anywhere was home

As soon as I finished reading The Messenger, I jumped into this one. Again, it’s another book that I’ve owned for years and just never got around to reading it. I finished it in a couple of days. It had a lot of similarities to Picoult’s other book Keeping Faith; the little girl could have been the same, there was a court case, and each chapter was a different character’s POV. It’s a story about a girl who discovers at age 30 that she was kidnapped by her father when she was 3 on a custody visit and now he’s awaiting trial for it. Parts of the jail scenes reminded me of Prison Break episodes, but they didn’t seem to eventuate. I didn’t even realise the plot problems until I checked some amazon reviews and then I found myself agreeing. There were a couple things that didn’t seem to go anywhere, but despite that, I really enjoyed the book. One annoying thing though was that each time we switched to a new character, we got a new font. One looked like Impact. It was almost as though the publisher didn’t think readers were capable of telling the difference between chapters, even though the character’s name was the chapter title. The last time I read something in Impact font was probably fanfiction in 1997.

I finished reading this one last week. It’s been sitting on my shelf for a couple months now because that’s what I do; I buy books and then I don’t read them. It had a good first chapter that hooked me in, so I bought it. Although it was first person and narrated by a 19 year old Aussie kid (hence a bit of slang) and it took me a couple chapters after that to really enjoy it, once I figured out what the story was about I enjoyed the ride. It was a feel-good book. I could tell that Marcus Zusak knows how to write, how to weave a story. Highly recommended!

Just finished reading this, took me two weeks. It was a long book, about the length of HP & Goblet of Fire. The important part is that I enjoyed reading it; even if it was about religion and divorce.

I’m trying to exchange my DVD watching time with reading time, so, today I began The Messenger, by Marcus Zusak. I’m starting with books I already own, then I’m moving onto library books / new books. I don’t want to buy any as I’m broke, so I’ll most likely read them when I’m out.

Feels like we are the only two of our kind trying to do this crazy career. It’s such a hard slog to get it done as well… but why would we want to do anything else?

This is the book plotted out into three acts. Blue papers are the points I need to have in the story and the pinks are the actual story where the points take place. Try it yourself! (in the words of Neil Buchanan from Art Attack)

who cares?

I actually learnt something in Fiction class today. The teacher began speaking about how it’s so easy for everyone to write an email or a letter, but when you sit down to write something else, it’s freakin’ hard! And when you do write something, you start waffling on about how the character woke up and what they ate, what they put on, what the sky outside looked like etc. but the point is — WHO CARES? That’s right, nobody. Your reader won’t care. Why? Because you wouldn’t start an email to a friend like that; your friend doesn’t give a hoot what you wore today or how the sky looked or what you ate for breakfast, they just want to know the juicy stuff, they want you to get right to the point! So the point is, you have to write your prose as if there’s an audience. If you’re writing in first person, you have to figure out who the heck is on the receiving end and why. The teacher also told us to start writing something in first person, but the “I” wasn’t allowed to be us, because “frankly the lot of you are boring and I don’t care about your lives”. I kid you not, he said that. But he had a point! That’s apparently the worst thing you can do: to write in first person and to make that character yourself. Anyway back to what I was talking about. So I sat down and thought, right! In my novel, who is the audience? And it came to me so quickly, I think I must have had this idea before, and then I started to write in first person as if the story was a letter that the “narrator” was writing to the audience, explaining their adventures and why they did what they did, just as if he was writing an email. And it all came out so easily. Now, I’m not going to leave it 1st person because I hate that POV but the story came out without any effort at all. Amazing… give it a try!

Scratch that last post. Changed it back to the second series again. Or an extra add-on book. I guess it’s always handy to know you’ve got something to write once your series is over. It’s just a little daunting.

Really good evening of editing and going back over an old draft. I thought this draft was going to be a future book. Turns out, it’s a prequel. I love that fact, because it means I get to work on it straight away instead of waiting a couple years to… And also because I am just in love with the story. That is so rare, to be in love with a story you wrote. That feeling inspires so much hard work, you have no idea. I hope everyone who wants to write a book some day, feels what I’m feeling right now. It makes all the slogging-it-out every day completely worth it.

Brightly dusted with a neon light

Pyrene photoshoot

“But Hogwarts IS hidden,” said Hermione, in surprise, “everyone knows that … well, everyone who’s read ‘Hogwarts: A History, anyway.”

“Just you, then,” said Ron.

Goblet Of Fire, page 148

I love these books so hard. Nick and Jane and I always make these kind of jokes and do the pause like Hermione does. Hilarious.

What a day, in which I woke up not feeling my novel anymore, then got to the coffee place and sat down with my laptop, started reading old draft which is going to be a sequel series to the novel I’m currently writing, then got so lost in what I was reading that I was excited again - only, for the wrong book series! - and then I got home, sat outside at the picnic table and edited the draft for a couple hours in the sunshine, came upstairs and got into a warm bed to draw up a big character list, and then relayed the whole thing to Katie about how I’m not feeling the current idea for some reason, which then required me to explain to her the entire plot of the current series I’m writing which exhausted me just thinking about … and once I was finally done doing that, it all came back to me and I realised what I have to do. What a day!

I think I’ve figured this novel thing out. I’ve been writing different novels for six years now and I seem to always do them differently. I used to be such a perfectionist in high school, especially because I was never prepared for anything. We’d go into an exam or a SAC (which was like an in-class timed essay) and I probably wouldn’t have even read the book. I’d spend the next two or three hours writing something, spelling would be perfect first time around and I barely had to re-read what I wrote, and I’d come out of there with an A. That’s the way I used to look at writing a book. You put something down on paper, it stays there for all eternity. You can imagine now why sometimes it seems like it’s so hard to write anything at all. Lately, I figured out the other way of doing it. I know exactly what I want to happen, I just need to lay it out on paper as it happens in my head. It’s all about drafting and redrafting and rewriting over and over again until you get it right. That’s actually kind of what I do when I draw, but there’s always a point while drawing where you just can’t erase it all and start over. You can do that when you’re writing though. I feel like a bit of a cheat when I sit down and hand-write a rambling version of what’s supposed to happen, but then I type it up and fix a couple things along the way, and then a few days later I’ll print that out and reread it and find some more things I want to fix, and I think the payoff comes when I realise that I actually didn’t write as badly as I thought I did. I’d like to believe I’m fairly good at spotting poor writing (in other people’s work), so when I’ve put something aside for a while and come back to it I tend to know exactly what is bothering me. I’m working on about four chapters at once at the moment; started with chapter 2 and then worked back to do a little of 1, now I’m drafting up 3 and 4. I feel okay about how things are going, but I’ll feel a lot better when I’ve got it printed up and double-spaced and have some full scenes to manage.

My sister Gretel, hanging out with me today in Gloria Jean’s, while we chatted to a guy named Simon who was there studying for Law exams. I’ve been to this Gloria jeans (inside Borders) only a couple times really yet the guy that works there already knows my order, and Simon’s, and we are now regulars. It’s not the most comfortable coffee shop and I prefer Starbucks but until those bastards get their act together and repopulate Melbourne with stores, GJ it is. Plus, my sister wants her job back. (for the record, I would be just as happy if Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf would put a store near us, I like them)

Chapter one is done. And by chapter one I mean it’s probably chapter three, and by done I mean it’s most likely not-done at all. I had a really good writing session today with the ipod playing at my usual coffee joint and was so in the zone that I didn’t even realise the whole album had played until it got to the end and the last song ended. Won’t say which album that was, but I do love it. Anyway, typing up the results of today’s work and it’s probably not even a whole chapter but it’s moving the story closer towards where it needs to be. This means nothing to anyone but me and possibly Katie. As much as I love writing a book, I can’t wait for it to be done already. Writing is hard. Which is a really odd thing to say, considering I write probably 8,000 words some days without even realising it’s actual fiction writing.