Just gotta!

I know I shouldn't be blogging right now ... I should be doing my exam paper, but I really really just felt like blogging and lately my blogging has been so few and far between that I thought what the heck, it's now or never.

Anyways, the reason I feel like blogging is the despite the major stress I'm feeling about my exam, I'm feeling really happy about everything else. Life is good :)

I'm enjoying TAFE so much more than I did last year, and I'm SO grateful to God for that. I kept doubting about whether or not I should even go this year, but even when I thought it wasn't the right decision, God knew it was. I'm glad I was able to leave it up to him to make that choice for me, because he always knows what's best.

So, I have three things to share with you:

1. The sun has shone for the past two days, so I'm hopeful that God will answer my prayer and keep the sun shining for my birthday party on Saturday. Praise God for the beautiful weather! I'm so geared up for this party - cannot wait. :)

2. I've recently discovered a TV show from the 80's called Family Ties. I think my fascination/new love for this show stems from A) the fact that Michael J Fox is the main character (and I have a teeny bit of a crush on him in his Back to the Future Days), and B) the fact that his character, Alex P Keaton, graduated high school the year before my Mom did. Thus a fascination that my parents used to live in a world that was a bit like what's in that show. Like whoa. Not to mention, it's pretty hilarious. I rewarded myself for getting a good bit of my paper done last night by Youtubing a couple of episodes, one where Tom Hanks shows up as a guest star (and he's pretty darn amazing), and another one where Alex and Mallory (who are aged 17 and 15 in the show) argue over who's babysitting their little sister. It's Mallory's turn to do it but she's organized a date to the movies with her new boyfriend, so when he walks in the door to pick her up the dialogue between Alex and the boyfriend (who is rather an insecure fellow) goes like this:


Alex: Jeff, you've got to be crazy, driving around on a night like tonight! 
Jeff: What?
Alex: I'm serious, I don't think you should go out. It's far too dangerous to drive. 
Jeff: What're you talking about? It's a beautiful night! 
Alex: That’s what makes it so dangerous – all the people who are afraid to drive in the rain are out there!

Yeah. I laughed out loud. Anyway, I love sitcoms for their humorous dialogue like that. There are some episodes of Family Ties that cover some pretty heavy issues like commiting crimes and sexual abuse and yet it's always light-hearted so that after the serious moment, you're laughing again. :) 


3. This morning before TAFE I went out to Newtown with my classmate, Hannah, to take some photos of buildings and landscapes as homework for one of out classes. We took some pretty good ones while we were out walking, but as we were driving back, we saw an angle of a building that we'd missed before, and quickly wound down the window and took a snapshot as we drove past. It turned out to be the best photograph we got. Pretty awesome. :) 

 Okay, back to work for me! Hope you have a beautiful evening :)

Procrasination to the max!

Yup. I've got a 3,000 word exam staring down at me through the barrel of a gun and I really ought to get started. I've been doing all the gearing up for the past week or two and unfortunately I think I'm as ready as I can get.

So, here I am, armed with nothing but my Plutarchs, my lecture notes, a huge bottle of cold water and a box of tissues for my oncoming cold that seems to be taunting me about all the work I have to get done this week.

Look out, social life. You might not get a chance to come out of the bedroom until the weekend ... but that's okay, because on Saturday it's time to party! See you then. :)

Wah.

You know those weighted blankets you can get for kids with autism to calm them when they're feeling overloaded? I wish I had one of those right now. I've been having trouble falling asleep lately, and I wish I had something to keep me in a tiny space where I could relax. I don't have a weighted blanket but when I came home from TAFE today I was feeling totally overwhelmed and distressed for absolutely NO reason whatsoever. Not even homework. Anyway, I needed something to calm me, so after dinner I started taking some chairs into my bedroom, and I borrowed the little fan from my parents room ... Dylan is sleeping over and he and Justin saw me doing this. The conversation we had went a bit like this:

Justin (watches me take chairs into my bedroom): What're you doing?


Me: Um ...


Dylan (light hearted sarcasm): She's building a cubby house, of course!


Me (looking awkward): Actually, I am...


The boys look at each other. Then look at me. We all laugh hysterically.

So yeah, I'm here in my blanket cubby typing this right now, still wishing I had a weighted blanket but feeling much better now, especially because I am accompanied by my beautiful little paperback copy of Never Let Me Go, which FINALLY arrived in the mail. I am only five chapters in and quite enjoying it. It's beautifully written; a little dark; very curious.

So, feeling stressed? Build a blanket cubby! Hide yourself away from the world for a little while. I promise, it will do wonders for your mental stability in times of stress. :)

"There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein."

Hi again. Between uni work and rewriting I've been reading over the manuscript of my one-and-only complete work of novel length, The Seven Stones of Caliger. As you might expect from the title, I wrote it when I was about thirteen or fourteen. I keep a full copy of it in my room and take it out occasionally to remind myself that my writing has indeed improved over the last four years. I have to say, I'm incredibly proud of this 100,000+ word fantasy novel, because it assures me that I really can write a book and finish it, despite how awful and utterly unpublishable this particular book is. I'm yet to make it through a whole paragraph without thinking 'what?' in reference to sentence structure, character's emotional reactions, word choice, or even just the plot in general. Rather, the complete lack of plot. And the info-dumping! I'm on page 14 and already I've got a character explaining to the other leads why the bad guys are attacking and what will happen if they win ... literally while the characters are standing just outside the city gates because the city is CRUMBLING TO PIECES. *facepalm*

The beloved manuscript.

I feel slightly better knowing that my printed copy is not the latest draft, and thankfully Mr. Info-Dump was scrapped from the story. Unfortunately there are still many other appalling things that I am reading that I am sorry to say, still exist in draft thirteen. (No exaggeration on the draft number there - my younger self had not quite grasped the concept of "rewriting" and hence each "draft" only differed very slightly from the previous one, aside from random drastic changes such as killing off Mr. Info-Dump.)
Anyway, you'll be pleased to know that I no longer write like my thirteen-year-old self, and though I'm no Wodehouse by any stretch of the imagination, there is definitely evidence of a great improvement in my pen-wielding. You have my permission to celebrate that the literary creations of the thirteen-year-old Erin will never again be seen by the public, but hopefully something better. I apologize if you were one of the unfortunate souls who had to endure reading through this grueling manuscript a few years ago and probably cringed inwardly as you told a starry-eyed me, 'Yes dear, it's wonderful. With a little editing I think you could look at publishing it.'

Pretty thick book, huh?

Ahem. Yes. I'm terribly sorry for the pain I put you through, but please know that I am now thanking you from the bottom of my heart, because your words of encouragement were the ones that made me push on at my dream to become a writer. Now, four years later, my beloved Caliger is now called Collinsmere, and dear Christian, the MC, is not the bumbling pre-adolescent servant boy he started out as, but a dashing 19th century detective with a bit of a genius streak, and I am finally beginning to write the story that I have always wanted to.
You might be familiar with Eloquence, one of my current projects, and though they are yet to get the formal introduction they deserve, three of the stars from Caliger appear in this new book as the beautiful characters I'd always wished they could be. Back then my young self just didn't have the creational talent that they were demanding. But now things are different!
I really do hope in a year's time (or two) I'll be writing again on this blog about writing, and I'll be able to tell you that if you walk into a particular bookstore and go to a particular shelf you will see a book with my name on it. It probably won't be Eloquence ... that story took four years to formulate and I expect it will need another four to become a real work of art, but I'm telling you, the time is coming! I'm getting there. It's rather exciting. It will still take time, of course, but I'm finally get to the point where I can say, this will happen. And it's pretty darn awesome. :)
I suppose the funny thing about this post is that one day I'm going to look back on the stories I wrote when I was seventeen/eighteen and still be going 'what?', but hey, I'll only have something to look back on if I keep writing now. :)

All my story idea notebooks, dating from 2006 to the present.

I'll leave this post with one last thing - you might notice some new additions in my sidebar. Yes, I've got word count progress meters! You can see my current projects and how much I've written on each one, and what the current goal for them stands at. Please leave a comment for me if you notice that the bars haven't moved for a while ... it'll urge me to keep writing!

A Few Awesome Things

Hi! I'm back! No, I haven't been away ... just lacking in the blog area of writing. So here I am, with a few awesome things to share with you.

Awesome Thing #1:

I got three days in a row off work. Which means I can paint my nails! I'm so happy. We're not allowed nail polish at work, which is very depressing in my opinion, and two days off work is never enough for nail painting to be worth it. But I got three! Yay. Now my nails are bright blue :) Awesome.

Awesome Thing #2:

I shouted Justin, Amber and Jordan Slurpees and Amber won a free one, and she gave it to me because they were leaving for Adelaide that afternoon. So today I redeemed the ticket and got a free large Slurpee. Awesome.


Awesome Thing #3:

I just made a chocolate/banana milkshake. It's awesome.


Awesome Thing #4:

I've begun rewriting my novella, Fat Beagles Are Unattractive. For those of you who don't know, it's a fun, slightly humorous story about a family with six kids and one very chubby Beagle puppy. It's currently sitting at 16,000 words so I'm hoping to expand that by 9k with the large plot point I'm about to dump on it, and get it up to at least 25,000 words.

If you were to ask me what age the book is for, I'm really awful about knowing exactly what age I'm writing for, but from the characters I'd say about ages 10-14. The narrator is 14 years old, and from what I've heard in regards to kids' stories is that the readers are usually about the same age as the protagonist or younger.

The goal is to get the rewrite done by May or early June, in order to use the story as my free proof copy from Createspace, which I won for doing NaNoWriMo. After that, I'll tidy it up until closer to the end of the year, and then submit the book for publishing. How exciting! I can't wait to get my first rejection letter in the mail. I plan on framing it. It's gonna be awesome.

Anyways ... that about all I can manage to write at the moment. I have uni work and rewriting to do, which I really should be prioritizing, but hey.... Ta ta for now :)

This is why I love Pink.

Okay, so there's a lot of swearing in these songs I know, but that's not my point. My point is the message that Pink puts in these songs. Have a listen, if you'd like. But really listen. Take in the words.

If there's one piece of advice I'd want to give all the girls (and boys too) of Generation Y and Z, and beyond, it would be this: No matter what you do, you won't be accepted by everyone. Not everyone is going to like you. Don't waste your time trying to be something your not. Just be YOU, whatever that is - don't try and shape yourself into something else to fit in with what other people pressure you to be. There are 6 billion+ people in this world ... just be yourself, because there will still be more than enough people to love you just for who you are.

Do what you want. Dress how you want. Cut your hair the way you like it. Dance like you don't care what people think. Sing out loud like you mean it. Dream BIG. Have fun! Let God shape you. 

To Him, you are perfect.

To me you're perfect too. Just the way you are.

So raise your glass ... if you are wrong, in all the right ways. :)

Happy Anniversary :)

It's my parents' 20th anniversary today. And I get a free sleepover out of it so that they can have the house to themselves haha. Thought I'd share with you this photo:

That's my Mumma about to walk down the aisle with her Daddy. Ain't she beautiful? I love this photo for three reasons:

* The excited/nervous looks on their faces

* The lovely lighting

* The way the photographer captured the sign that hangs above the door: "Jesus Christ the same Yesterday, Today, Forever"

Twenty years pass and everything around us changes ... but God is the one constant. He will never change.

Drinking in the words...

I have come to a conclusion that when I read more, I write more.

It makes sense, really. I absorb the beautiful words of people like P.G Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Sara Gruen and J.K Rowling and it inspires me to make more beautiful words.

I was also reading this list, Ten Rules of Writing, and there were two that stood out to me in particular:

1. Try to spend more time writing than cruising the Net, and that includes reading chat about writing.

5. Read widely, and that means outside your genre, and as far outside your socio-economic-ethnic pool as you can get.

So I decided to make a booklist. And spend more time reading instead of being on the internet, in an effort to get me writing more. Reading and writing usually go hand in hand.

I also want to embrace this idea of 'reading anything and everything I can get my hands on', which includes things that I don't want to read. And so I jumped on Book Depository, with the goal in mind that I would order one book that I had never read, one non-fiction book about something that interests me, and one book that I wasn't really keen on reading but should read anyway if I want to be a Young Adult author. I briefly thought of adding one book of poetry to this as well, but seeing as Book Depository has free postage and therefore no handling, I would save my money and buy and nice hard backed copy from somewhere like Elizabeth's and know that it wouldn't get dinged up on the way to my doorstep.

So, the three books I ordered.

Firstly I added Never Let Me Go to my shopping cart, by Kazuo Ishiguro. You may recognize the title from the movie that's about to come out starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley. I'm keen to see the film and so I thought perhaps reading the book would be a good idea. Plus it sounds like my kind of story - sci fi without being in space. :D
Secondly was the ever-wanted-to-order Queen Victoria, by Lytton Strachey. I read the first chapter or two when I got it from the library, and fell in love with it, so I put it on my mental wishlist to order the moment I wasn't poor. Then I forgot about it. But now it's coming! I do so love the 19th century. I can't wait to read the rest of this book - I found some incredibly interesting little tidbits in the first couple chapters that will definitely be turning up in the pages of my own novel. Excitement.
Lastly, I had to choose a book that I should probably read but am not quite excited by the concept of it. I'm into trying to read popular teen fiction at the moment so I can 'know what's on the market'. Currently struggling through City of Bones (which, for the record, failed me on the second page with the most hideously awful sentence I have ever read in published fiction. Not counting a few sentences written by Stephenie Meyer, of course...). Thought I'd try for something perhaps a little better and order myself a nine-dollar copy of Tomorrow, When the War Began. Purposely went for the non-movie-edition-cover, of course. I have never read it and yet surprisingly did not mind the movie; although, truth be told the protagonist was one of the biggest Mary Sues of all Mary Sues, so I can't say I have much hope for her in the actual book. Nevertheless, I'm willing to give it a try.

Now off to read the rest of Chapter One of After the Funeral by Agatha Christie. Care to share what you're reading at the moment?