Well that little resolution went down the tubes didn't it?
Ah well, another day, another Tuesday looming on the horizon like a big black cloud. I'm taking a fruit-salad with me onto campus tomorrow, in the vain hope that some jazzy mango and grapefruit will lift my mood when I reach that crunch point at about 4 in the afternoon when I still have two hours till I go home and I've run out of inane questions to ask my friend Stefano - for example: "You are an alien - what colour alien would you like to be?"
I chose lime green with orange spots, which I think overall, would be rather fetching. Stefano, as you might imagine, looked at me as if I had found new depths of strangeness from which to mine and said nothing. I often get that from him, or just looks of deep perplexity and worry, accompanied by rather girly shrieks of "What???". I'm just kidding - they aren't quite shrieks...they just happen to be a bit girly.
Today I wrote the major part of a letter to my Grandmother, who I call Mutti for reasons best known to myself. I love my Mutti - she is, to my mind, one of the great people of this earth, and her opinions of my writing in particular, I care for most in the whole world. She wrote to me last week with her thoughts on a short story that I had written and asked her to read, and she was really positive. I also got back the proofreaders comments and critique, which was very exciting, and I'll get to work on the redraft soon.
It is February, and I am holed up in my room, in bed, with my laptop, listening to the coming of the Second Flood outside my window. If anyone feels like building an Ark, please let me know, and I'll join them, honestly.
I haven't written anything in a while, and it's become a bit unsettling. I hope Reading Week will give me at least some chance to start scrabbling with the red pen of doom.
Monday, 4 February 2008
Tuesday, 15 January 2008
Two - Almost like Tue in Tuesdays but not quite.
In my opinion, humble and honest as it is: Tuesdays should be burnt at the stake like Joan of Arc for the mad heretics they are. Although Joan of Arc was found innocent at her retrial after she was dead - how nice for her. Anyway, Tuesdays. The Boomtown Rats (Who? I hear you say, and yet oddly I refuse to answer.) don't like Mondays, apparently, but I honestly think they should reconsider the pure evil that is Tuesday.
Admittedly, it's not really that bad, it just happens to be horrifically drawn out. Between Italian Grammar lectures and the like there are hours of wasted and yet impossible not to waste time. It is, quite truly, maddening, and seeing as I don't have far to go on that count, I should probably do something about it. Still, as one particularly gnome-like of my friends was so kind as to point out today, we only have eight more of them left before the end of term and then next year, when I'm in Italy, it won't matter quite so much if my Tuesdays are rubbish because I'll just think: Hey, what does it matter...I'm in ITALY.
Hopefully I'll be in Florence, although today I found out that that's not as certain as I'd hoped it was, and am slightly panicking. What if I end up in Lecce? I'm not even entirely sure where Lecce is! All my plans were based on the fact that Pisa airport is near to Florence and Easyjet flies from Bristol to Pisa and Bristol Airport is quite clearly the best airport in the world, and it's close to Bath so I can visit Bill and panic panic panic.
There's nothing I can do about it just now, as irritating as that is.
One of the reasons I started this blog, apart from the fact that I found LiveJournal confusing and unrewarding, was to foster a new style of writing. Considering the fact that my diary, like most diaries, is really just a prolonged whinge about my life and lack of major success, I wanted to develop a more interesting and imaginative non-fiction style, in the hopes that one day (my year abroad perhaps?) I might have something worth writing about in it.
On a more alarming note I am today sending my short story, of which I am very proud, to a proofreader. Never before in my life have I had to PAY people to read my work (excluding September's competition) and now I'm slightly worried and out of pocket at the same time. I am, however, in the belief that it will be worth it.
Let's hope eh?
Admittedly, it's not really that bad, it just happens to be horrifically drawn out. Between Italian Grammar lectures and the like there are hours of wasted and yet impossible not to waste time. It is, quite truly, maddening, and seeing as I don't have far to go on that count, I should probably do something about it. Still, as one particularly gnome-like of my friends was so kind as to point out today, we only have eight more of them left before the end of term and then next year, when I'm in Italy, it won't matter quite so much if my Tuesdays are rubbish because I'll just think: Hey, what does it matter...I'm in ITALY.
Hopefully I'll be in Florence, although today I found out that that's not as certain as I'd hoped it was, and am slightly panicking. What if I end up in Lecce? I'm not even entirely sure where Lecce is! All my plans were based on the fact that Pisa airport is near to Florence and Easyjet flies from Bristol to Pisa and Bristol Airport is quite clearly the best airport in the world, and it's close to Bath so I can visit Bill and panic panic panic.
There's nothing I can do about it just now, as irritating as that is.
One of the reasons I started this blog, apart from the fact that I found LiveJournal confusing and unrewarding, was to foster a new style of writing. Considering the fact that my diary, like most diaries, is really just a prolonged whinge about my life and lack of major success, I wanted to develop a more interesting and imaginative non-fiction style, in the hopes that one day (my year abroad perhaps?) I might have something worth writing about in it.
On a more alarming note I am today sending my short story, of which I am very proud, to a proofreader. Never before in my life have I had to PAY people to read my work (excluding September's competition) and now I'm slightly worried and out of pocket at the same time. I am, however, in the belief that it will be worth it.
Let's hope eh?
Monday, 14 January 2008
Post the First - Why green is good, and LiveJournal is bad.
Actually I think I've summed up my post in my title, and now I don't think I'll bother.
On the other hand, why not? As a writer I should always be able to ramble incoherently on some point or another, and hopefully do it in a none too disinteresting manner. That is the theory at least.
LiveJournal doesn't work. Or rather, it doesn't for the likes of me. I find the whole joining groups thing confusing, and whenever I look at my friends' blogs (In six months of LiveJournal I have made only four friends, one of whom is an alternate blog for myself) I wonder if I am writing the right sort of thing. No more. No more wondering how that crazy site works, no more confusion. The whole point of this blog is to write, to voice (or rather type) my thoughts about odd things that strike, and my general uphill struggle to be published.
And so biography. This is me. In particular this is a photo of me taken this summer in Rome by my boyfriend Bill. Interestingly this photo was taken mere seconds before Bill broke his glasses for what felt like the hundredth time on our trip. I'd show you what he looks like with his glasses half hanging off his face, but I am reliably informed that he would kill me if I did. (Please note: The previous sentence was a poor attempt at a joke, Bill is no murderer, nor woman-beater either.) We spent three weeks travelling through Italy, ostensibly because I am in the process of learning the language (Very....very...slowly.), but mainly because Bill wanted an excuse to eat pasta and or pizza everyday for three weeks. I am (and I find this considerably worrying), nearly twenty, a university student and a writer as yet unpublished with the exception of the internet. If you google me, you will find an array of me related references the majority of which I find mildly embarrassing, but then such is the problem of using the same username for everything, and not knowing enough about the sites you use to work out how to delete your profile. I think some sites purposefully hide the delete function, so you can never do it. Curse internet immortality!
In some senses it would be right to say that I want to be a writer, but that is not strictly true. The truth about it all is that I am a writer, and have been since a moment in my school library when I was eleven. Other people played sport or paid attention in class, while I scribbled in my notepad under the desk, and quite often got told off for it. You see, the problem in those days was that I wasn't able to multi task - if I had been, I might have noticed when people asked me questions and not had my notebooks confiscated quite so often. The reason I am not quite a writer in the strictest sense, is that nobody that doesn't know me has ever read any of my original work, and I have never been published. (The two are not always the same thing. My Uncle Peter for example wrote a hilarious autobiography called 'Granny knows best', which ran to four editions and which he published himself. I really loved this book, it made me laugh so much, and I wish that my Uncle were still alive for me to tell him that it was a glorious festival of lovable cliche written by a man who led an extraordinary life.)
Now, eight years on from my library epiphany, I am still struggling, still learning, and above all still working to fulfil my ambition. (I don't want to say dream.) At every stage I feel I have improved, even though I have never been taught, and the only criticism I have ever received from outside my sphere of friends was from a Judge in a competition I entered last September, in which I was described as 'atrociously obscure' - a truly wonderful phrase in a critique which had me laughing for, quite literally, weeks. The story to which she was referring is currently one of my editing projects, and good grief, she was right.
So, I have a long way to go, but I'm far too stubborn to give up on this now, and I honestly can't imagine doing anything else/more useful with my life. We'll see how it turns out...
--Amanda
P.S. I like green.
On the other hand, why not? As a writer I should always be able to ramble incoherently on some point or another, and hopefully do it in a none too disinteresting manner. That is the theory at least.
LiveJournal doesn't work. Or rather, it doesn't for the likes of me. I find the whole joining groups thing confusing, and whenever I look at my friends' blogs (In six months of LiveJournal I have made only four friends, one of whom is an alternate blog for myself) I wonder if I am writing the right sort of thing. No more. No more wondering how that crazy site works, no more confusion. The whole point of this blog is to write, to voice (or rather type) my thoughts about odd things that strike, and my general uphill struggle to be published.
And so biography. This is me. In particular this is a photo of me taken this summer in Rome by my boyfriend Bill. Interestingly this photo was taken mere seconds before Bill broke his glasses for what felt like the hundredth time on our trip. I'd show you what he looks like with his glasses half hanging off his face, but I am reliably informed that he would kill me if I did. (Please note: The previous sentence was a poor attempt at a joke, Bill is no murderer, nor woman-beater either.) We spent three weeks travelling through Italy, ostensibly because I am in the process of learning the language (Very....very...slowly.), but mainly because Bill wanted an excuse to eat pasta and or pizza everyday for three weeks. I am (and I find this considerably worrying), nearly twenty, a university student and a writer as yet unpublished with the exception of the internet. If you google me, you will find an array of me related references the majority of which I find mildly embarrassing, but then such is the problem of using the same username for everything, and not knowing enough about the sites you use to work out how to delete your profile. I think some sites purposefully hide the delete function, so you can never do it. Curse internet immortality!In some senses it would be right to say that I want to be a writer, but that is not strictly true. The truth about it all is that I am a writer, and have been since a moment in my school library when I was eleven. Other people played sport or paid attention in class, while I scribbled in my notepad under the desk, and quite often got told off for it. You see, the problem in those days was that I wasn't able to multi task - if I had been, I might have noticed when people asked me questions and not had my notebooks confiscated quite so often. The reason I am not quite a writer in the strictest sense, is that nobody that doesn't know me has ever read any of my original work, and I have never been published. (The two are not always the same thing. My Uncle Peter for example wrote a hilarious autobiography called 'Granny knows best', which ran to four editions and which he published himself. I really loved this book, it made me laugh so much, and I wish that my Uncle were still alive for me to tell him that it was a glorious festival of lovable cliche written by a man who led an extraordinary life.)
Now, eight years on from my library epiphany, I am still struggling, still learning, and above all still working to fulfil my ambition. (I don't want to say dream.) At every stage I feel I have improved, even though I have never been taught, and the only criticism I have ever received from outside my sphere of friends was from a Judge in a competition I entered last September, in which I was described as 'atrociously obscure' - a truly wonderful phrase in a critique which had me laughing for, quite literally, weeks. The story to which she was referring is currently one of my editing projects, and good grief, she was right.
So, I have a long way to go, but I'm far too stubborn to give up on this now, and I honestly can't imagine doing anything else/more useful with my life. We'll see how it turns out...
--Amanda
P.S. I like green.
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