. If you're going to see it, see it on the big screen. The time is now.


As for my new blog url, it's a reference to Hebrew 3:4: "For every house is built by someone, but God is the builder of everything." 

I like that verse because I am a creative person, and it reminds me that my talents are all gifts from God, because he is the designer of this universe :)

Off to watch Arthur and eat dinner before work. Have a good evening!