Wait what just happened?

It's December! I am in shock and also... excited!

I'm not going to apologize for not touching this space for an entire month or two, because I'm really not sorry! I have had the most amazing, full, inspiring couple of months!

My first semester of my Masters was INCREDIBLE! Working full-time, studying part-time and having a life all-the-time sounded scary (I had many an anxious cry in preparation for this season)... But what I found was that when you're doing something you love, I mean really L.o.v.e you find the resources, the strength, the time, the creativity, the ideas etc to make it work! And if your lucky, you get to meet some amazing people whose advice and encouragement helps stoke the embers of enthusiasm and a firestorm of dreaming that keeps you going well into the wee hours of the morning. Thanks to passion and some structure I survived!

I have learnt so much by generous and positive lecturers and fellow students and I'm full to the brim with ideas and techniques and so many colours!

I made some changes to my work situation and I'm currently slowly moving away from full-time work (in an industry I'm not so thrilled to be in) to what I expect will evolve into more freelance, writerly work.

I've started working one day a week in an organisation I love and truly believe it!

I've ripped my novel in half and will commence working on the half that I actually like this month.

I am considering sharing some of my pieces from the semester with you. 

I have read so many beautiful articles and books that I need to share with you, or I'll sure die a thousand sad selfish miserable deaths!

What did your last month look like?

depraved bubble popper

I was popping bubble wrap today and it made me think about art. About how great art changes the way you see the world.

Amelie (one of my favourites) changed the way I think about people who secretly pop bubble wrap. In the movie, almost every character has their "likes" and "dislikes" presented just before they enter the storyline. A neighbour who plays a mean trick on Amelie as a little girl only likes one thing: "popping bubble wrap". From memory, there is short scene where the man sits alone at his diningroom table, his shifty eyes scanning the empty room as the camera pans down to his hands which are vigorously popping a sheet of bubble wrap.

That short scene about a minor character, made me giggle to myself as I sat at my desk surreptitiously popping away. I remembered Amelie, and suddenly I associated the act with repression and depravity. Suddenly I wondered if my popping may be something I might like to bring up in consultation with a therapist?

Great art does this! Great art finds and presents connections that, if executed cleverly, make you smile (or sigh) with recognition. 

NB. The paintings above are by Michael Sowa, one of which hangs above Amelie's Bed.

What movie, painting, book, character changed your perception of something you do? 

Opening lines good and bad

via beehives

I've just finished re-reading one of my favourite books: White Teeth by Zadie Smith. Please do yourself a favour and read this book; it is intelligent, colourful, rich and hilarious! Among the multifarious (I learned a new word, you like? You don't do you? I sound like one of those first year university kids who use the word "erroneous" instead of "incorrect" or "wrong" in their tutorial oral presentations. We all know that no-one actually talks like this!) things that I love about White Teeth are the opening lines:

Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway. At 0627 hours on January 1, 1975, Alfred Archilbald Jones was dressed in corduroy and sat in a fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate facedown on the steering wheel, hope the judgment would not be too heavy upon him. He lay in a prostate cross, jaw slack, arms splayed on either side like some fallen angel; scrunch up in each fist he held his army service medals (left) and his marriage license (right), for he had decided to take his mistakes with him.

Before learning anything else about Archie, these pathetic and but cheeky first lines convince me that I'm going to like him, or at least chuckle at the tongue in cheek melodrama of his life. I want to know more about Archie, what has brought him to this place, what's up with his marriage, why does he choose to wear corduroy to his suicide? Now that's a great opener to a novel!

I wonder how long it took Smith to craft these opening lines? Do the rest of us plebs have any hope of being as clever with our own openers? If not, do you think perhaps that we should aim for the opposite and craft the most awful opening lines know to man? If you plan to do so, I suggest perusing www.bulwer-lytton.com for the worst opening lines in published novels, updated annually. Here are some of my favourites from the 2010 winners:

For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil.
Molly Ringle

(Hmmm, nothing says passion like water guzzling gerbils.) 

The dark, drafty old house was lopsided and decrepit, leaning in on itself, the way an aging possum carrying a very heavy, overcooked drumstick in his mouth might list to one side if he were also favoring a torn Achilles tendon, assuming possums have them.
Scott Davis Jones

(If you squint you can almost see the metaphoric connection... almost)

Wearing his new slacks from L.L. Bean, and entering the pen to feed his three big dogs their usual three cans of dog food, some of which ended up on his new pants, Kevin then left the house to attend a revival screening of ‘Serpico’ with Alpo chinos.
Greg Homer

(Greg, awful puns are never acceptable)

She purred sensually, oozing allure that was resisted only by his realization as an entomologist that the protein dust on the couch from the filing of her crimson nails was now being devoured by dust mites in a clicking, ferocious, ecstatic frenzy. Jonathan Blay

(I'm sorry, what?)

Happy crafting!

The Hitchhiker

 

A short short film made by some talented friends of mine. 

"Based on the book Roald Dahl - The Hitchhiker... Always interesting as to who you pick up or be picked up by when it comes to hitchhiking." 

 

The characterisation is brilliant, great comic timing and a very clever script. But don't you kinda just want to wash, condition and comb Jimmy's golden locks until they resemble Michael Bolton's mane? (One day, jimmy, one day!)

Share the love :)

Inspire me

I'm still around the start of editting my first draft of my WIP novel and all is going well (read so so awful, I want to cry myself to sleep right now.) I've got to keep reminding myself that there is something good in this novel and that I am able to pull it together! 

Yes, it's hard going, but it has also been a good time to distract my self with some beautiful novels like Tony Morrison's A Mercy and Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger - reviews coming soon. I'm also distracting myself with beautiful things. I'm currently putting together an inspiration board with images, textiles and objects that... well, inspire me.  Really I should say, I've been fighting with the inspiration board ( it keeps falling off the wall)! 

In anycase, here are a few collections that have delighted me...

via coco+kelley

 via vee*

via steven's accidents

via fine little day

via jek in the box

via jessicab1992

 

via sandra

What do you use for inspiration?

What lurks in the deep

 via burgerdreams

Last night I wrote a pivotal chapter in my novel.

I’ve finally hit my relatively modest goal of 50 000 words since starting in November 2008 (!) The story has swelled and is continuing to grow despite me, though I’m eager to end it – even if it means writing a purely arbitrary finale – so that I can begin the very scary journey of EDITING! (eek!)

Anyway, last night I wrote a pivotal chapter. It was emotional, scary and at times I wanted to stop but I couldn't. I find that writing upsetting scenes come naturally to me. Most of the time I struggle to write even 300 words in one sitting. But when the content is distressing or moving and when I find myself asking the question "can I show this to other people", my writing becomes fluid, I can punch out 1000 words in under an hour and it is mostly coherent.

I have a few scenes in my novel like this. Scenes that I seriously question whether I have the stomach to edit, expand and prepare for a second/third/fourth pair of eyes to read. The scenes are not morbidly grotesque or terribly depressing, but they are dark and confronting. Sometimes they are themes that stem from dark times in my own life - though they are always fictionalised extensions of what I have experienced.

Despite the fact that it is fiction, sometimes the emotion of traumatic scenes, that my characters face, get to me. I've gotten emotional while writing about four or five key scenes while writing this piece. One of which I don't know if I'll ultimately include at all in my second draft. I feel like I can communicate the scene well enough and it defines the behaviour of one of the main characters... but I don't know if I want the content, I don't know if it has a place in the bigger story, I don't know if I can go back to it to improve and manipulate the first raw scribbling.

Have you experienced this? What do you do when your content gets too close to home? What do you do when it gets too far from home and you find yourself a little lost

Ps. If you want to read an extract of my WIP click here (1) and then here (2) let me know what you think!

Fighting with my protagonist

I am so frustrated with my novel's protagonist Adin.

As a little girl she is tenacious, annoying, deceptive, vulnerable, funny and lovable, well I love her and that counts.

As an adult, I just can't connect with her. Which is a problem; how could anyone else ever connect with her if I can't - she came out of my brain!

Grown-up Adin is elusive and cunning. She’s made a career out being shrewd and lifestyle out of isolation. These characteristics are interesting enough, but having a conversation with someone like this is an experience akin to hitting your head repeatedly against a rather thick, abrasive wall.

I've tried to write out an interview with Adin to get more from her, but it felt much like the above. How can your own imagination be cagey and distrustful?

I've left it until now, and focussed on volume volume volume. But now I have a plan. Over the next little while, I’ll be thinking and blogging about novels and the characters that I love as a means of digging deep and finding the things that draw me to them. What makes me commit hours of my precious (and often limited) attention to reading their stories?

I'll start soon with ‘Rahel’ from my all time favourite book: "The God of Small Things' by Arundhati Roy. Wish me luck!

Do you have any tips or tricks on characterisation? I’m totally down with the weird stuff people do for their art, so please share!

Bird by bird

I've started reading "Bird by Bird" by Anne Lamott, lent to me by a rather clever and thoughtful friend of mine.

I like it already:

First reason being, I have this rather disturbing predilection for birds - not real ones, which I find creepy and unnerving, but pictures and figurines, that seem to be taking over my apartment (see exibit A. above.) I am well on my way to becoming one of those kooky old ladies who wears all her best dresses and hats simultaneously, never leaving her small home filled with stuffed cats.

Second reason being Anne Lamott is very funny and very easy to read.

Thirdly, the book is quite thin, which helps me not to feel guilty about starting to read a fourth book concurrently. Do you ever feel like the other books you're reading get a bit despondent, depressed when you ignore them? I think they jostle for my attention and begin doing curious things such as turning up in odd places such as the bath, a handbag, a dream or other people's conversations.

I feel that this will be a good one:)

zz

Non-creative types

How does creativity transpire in the minds of mere mortals? Is it a thunder of genius that strikes the brain willy-nilly, haphazardly, any time it pleases? Is it a science, the formula to which is only dispensed to the most dedicated of inquirers? Unoriginally I want to say: "I believe it is a combination of the both divine inspiration and hard work."

But wouldn't it be wonderful if someone would set the record straight once and for all and say: "Actually no, creativity is a direct result of a complex and precise chemical makeup in the Medulla oblongata: You've either got it or you don't.

If you've got it, go paint the sky with the colours that spill out from your arteries.

If you don't, just give it up. Put on your mustard tracksuit from the 90s, and prepare for a life of absorbing and filtering experience via your spleen, yawning your day's allotment of breathe away. Don't bother trying anything new, it's all been done before, by other people. Don't you dare even think of reading up on a new area of work or play - you'll only discover that it's a lot harder than you think. And most of all do not talk to people, ask questions or listen to anybody - what's the point; surely no-one has thought thoughts that could have any impact on your perspective. And even if anyone did have challenging ideas to share, you are not capable of processing these in any useful way, as they will be relegated to your spleen to be dried and then incinerated in the crematorium of your desolate soul.”

If only someone would say THAT! Then I wouldn't feel so bad closing the curtains, switching on the TV and shutting out the new things stirring up in me.