Category: Creative writing

January 13, 2013

Fifteen years ago, to the very day

Today it is exactly 15 years since I went to school for the very first time. I can always place this date very exactly because I started school on my grandmother’s 80^th birthday. She would have been 95 today, but she is dead just over four years now. So this date, the 13^th of January, isn’t really important to me because I went to school, or because of my grandmother’s birthday, for I didn’t actually have much contact or a connection with her. It is important to me because it marks the anniversary of me finding out I was different.

It’s been fifteen years that I’ve known I’m weird. When you’re six years old it is a terrible revelation knowing that you will never be normal. You will never fit in. You know, when you’re little you are not aware that other people’s lives are different from yours. It was only when I went to school for the first time that I found out that other people’s parents weren’t “old”. When I got to school for the first time I found out it was not normal to have parents who were already middle-aged and grey when you are only six years and two months. I wasn’t aware how weird it was to grow up without any influence from pop-culture, to hardly watch any TV at all and to not listen to modern music. But most of all, I didn’t know how big of an issue all of this would be to the other kids. Continue reading →

December 1, 2012

Writing

Soooo… Please excuse the ultra-descriptive title: I used up all of my words on NaNoWriMo.

Yesterday I said that I’ll talk more about my NaNoWriMo. Also, some people have asked me how I write. I have no idea why anyone would ask me, but I might as well reveal what I do during NaNoWriMo. If it can help anyone else, I’m happy!

Firstly, a few things about NaNoWriMo. I know that a lot of people criticize this endeavour. I know that a lot of people say that a good novel cannot be written in a month. And to those people I would say that you are absolutely right. A good novel can (probably) not be written in 30 days. However, this is not what NaNoWriMo is about. It is about sitting down and writing that first draft, while the experience of writing along with thousands of other like-minded people is your motivation to continue. NaNoWriMo gives you the freedom to write absolute crap and, believe me, a large part of my current novel is exactly that. Continue reading →

November 30, 2012

One for the history books

That’s my history book, not yours!

I meant to post this yesterday, actually, but my stupid internet died.

Anyway, yesterday, the 29th of November, is a day to go down in my history book. Why? Here’s a bulleted list of reasons. Everyone likes bulleted lists, don’t they?

Yesterday I handed in one play review. As if going to the theatre and watching a play and then reviewing it was something I had time for this month. That wasn’t such a pain, it was more of a nuisance and a waste of time. I’m not a journalism or drama student, why do I get play reviews as assignments? So I went to the theatre alone last week, for the first time in my life. People gave me weird looks. They were probably wondering what a young girl (I look about 16, remember?) was doing there all alone. Maybe they thought I was waiting for a boyfriend who never pitched…
Yesterday I handed in one research essay. 3000 words. The longest one I’ve ever written. Possibly it was also the most painful one I’d ever had to write. I always struggle with research essays, not because I can’t write them (I generally do quite well in them), but because I am so attention deficient. And I don’t do well on computers with my attention deficiency. Seriously with the amount of time that I spent playing FreeCell, Spider Solitaire and Angry Birds instead of working this past week, I could have won NaNoWriMo in 20 days and finished three research papers. These days, I turn off my laptop’s Wi-Fi access when I’m trying to work, but unfortunately none of those three games need internet access. Anyway, I always struggle with the temptations and distractions when trying to work, but it has never been as bad as this past week. My motivation to do anything academic related has been 0% for a while now and trying to study for my last paper and finish that freakin’ essay in that state… I’ve used a few more choice words at it the last few days. Continue reading →

November 19, 2012

Things that should be published. Maybe.

Sooo… It’s still the third week of NaNoWriMo. My little colourful calendar there in the sidebar is starting to look increasingly like a game of Tetris and I’m still winning the word count. I haven’t been behind yet, except for the second day where I was technically a few hundred words behind when midnight came, but I continued writing beyond midnight and by the end of day 3 I was all caught up again. So, this is the week of the 30,000′s. And the great and scary thing at the moment? My week-threes haven’t turned up yet. You know how I said that other people suffer during week 2, they hit a block, etc., but that I suffer during week 3, because that is usually when I run out of steam? I did run out of steam a bit in week one. Well, actually I started low on steam, but now I’m pretty ~~chilled~~ chirpy. We’ll see what the rest of this week holds. I’m trying to study for English Lit and doing an assignment at the same time and it’s a bit stressful. I write English on Saturday (yes, Saturday, sometimes I hate my university) and I also have to hit 40,000 words that day. And the 3,000 word assignment is due next week. I just want to curl up on the couch and watch How to Train Your Dragon, but all of that will have to wait for December.

We’ll see. But that is not all that happened this week. I found a couple of things that are just yelling at me to hold on and keep writing and studying and creating. One of them was this tweet that appeared on my Twitter dashboard:

"You fail only if you stop writing." Ray Bradbury #writing #bradbury
—
Jennifer Persinger (@jp0473) November 12, 2012

It came at the right time. I need to continue writing, even though the odds aren’t in my favour this week. Then… Continue reading →

November 13, 2012

A NaNoWriMo scenario [cartoon]

Hi! If I’m writing this, it means I survived my first exam today! And guess what that means? I should be studying for my next one on Friday, but I have a minute now and this means cartoons! And what else would it be about than what is constantly on my mind at the moment: National Novel Writing Month? So, here’s my version of Nanotoons!

Yes, this really happens.

Here’s a tip: don’t ever name a character Vivienne if you’re going to be typing her name in a hurry. It’s the hardest name ever to type. It’s like, left hand, right hand, left hand, right hand, left hand, double right hand, left hand. Bam. But now I’ve made that mistake and I’ve got to live with it.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go write. I have 20,371 words so far and I need to hit 21,667 in one hour from now. I really don’t want to go. I’m aching all over and the last thing I want to do right now is exert myself further. It isn’t just that my arm aches from writing the exam (Though it would have been cool if the roughly 3,000 words [I'm deadly serious] I wrote in the exam today counted for NaNo. It’d give me such a boost! ), I also thought it would be a great idea to do a workout this morning because I hadn’t slept nearly enough last night and I thought it would wake my brain up. I haven’t done a proper workout since high school, under the death stare of the PE teacher… Well, it did wake my brain up. Unfortunately it also woke my muscles up. I didn’t even know you had muscles along the sides of your ribcage. Well, that’s where it mainly aches right now. You guys can tell I dropped biology as fast as I possibly could in high school and did history instead, can’t you? I’m clueless about anatomy.

I’ve put in almost 14 hours of writing so far. For the first time, I’m keeping a log book of my NaNo and it’s very interesting. I’ve also been able to monitor that my morale hasn’t been very good so far this month:

I was so sick on the 6th, with a headache that I could hardly see, let alone type. I managed 779 words though. I need to fill in today’s. It’s probably about a five.