Homework and Rag Dolls

I have felt my creative flair rather flattened lately by suddenly having a wave of homework and assignments. I always thought that spending hours doing schoolwork was a discision you had to make at some point in high school, but I have just woken up one day and realised that I'm putting in two or more hours of work most nights...

And the funny thing is, I love it!! I simply hate the feeling of being bored so much that feeling busy is bliss compared to it! Yay!

I had to perform a piano piece for class today. It went better than I thought it would, but I still stumbled over a section and missed the second last note. Haha... it was all good fun though!

I really want to make something right now, and seeing a sort of rag-doll that my friend had created inspired me to make one too! Although i have very limited fabrics... I had thought I should make various costumes and stuff, but I'd be lucky to find fabric enough to make the doll and perhaps two outfits. And last time I attempted making a doll of that sort... well, let's just say that fraying is just about my most hated aspect of sewing.

I haven't really had much time to visit my geurilla knitting... it would be nice if my dad stopped spilling the beans about who's been putting all the knitting up to our neighbours though. It's supposed to be annonomus!!! The day my parents realised it was me putting it up (the first day I tried), I knew I'd only ever recieve about a third of the pertential thrill in doing it.

I appologise for all the appaling spelling mistakes in this post, but I have been exposed as this doesn't seem to put red squiggly lines under spelling errors anymore... :( alas, my spelling est very poor.

Knitting

Well, I'm not a state winner for the Novella Competition, but I still stand a chance of being a shortlisted or "highly recommended" participant. Doesn't it defeat the purpose if they choose who was shortlisted AFTER choosing the state winners though? Strange...

Anyway, today I took a walk with a had and dark sunglasses and stood next to a particular pole, and waiting around suspiciously for everyone in sight to disappear. Who would guess that a Sunday morning would have so many people taking a walk?? After about five minutes waiting, I gave up and took out my 2m long piece of knitting and started sewing it up with trembling hands. After a few stitches however, I started to quite enjoy myself. I loved it every time someone walked past, probably giving me shifty looks and wondering what on earth I was doing, but were too scared to ask. I just kept sewing away, ignoring everyone. One nice man asked me what I was doing, but before I could actually work out what I really was doing (i still have no idea) he suggested it was art, and I agreed. He told me all about his wife and how she likes quilting and thought my little piece was quite nice and bright, and then he went on. As he walked away, I thought about how I would never EVER have such a nice conversation like that with a stranger, and decided I want to try and do more of this geurilla knitting in the future as I enjoyed the whole thing so much.

Doesn't look 2 metres, does it?? Well, I think it was a bit short of it because I was beginning to worry how long I would have to stand there sewing it up... I think in the end it took nearly half an hour, but I loved every minute of it.

I was very impressed with how this bit turned out. "Llama was here" I did that whole little bit in just over half an hour. I drew out the words lightly with pencil, then stitched over them, and then folded back the edges and sewed it onto the knitting. Now everyone can know that Llama who made the first piece made the second one too :)

Back to School

If Chloe or Liz reads this, HI!

Lol

Anyway, I have been back at school for nearly a complete fortnight, and have not written a single word of my story I started in the holidays :( and I was quite bored last night, I guess I didn't think of writing it...

But I had to write a short story for English. That was fun. I killed off the main character, then realised that I was about 400 words over the 500 word limit, so I had to cut that bit out ~ haha. Ah well. I've never had such an editing-out task before... Very hard to choose what has to go.

I hope to be posting it, and the alternative ending on my site elizabethdanara.mysite.com soon.

Also, drawing-wise, we've finally been doing pencil drawings in art class, so I can finally actually feel good at art :D I need to find darker pencils... anyone know what that spray stuff is called for drawings so they don't smudge??

Aaron Finder

Recently, my head has been filled with the character Aaron Finder. I have heard it said before that an author lives through their character and can feel their emotions, and I have proved it to myself yet again by creating this character. Whenever I conjure up emotions to write about them, I find I am suddenly feeling the emotions in a very real way and am left angry for no apparent reason except that Aaron is in my story, or lonely because Aaron is.

I still hate the last name Finder, but I simply adore the character. I said in my last blog entry that I had no inspiration. But, I have started a children's series of somewhat-fantasy, starring Aaron Finder who is trying to find his Dad (hense why I don't like the name Finder - cause he is a finder, in a sense :S it's a bit lame... and unintentional)

Anyway, I have been fully immersed in the story in a way that I haven't been for a very long time. Plus, if I have been successfully chosen to be a state winner in the Somorset Competition, I shall be hearing so in the next week - but if I was a successfully short-listed or didn't do well at all, I shall be hearing the week after. Fingers crossed!!! Once I hear how I have done in this competition, I shall finally take action towards sending this new book to a publisher (after finishing and editing etc of course)

Meanwhile, my site elizabethdanara.mysite.com is having a bit of a re-vamp. I designed advertisements for it about a whole year ago, and have decided to finally start advertising it.

I shall write again soon after I hear news on the competition...

Failing........

Right now, all my writing attempts are trashy.

So I thought, why don't I go back to drawing, which I used to do all the time but haven't done for like a whole year?

Well, I tried that out too, but my drawing style seems to have failed too... unless I have such little confidence that when I started drawing a head and neck, I despaired and scrunched it up and pronounced myself an incapable drawer.

I HAVE NO INSPIRATION!!!!!!!!!!!

One has to wonder if this is due to the fact that I haven't watched any movies (or at least what I would justify as a real movie) in the last few months. Usually it's in the middle of a good movie that I get my inspiration for a story or a picture...

Anyway, I've decided that I want to go back to traditional fantasy, which I have been too scared to write for a long time now as I often get (perhaps by invisible people in my mind) criticised for it, and so I try to write realism and it fails miserably.

I had thought this long 2-month holiday would give me heaps of time to write a lot. Well, it's coming to an end and all I've written was a couple of pages that really weren't working. Perhaps returning to my busy school life will give me more to do and think about?

Hmmm............

How can I write fantasy that is not cliché? Is it possible? And could I write fantasy that doesn't have magic, or at least the main characters dont have it?? cause im sick of magic

Scrapped and Started

The story I started recently was going quite well - although I felt a strange conviction that what I was writing was a bad idea, and so I am sorry to say I have scrapped that idea. I always keep my attempts at writing, and I now read over what I wrote fondly, but refuse to continue.

Meanwhile, I have been musing over the subjects of abortion and what happens to babies that die and where life really begins and all that. I have had the inspiration to write about someone who knows their unborn baby cannot survive, and the process they go through of deciding what to do and how to react. A more morbid storyline than what I usually write about, and I have no idea if it will work at all. Generally I can tell if a story is going to work by the time I have written only a page or two of it, and seeing if the characters are easily usable, so I shall see if this works.

Generally when I start a story I begin by mapping out the characters. I flip through baby-name books to get some ideas, and then draw rough pictures of the main characters and write up some notes on them. Then I might right down a few ideas for where the story is going to go, and then I get started pretty quickly on the first part of the story to see if it'll work.

What attracts me to this new story is that for the first time - ever, I think - I have come up with a storyline that is not based on any other book or movie!!! And I really have no idea what is gonna happen in it...

Life is pretty slow at the moment. A lot of reading, as I am trying to finish my 1000 page Obernewtyn #5 book I've been reading for a year and a bit. After five books in a series of torment, it's finally getting interesting! I knew 21 years of writing would eventually pay off for the writer.

New Writing

I has this idea for a novel for a long time, but I thought it sounded too intimidating to write. Plus I can't write romance to save myself, which would be a main feature of the story. I thought I was terrible at writing non-fantasy, but in the end it was my competition story which made me decide to write it. Half of that story was non-fantasy, and I think it worked quite well, so I'm giving this one a go.

And I seriously need to try and force myself to write in discription :( i just wanna let the reader imagine it themselves, but it means the setting is almost non-existent!

Meanwhile, inspired by one of my sister's books on yarn bombing, I decided to give it a shot myself. I went for a walk around the block, and found a nice chair that no-one ever sits on, and making sure no-one was looking, I quickly measured it. I then went home, and in a few hours I had created some knitting to my own made-up pattern. The name reads "Llama" and a smiley face, and I realised through this that I need to develop my sewing letters skills more as both my parents walked past it, stopped and said, "this looks suspiciously like something she would make....." but couldn't read the letters.

Also, I didn't measure it well enough as I was try to get away as quickly as possible, and so it was far too bit and the seam bulges out quite a lot.