I Need a Victory Fanfare

Or a theme song. I'll take either.

The reading went quite well yesterday. I was pretty nervous, but it's done. All the practicing sort of paid off. I still tripped over my words a bit and read too fast, but no one seemed to notice. That or they were being nice. Halfway through the reading I also got something stuck in my throat, which was quite annoying because I couldn't get enough air in to read. I think in any other circumstance I would have started laughing. Heard some great readers yesterday though. The amount of readers in the higher levels shocked me though. There were so few! At any rate, it was a fairly good time.

The party at the Auburn Saloon after was the best part though (they most certainly weren't expecting about 70 poets and writers last night). I'm going to miss our class. thankfully most of them are planning to sign up for Fiction II next year, so I'll see at least some of them again. Had a good time, talked a lot, drank beer, ate food, signed chapbooks, watched a dude pee on the side of the building right outside our window and ran around in Olympic Plaza for a bit. Good times.

I probably won't be able to write until Monday night, which saddens me some. Going to be studying for the 16th Century Literature exam...which is on Saturday...in the middle of the day. One must ask why. Sunday I'm volunteering at the Calgary Comic expo (come visit me! I'll be at admissions in the morning and on "Floor 4" in the afternoon, even though I don't really know where and what floor 4 is...). Monday I have my History exam and an interview with a prof.

So yeah. Here's a Nostalgia Chick video:



Because I felt like it.

Day Lilies

Are apparently quite edible. I am on to my final short story of the year. I finally decided on what to write about. Now I just need to write it before 2pm tomorrow.

I might want to look into better time management skills.

Our end of the year reading is tomorrow. I should be more terrified. I know I will be when I'm actually THERE, but for now all I can think about is finishing my last short story...and playing Half Life. The urge to play video games always comes at the least opportune time. Kind of like writing my novel, which by the way is well into chapter 6. I am almost finished filling in mission 2. I left it out a LONG time ago in order to write chapter 7 (which was chapter 6 until I decided mission 2 needed two parts).

I love how the story evolves on its own. I start writing with a specific goal or action in mind, and end up throwing in a giant, mechanical minotaur or an accidental journey to a garbage bay. I just make it up as I go, and the story ends up CHANGING. Half the time it screws around with my initial plans and I have to go back and change stuff. This happens with my short stories as well. I am so disorganized it's crazy...but that's half the fun. Even I don't know where a story will end up. I do have plans for the rest of the novel, but I have no idea if those end results are going to be what I predict.

I also found a lot of TYPOS and sentences that don't even make sense. I tried reading a part of chapter one out loud and this is what I came across:

“One hundred to start is enough as is, unless you think we’re going to be running marathons in the future.”
“I’ll ensure that you do unless you stop wasting my time Myra. Three hundred laps.”

WTF WAS I ON? IT MAKES NO SENSE.

I made a few updates to EGAW in the past few days. Friends of mine liked it/said it was a good idea, so I will finish it. See last post for a link, or just follow the one on the right-hand side of the page.

Toodles.

(apparently "toodles" is a shortened version of the French "à tout à l'heure". Who knew?)

I seem to have a lot of time on my hands for someone who has no time on their hands.

(I washed it off this morning.)

Revolutionary Army of TING

So, in relation to the last post, I listened to the recording of me trying to read chapter 1 of WMRR, and it was fairly hilarious. I freaked out in the middle after tripping over the words of a description and I just started laughing. Kind of shook my confidence on it a bit, because I wasn't sure if I'm a poor reader or my writing actually sucks.

I also learned that writing about the production of coins is harder than I first anticipated. Now, I'm not sure if I was the only who didn't know this, but I had no idea that most coins aren't a pure metal...they are steel discs coated with copper, nickel, sliver etc. This fact changed a large portion of my introduction. Not only that, I realized it's difficult telling the story of a penny, especially since I can't easily get into the heads of the people that encounter it...because it has a penny's perspective. So I'm not sure if it's laziness, exhaustion, confusion, worry or a lack of motivation that's stopped me from writing this so long, but I'm having issues. It's due tomorrow. I've put it off for three weeks. I can't believe I got away with it.

In other news, WMRR has ground to a full stop again. Confidence issues, time issues and laziness issues all factor in. I am quite sure now that I won't make the deadline. In fact, I know I'm not. I'm still going to try, but unfortunately I don't think I had the drive to complete it along with the other events in my life. I want so badly to finish this, and I've sworn not to start it over again. I need to push through it, even if it's horrible. I'm just so unfocused, unmotivated, busy and lazy at the same time and stressed beyond all reason to the point where I can't even remember where I was going with a sentence by the time I'm ready to finish it. Even this blog has gotten a little off topic. So while we're at it:

http://trololololololololololo.com/

oh and:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE&playnext_from=TL&videos=erNK6yFFUE8&playnext=1

Finally:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTmyLsSWksM&

Someone please save me from my madness.

Readings

For an hour and a half today no one was home but my dog and I, so I decided to practice my readings. By readings I don't mean the actual act of reading, I mean reading my work out loud. It's a lot harder than I thought it would be. Not only did I have problems properly speaking (I have trouble with the alliteration, and "s" and "th" sounds), but my throat got so sore over time that I couldn't continue my practice. Halls didn't really help either. Reading out loud helps with writing so much, because what works and what doesn't work with flow shows quite well. I particularly had problems with "tapped the touch pad". I also had issues with the word "horror", which is innocent enough on paper, but when I read it out loud it sounds like "whore"...and unfortunately the two are much too interchangeable in a sentence (one doesn't mean the other, I just mean that the sentence doesn't sound...weird with either word). I found that my voice got annoying after awhile as well. I'm sure most people find recordings of their own voice annoying, but I have an almost childish voice and I find that the tones and pitches fluctuate a lot (not as in puberty fluctuate...I mean just parts of words and sentences that start with one tone end with another tone). At any rate, I can certainly see why my Fiction Writing prof said that there can be good writing that is terrible for readings, just because of the sounds put together. One of my readings ended up fairly decent, but I got messed up at the "horror" part and started to laugh.

Also...pro tip. If you're going to do a reading, or record yourself reading, EDIT before you start. I ran into a few typos, and it threw me off so much I had to restart.

Once I get a decent reading out, I will post it here, either through YouTube or upload it directly.