Shadows Land

Hi everyone,
Sorry, due to the madness that is year 12 I have again been away for a while, however as a result of this difficult high school time I have got a few creative products of my work to share with you including the video below, Shadow's Land.
The video was my drama individual study, which I chose to do over the group performance, aka I was a bit mental. This has taken me blood, sweat and tears to complete, but it was worth it. Note, though the work, settings, and ideas are all mine, the music on this video was not, I give credit to Roberto Jonata and The Piano Guys for their wonderful compositions.

Personal Post

Its been a fun week for me this week. Back at school, and trying to get good grades in year twelve while fighting a Science Fiction addiction and keep writing. Currently I am working on turning my novella, Space Bird into a full length novel. So right now my head is filled with tall white snowy creatures, flying whales and the challenge of trying to achieve the perfect masculine-feminine balance in a proud alien hermaphrodite (some sneaky advertising there).

The problem (or benefit) is that my stories keep bleeding into whatever shows I'm currently watching or books I'm currently reading until they become a strange, elaborate fan fiction. I won't go into details, but the truth is it has helped me develop further interest in my own stories, understand my own characters and come up with new ideas by exercising my creativity this way. So in all it has been a very imaginative and enjoyable inside my head this week. Currently I am still trying to come up with a new name for the story, Space Bird isn't quite working for me - wish me luck!

Music Video

I'll Forget You - Music Video

Sia and Lior

Recently I've been doing work on short films and shadow puppetry in drama and this caught my eye. It may not be strictly literary art, but it is wonderful, creative and inspiring art none the less, and the song is beautiful. The puppeteer is, I believe, Stephen Mushin, and his craftsmanship is gorgeous, so please enjoy!

Publishing and Getting Noticed

My new advice for people who want to publish - enter competitions.
I recently won the state selection for the somerset national novella competition, and as a result my love of writing has doubled and my confidence as a writer has been reborn. Thanks to this experience I'll have a contact at penguin who's an editor and can look at my work, and even if I hadn't won, writing that novella was a great experience.
Competitions are a great idea because getting yourself noticed over other authors is really all you want. You want a publishing agency to look at you and see someone who will put in the effort to make the book sell (and that's a fair bit of effort, I assure you). So you do have to prove your persistence and passion for writing for them to want you. Competitions are a great way to show this, practice your skills and try out new ideas, and they provide a reason to write (who doesn't love that?).
Because of this novella competition I got to attend the Somerset Literary festival, and there got so much wonderful advice from many authors, like sending in work to literary magazines, or never selling your copy write and using Twitter and Goodreads to build a platform for yourself and your work - a process I am steadily making headway on.
Just attending literary festivals is a wonderful thing, and you can ask the authors themselves what they did to get themselves published. Even if entering competitions and going to these places don't get you noticed, they will help build your skills and help you become a better writer. That, and honestly, the festivals especially, they're a lot of fun.

Happy Writing!

Light Dreamer

Cheeks be laden with crusted salt

eyes the colour of rain

oh, but to see the sunshine.

She sits upon the common sheets

so late this hour she keeps

and from the open window across from her

and through the fabric cast aside

gentle fingers sift through the glass

between where charging beams would mount

to cast the shadow on the wall.

Still, the shepherd's breath,

painted be her thoughts

captured, kept a moment

lain to waste with the morning sun

and renewed for the glory of the night.

Unending for tears wept

and forgotten. 

My 10 Tips for Writing

1. If you find that you have a story in your mind, and that it you loose all motivation to write it after the first few lines try finding a story or idea in your mind that's still developing, develop it as you write your first draft. This avoids you having a developed story grow boring, like a movie you've already seen twenty times before in your head. You don't want to grow tired of your story before before you reach the second chapter.
2. Allow room for change. Sometimes great ideas will come halfway through writing your story.
3. When you hit a block, try skipping ahead. Remember, you can bridge sections later.
4. Or, in a block, try to develop a new character or add depth to a current character. Add a layer in and write it out properly, integrating it into the draft.
5. Gain a proper, in-depth understanding of all your characters, the more real and believable they are, the more engaging it is for the reader.
6. Make them real, with faults, and don't simply try to live through them, make them different from yourself, but close enough so you can write them truthfully (check with Mary Sue test)
7. You don't have to have solid themes beforehand, it's great if you do but otherwise, once you're part way through check what themes are developing naturally. You can then choose whether to work form them and/or to keep them running through the book.
8. You also don't have to make themes to obvious, and you can have more than one, you can have several main themes and others in the background, remember, the more well thought-out and in-depth layers you have to you work, the more interesting it is.
9. Read your book out loud to yourself to check your writing, and read parts backwards, sentence by sentence to check them, (reading backwards helps prevent you from reading what you think is there and helps you read each word objectively).
10. Lastly, write fearlessly. Remember that writing is power, you can always come back and change your work, but the more you write the better at it you will become naturally. Also, cultivate your mind, look at how other writers write, find new material and be unafraid to try new things out in your writing.

School and Creativity

ted.com

I love this video, not to put down great subjects like math, science and english (especially english) and people who are good at them, but its great to think about schooling in this different way. Like many Ted talks, it's just very interesting. This guy Ken Robinson has done several books on finding talent and is great to watch.