Tuesday 29 October 2013

Figment: The Shoes

I finally posted a story on Figment.com. I'm not sure why, I've had the account a couple of years now so I don't really know why I thought now was a good time to finally post something on it, but there we go. Anyway, it's about the memories that are attached to certain items, it won't take two minutes of your precious time to read (literally), if you follow this link right here then please enjoy it. :)

Tuesday 22 October 2013

Wild Apparitions

I wrote this poem at my school's creative writing club and it was published in a newspaper for the schools in my local area. We were given a load of wildlife magazines and told to pick a picture of an animal and write a poem or a description about it. You can guess what animal I picked when you read the poem. I now have the picture stuck on the back of my creative writing folder (it's very pretty). I wrote this poem pretty quickly, I recall, and oddly it didn't take much editing for me to be happy with it. It isn't often I write a poem I'm happy with, no matter how much time I spend on it or how much I edit it, which is why I thought I'd share this one with everyone.

So, here is the poem:


Perhaps a memory, perhaps a dream,
From a summer long ago:
I turned around and there it was,
Its outline glinting gold.
Its body in shadow in half-light,
Its head held tall and proud –
The wolf stood high and looked at me;
Looked me up and down.


Only a moment it was there,
But forever in my mind.
When the sun glints gold that way,
I turn
And there the wolf I think I find.

Monday 21 October 2013

New Account, New Start :)

It's not really that much of a new start. It just sounded good.

So, this isn't exactly the solution I had in mind for changing the accounts on my blog, it's slightly more stressful in that I shall now have to reapply all the settings that, in my eyes, make my blog MY blog. But it's a solution. I definitely didn't just waste an entire evening doing this.

I'm not deleting my old blog (for now, I need it as a reference to get this one looking exactly the same), and you can find a link to it in the sidebar thingy on the left. I don't see why you'd want to go look at it, I have all the posts from it right here (I know! Magic!), but still.

I have changed the name of my blog again, mostly because of course there cannot be two blogs existing at the same time with the same name. So I took a step back in time to rename it the original name, "The Authoress And The Voices". Except without the "And The Voices" bit. Because I didn't like it.

Well, that's that, I suppose. Eventually I aim for this blog to look exactly like the other one, but right now I have things to do and quite frankly I've had enough of sorting out blogs today. I'll be posting the same sort of stuff as I was before: book reviews, short stories, rants, etc... So there we go. Please enjoy my blog! :) Goodnight, readers... goodnight...

GOOGLE, WHY?!

This is a little bit complicated. I created a new Google account specifically so that I could link this blog to it. Turns out, I can't do that. Unless I can. Somebody educate me please?

Basically, if Google lets me have things my way, I want to connect my blog to Google+, except that I don't particularly want to do that on this account, hence why I created a new one. I think I've linked the accounts, and I sent an invitation to my other account to be a writer on this blog. The theory behind this is that if my other account can be listed as a writer on this blog, then I can promote myself to admin, connect my blog to Google+ on my other account (because apparently blogs are so much easier to use on Google+, if you believe what Google tells you), stop blogging from this account, and voila. I have no idea if this is actually possible. I haven't got past the first stage yet. This account tells me that I have sent off the invitation for my guest writer, but my other account has no idea about it. Has it just quite simply not come through yet - and I just need to wait a bit longer? Should I try again?

I have no idea why I'm bothering to ask. It's not like anybody's actually reading this. Which was the idea behind connecting this blog to Google+, to connect more and actually get a couple of readers, because apparently Google+ is so much better.

But anyway. Long story short, if things go my way, I'll be blogging from a different account, on Google+. That account is beththewriter.librarymouse@gmail.com. I have the same picture as this one. I will be rather difficult to find, unless this blog magically shows you its followers, because I followed it in the hopes it would help my predicament. It didn't. I am also my only follower. Yay, popularity...

Tuesday 8 October 2013

NaNoWriMo

I don't know if you've heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, which is actually international), but it's an online challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in a month (specifically, the month of November). Anyone can participate, and it's free to join.

I took part in NaNoWriMo for the first time in 2010, when I was fourteen. My novel was called The Children of The Forgotten and I completed it (albeit thanks to it snowing and my school being closed towards the end of the month, so I had a couple of extra full days in which to write). It wasn't very well planned and I never managed to finish the second draft but there we go.

In 2012 I took part in Camp NaNoWriMo, which is the same thing but in the summer - like an American summer camp, but online, and for writers. That was also fun (however I believe I prefer the November event; I think because it is more well-known, so there are more people and I felt like I was part of something bigger and grander.), although again it wasn't very well planned (I began the novel on an impulse with an idea that I forced out of my head specifically so I could take part). I did finish it, but I got bored with my main character halfway through, and I'd got quite far without very much actually happening, so I killed off my annoying protagonist, threw my plotline (metaphorically) out the window, and continued the novel by following some much more interesting characters who consequently had run-ins with dancing trees, cheese-on-toast running away, people with extremely long names made of up numbers, and a disappearing donut-seller who was actually a murderer (he poisoned his donuts). It was all rather amusing, but absolutely terrible.

I also attempted NaNoWriMo in 2011 (getting little further than perhaps 5,000 words) and Camp NaNoWriMo in 2012 (I got to 41,000 words before giving up - except that I didn't give up on the idea, because I'm still working on it now. Just very, very slowly.)

Generally I'm not very happy about there being no more January examinations, because it means we have to do ALL OF THEM in the summer which just adds to the pressure (thanks a lot, like we really need that), but what it does mean is that if I have no exams in January then I don't need to spend every second of November and December revising. Which in my books can only mean one thing. NaNoWriMo. Which is particularly good because NaNoWriMo is really the only time I have ever finished a writing project that isn't a short story.

I do have an idea already prepared for this year's novel, but the likelihood is that things will get pretty random (when one has 50,000 words to write in a month and a novel with serious themes, possibly the only way to get through it is to keep oneself entertained with the occasional light-hearted and plain crazy scene. It's gonna be great.). Fingers crossed for completing it, though. :)

Sunday 6 October 2013

TO READ: Bitterblue

SPOILER ALERT FOR GRACELING

(also, click here for a series of letters between the characters of Graceling and Bitterblue set before the beginning of Bitterblue, written by Kristin Cashore)

The third instalment in Kristin Cashore's The Seven Kingdoms Trilogy is Bitterblue, set eight years after the first book Graceling and on the same side of the mountains as the aforementioned novel - in the kingdom of Monsea, where young Queen Bitterblue now rules, still attempting to help her country recover. This book most certainly has the most complicated plotline of the series, and the darkest themes as well.

Bitterblue is the coming-of-age story of a young queen struggling to find herself and to take control of a kingdom she is supposedly in charge of. Feeling disconnected from the people she rules, Bitterblue begins to sneak out into the city at night to hear stories of her late father, a corrupt king, and it is there that she meets Teddy and Saf - two young men known as truthseekers who use thievery and publishing to try and put right what they believe to be wrong in the world, although there are many who would take extreme measures to silence them. And so it is just as the web of lies set up to make her transition to the throne as a ten-year-old is beginning to fall apart that Bitterblue starts spinning her own web of lies to hide from her advisors that she is trying to uncover the truth, and to hide from her newfound friends the power she truly wields.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Bitterblue; I loved seeing characters we met in Graceling return and I very much liked how relatable the character of Bitterblue is - she might be a queen, but that doesn't mean she can't get just as annoyed and confused as the rest of us (what I would like to know is, who had she been hanging around with who would teach her to use the word "balls" as a curse word?). Of course I particularly love Cashore's writing style, and her use of humour (there are a number of brilliant quotes I could point you to which I found rather amusing). Overall, I would say that Bitterblue is my least favourite in the series - however, please consider that there are only three of them, and that they are all favourite over pretty much all other books I have read.