I'm on a mission!

Well hello there! It's been almost a month since I last blogged, but in that time I have come to a decision.

As most of you know, I really, really want to be a writer. One that gets things published. And I have come to the conclusion that this will not happen unless I (at least attempt to) stick to one project. Ever since I finished my one book back in 2008, I've been working on numerous projects. Fat Beagles Are Unattractive, Veridical, and Eloquence are and have been some of my biggest works, but I haven't completed any of them.

Yet.

When I wrote my fantasy novel it was the only book I worked on. I wrote it from start to finish, and then continued with a good nine or ten chapters of the second book, intending for it to be a four-book series. That is, until I discovered that my writing was actually not as good as I thought it was and I would need to work hard to make it better, and the best way to do that was to start a new project.

That's when Veridical was started. It too was a bit of a failure and though I wrote over 40,000 words with my ensemble of six characters I struggled with the chronology of the story and after a couple of years, ended up with a huge pile of inconsistent plot and three or four Mary-Sues. Some of the scenes I wrote in that time are still in my mental list of Best-Scenes-I've-Ever-Written, so once again I'm happy with what I did but not nearly satisfied.

And so we come to the now. I have an amazing novel in my mind. A murder mystery set in a mild-steampunk world based off 19th century England, with a huge dollop of political drama and class/status epic thrown in. It's the story I've been dreaming I could write since I penned my first six pages of fiction at age seven.

I adore my characters.

I love the mood and the genre.

I'm still excited about the plot two years after I began to develop it.

Yet I'm struggling to get this story on paper.

Why?

I get the feeling it's because I have not disciplined myself enough when it comes to my writing. This is because of two things. One is that I do not have a proper schedule, and so I can go days without writing and then hate myself for it later on. This will be fixed. I plan to come up with a proper schedule in the holidays. The other reason my story is not getting written is because when I do write, I distract myself from my main story with other ideas, like super powers and rewriting Fat Beagles and numerous other things that come into my head. When I get a good idea I get the urge to write about it immediately. I've decided that this is not the way to do things anymore. Now, when I get a good idea I will write it down and store it away in my filing cabinet for later, and knuckle down and solely writing Eloquence until the first draft is complete.

Ha, easier said than done.

Wish me luck. I really, really, want to do this. I hope I can manage it sooner than I think.

Yes, it's all in my head....

Good afternoon!

I'm supposed to be doing homework right now but I keep getting distracted and start doing fun things with Photoshop and After Effects instead of the boring homework that has been assigned. I've just discovered how to make GIFs with AE and so now I'm going GIF crazy on my tumblr. Yay for procrastination!

I'm loving the confidence I've gained in Photoshop recently; we're not doing a lot of it in our classes but I have been using it a lot and so I'm doing new things that I haven't been able to do before. One thing I did was make a painting out of photographs for a story.

Keira and I have been doing a writing exercise together - we've each created a character and written letters back in forth as those characters, creating back stories and jobs and interests and friends for them. It's quite interesting what we're coming up with. I love it.

My character, Sophie, is a young artist living in New York. She's been corresponding with Jasper Clancy, a uni student living in Sydney who does acting in his spare time. Jasper found a collection of artworks that belonged to Sophie's grandmother that had been left behind in Sydney airport, and they've been writing back and forth to each other ever since.

Sophie told Jasper that she was going to paint her brother Alan, a cellist. In one of Jasper's recent letters he asked Sophie if he could see her artwork, and so I thought, why not?

I'd had an idea in my head since creating Sophie what her art would be like, and at first I started googling paintings of cellist to see if I could find something that would resemble her art, but I got nothing. Decided just to make my own 'painting' instead, and so I launched Photoshop and started googling for a cellist that looked like Alan.

I found these three images and got to work, turning them into this:

At least now it looks like a painting! I kind of would have liked it to look more like paint, with more thick drips and what-not but that's sort of hard to do ... for the half hour I spent in Photoshop I'm pretty happy with the outcome, especially because it's very close to how I'd pictured Sophie's art style and the cellist actually looks quite a bit like how I had pictured my character Alan.

Fun! Anyway, I've done more than my fair share of procrastinating today so I'd better get stuck into Flash.... Tata. :)

"I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their pefect readers." - Dawsey Adams, to Juliet Ashton

I was going to write a review about how much I enjoyed this darling book, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, but I think what I wrote to Jessie (and the comments that followed) about the book sums it up:

If there is any book in the world that will leave you with an overwhelming desire to tell others to read it, it's this one.

"The moon's an arrant thief, and her pale fire she snatches from the sun." ~ William Shakespeare

And my teacher just told me she's dactylic!

I love discovering new music. It's so exciting, don't you think? Well I had recently discovered Ben Folds and on a random impulse bought tickets with Hannah in the middle of Flash class back in April. We were surprised there were still some good seats left. Anyway, I nearly didn't go to the concert because I was starting to regret making such a big dent in my wallet for it, but in the end I wound up inside the State Theater drooling over the loveliness of the building.

My camera really doesn't do it justice....

Anyway, we got in there and from out seats we could see this:

Which looked like a pretty good view to us! Aside from the smokiness in the air from the crew obviously testing the smoke-machine before the audience came in.... It added significantly to the lighting later on :)

So first off Kate Miller-Heidke came out as support, and I wasn't really too keen on her performance because I'd never heard her before. Hannah told me she was pretty good, and she's a trained opera. Opera? I thought. Who listens to opera? No wonder she's turned to pop. So yeah, that was me initially being all skeptical and prepared to be bored, because I have had several bad experiences with support acts....

I short, I really loved her. I am no longer skeptical about the opera thing. Seeing her live, singing normally one moment and then bursting into this bit of vocal awesomeness in the middle of her songs was pretty rad. This song in particular that caused me to have a little spasm in my seat and think omgihavetogetthecd. Hee.



I get particularly excited when I discover a new female singer, because if you look at my ipod my top artists are Mumford and Sons, Coldplay, Ben Folds, Jack Johnson, John Mayer, Jason Mraz, Newtown Faulker, Peter Murray, and U2. ALL MEN. The only two female singers that I listen to a lot are P!nk and Regina Spektor. And bonus points, Kate Miller-Heidke is Australian! She has a Vegemite product placement in her video clips and sings humorous songs about Facebook and Southern Cross tattoos. And we get it. It's great.

Anyway, onto the star of the show! Ben Folds can really rock the piano. That was awesome. We got a couple good photos of him smashing some stuff out on the grand piano, accompanied by drums, tambourine, bass guitar and french horn. Um, cool or what?!

As I said, the lighting was an entertainment in itself.

So yeah. I love concerts and discovering new music and that is the point of the post. The end. :)

P.S Here's a couple videos for you.

One that I took of Kate and Ben's duet at the concert. Like hello! How does she even do that with her voice???

And if you haven't watched Charlie's music video for Ben Folds and Nick Hornby's Saskia Hamilton, you must. Right now.



And this song is on the Kate CD that I now own. I really like the video clip and the song is just AWESOME because it's about not being able to dance, and I can't dance. So yay. Watch it :)

In eighteen years, precisely, the planets will align ever so nicely...

Yeah so on Friday morning Dad and I woke up at 4:45 a.m. and cruised down to Coogee Beach to see this:

Those three dots at the top of the picture are planets - Jupiter, Venus and Mercury, to be precise. Down below in the middle of the photo is Mars. They're all rather pretty, aren't they? In 29 years time Saturn will catch up with them, and all five planets visible to the naked eye will be together :) God is pretty amazing, building all that stuff up there. I'm glad we get to see so much of it. It was totally worth nearly freezing to death at the beach to see this.

Sound sounds so good to me!

So blogger was down yesterday and I have a few things piled up in my head that I must write about, but now is not the time for it all, as it is nine minutes to midnight. I will blog tomorrow, but I thought I'd let you know that I just got back from Ben Fold's concert at the State Theatre with Hannah, which was totally awesome. Ben Folds was really, really cool and funky on the piano, but I have to say it was Kate Miller-Heidke's voice that blew my mind. I can't believe I have never listened to her before. I was so excited about this new discovery that I bought her CD, and she signed it for me right then and there. Here's proof: 

So yeah it was a pretty exciting night. I'll tell you more about it, and the planet alignment that I woke up at 4:45 a.m on Friday morning for, tomorrow. :)

Where's Jubby? The Royal Wedding Edition!

Can you find Jubby?