30 Days of Writing, Day 4 (or I'm posting again, except I'm not being contemplative and whatnot).

It's nearly midnight, which basically means I am going to hit the tired mark in about 15 minutes and start writing complete and utter nonsense.
So, because my story is sitting there glaring at me, I'm going to do another one of those quiz questions I started ages ago before assignments hit. You know, when I naively thought I could write daily without issue.
Anyway.

Describe your inspiration and message you want to bring across
For anyone who says their family is not inspiration enough, I challenge you to live a week with my family. They are fantastic, and are just absolute gems for inspiration. They also don't seem to care when I blatantly steal their qualities and smoosh them around with other qualities.
As an example of what you'd experience in my family, the following happened the other night.

SCENE: The living room.
I am on my laptop, and Mum is watching TV.
MUM: Tash, can you please type this recipe up and email it to me?
ME: Yeah, sure. To your school email or your home one?
MUM: The home one.
The recipe is typed and emailed. Mum wanders into the study where Dad is sitting.
MUM: Sweetie, did you hear anything print?
DAD: ... no.
MUM: Tashi, I don't think the recipe printed.
ME: You told me to email it to you.
MUM: Oh, yeah! That's right!
She comes back and logs into her school email.
MUM: No, honey, it's not there.
ME: It's at your home email address.
MUM: What? Why? I told you school!
Dad especially came in from the study to give her a withering stare and a "And you say we've got memory problems".


My mother is gold in general. She was on the SBS website the other night and had multiple tabs open. One of the tabs had a video that automatically played. "Tashi!" she shouted at me, panicking. "Someone is haunting my computer!"
I fell off the lounge laughing.

As for the message I want to get across, I wouldn't say there's any message I'm actively trying to convey. I don't like overly didactic texts. Seven Little Australians springs to mind here, and that text was just

I'm sure something will end up coming through and I'll end up being all horrified with myself yet won't be able to find a way to remove it.

30 Days of Writing, Day 1

Name of your current project and back story of the name


This doesn't work for me, really. Titles are never a good thing for me to figure out, and they usually come far down the track. As I don't actually have a title for my story as of yet, let's go with some previous titles I've used for other stories and why I used them, then I'll say what my story's about (or will be about) so you can get an idea about it.

• Age 6: Two Little Girls
  We begin the creative process young. Two Little Girls was, as expected, about two little girls who went on adventures. These adventures were things like trips to the zoo and whatnot - things kids get excited about in Sydney - and were carefully handwritten with accompanying drawings. My best friend at the time, Alyssa, wrote these with me. 
• Age 13: Pretty much any title involving Simple Plan/The Used/Good Charlotte/Blink 182 lyrics
  Oh, to be thirteen again. I had black hair, black clothes, a bleak life outlook and terrible taste in music. (My taste is still terrible, according to all of my friends, but I maintain Aqua is brilliant music to listen to when doing assignments. The Swedish get pop dance stuff right. Or are they Danish?) Anyway, these were mostly terrible fanfics where my main character, a thinly-veiled version of myself, would have shenanigans of some description with these bands. I am truly thankful I never discovered Fanfiction.net, otherwise I'd have a lot of explaining to do.
• Age 16: Vivir Con Miedo, Es Como Vivir A Medias
  If anyone's familiar with Australian cinema, you'll know that's a Strictly Ballroom reference. I wrote this when I was in the throes of staying at home (woo panic attacks) and I basically was watching all the Baz Luhrmann, all the time. This story was an appropriation I had to do for Extension English - we had to appropriate Frankenstein. If you feel like reading the story, it lives here. I look at my old short stories and wonder where my skill in writing creepy stories went.
• Age 17: Exotopy OR A Season Called Home
  I chose Exotopy, my tutor chose A Season Called Home. Exotopy was an interesting word I stumbled upon when researching this novella. The word literally means outsidedness. According to this website, it's also used to describe when an author 'speaks' the authentic voices of characters outside their own. This was probably my most deliberate title choice. The characters were migrants, as I've been focusing on for three years now, and for two of them, they existed by assuming identities. For Fernanda, she wanted to be a part of her family and so allowed herself to become Spanish over Australian. For Cristobal, it was the opposite. For Santiago, the outsider feeling was the dominant feeling. My tutor added the very corny Season Called Home because Extension 2 English is stupid. I had to incorporate Romanticism into it (why, why didn't I get to study life writing?) and I focused on the seasons - each character was associated with a season. Unfortunately I had to put a really obtuse reference to that in the title, because my English teacher kept nagging, my tutor became exasperated, and I let her do as she saw fit.
• Age 18: Understanding
  Back to Chilean stories. This is the first attempt at my Novel and Memoir story, except it's a short story. The title was so chosen because the second last line was something like, "One day, mi vida, you'll understand." I'll go into more detail when I explain my novel.
• Age 20: About the Toes
  A memoir piece relating to my father's toes. I went with a Sedarisy angle, and Sedaris uses quirky titles for his pieces. Okay, that's a lie. I literally couldn't think of anything else, and an hour before I submitted the assignment I tacked the title on, printed it off, and fled to the train.

Now, the novel.
Basically this novel is an extension of Understanding. It may have the same title when I get around to it, who knows. It'll revolve around Carmen, age 19, her mother's best friend, whose name escapes me (it's in my room somewhere) and this woman's son, Cristian. Rather than doing the whole woo teen love angle (I'm going to slightly cover that, if I can make it realistic), I'm going to focus more on the relationship between Carmen and her mother's friend. Carmen is basically an outsider, and I enjoy writing these ones. I found my closest relationships outside of my immediate family (such as for much of my teenager years, my grandfather was my surrogate father - due to my insanity, not my father's - and is now the person I love more than anyone in the world. He, too, was the black sheep in our family), and I find it interesting to explore the relationships that aren't typical. The woman and Carmen are similar, but different, but understanding life in the confines of a certain culture is the outcome.

So there you have it. I've also pretty much done an assignment in here - had to write a pitch for Novel and Memoir. Polish the last paragraph up and I'm done!
Muchas gracias, interwebs! 

Fates and Stars.

Occasionally, I read a book that drains me.
I can't quite describe the multiple levels it drains me on. Certainly emotional, but there's something else. A sense of awe at the words that have caused whatever my reaction is, and I need to shut myself off because they're too beautiful.
After all, you can only ever read a book for the first time once, so you might as well savour it madly.

I have just read a book, and I suppose I'm writing about it now because I've not read a book in quite some time that drained me. The Fault in Our Stars.
I started this book, and I finished it falsely to begin with. I flicked. I was stressed at the time when I received it, so I didn't want to read and fall into someone else's pain, be overwhelmed with sympathy only they deserved. Selfishly, I wanted to hold onto my own mind's worries, the ones that don't matter. The ones you know don't matter.

Today, I read it fully.
I cried.
I have cried during one other novel, and that was during a time when I cried over the Lion King and Fantastic Four.

I don't know how to describe fully what I'm feeling after reading it, but I feel less sure of things. Less sure of what matters.
I want to curl up in my bed and sleep for days, in the hopes that I'll understand whatever it is this book has caused me to feel.
I'm silently tossing up making deals with God to let me never go through what Hazel and Augustus and Isaac did, be it as a daughter or sister or girlfriend or wife or mother or grandmother or aunt or friend, and dismissing it as a futile activity.

And John Green has taken my breath away again with a book, and if I write like that one day - if I drain just one person the way his words have drained me - then my words will be a success.