March 23rd

It's been a week.

Coming up to the day was a mix of trepidation and a surreal sense of repetition. My day started exactly as it did on the fifteenth of March: a two hour shift at Papanui, a two hour lunch break, and then five hours at Bishopdale. 

All the morning I was thinking: "it hadn't happened yet, it hadn't happened yet" and once I was at Bishopdale I kept glancing at the clock, trying to match the times with the corresponding events of the week before.

At half-past one we all stopped to watch the live broadcast of a two minute silence and the Islamic call to prayer in Hagley Park, which was attended by thousands of people, including some of the survivors that have recently been released from hospital. 

March 15th

You've all heard the news by now: yesterday my city was attacked by a terrorist who targeted two mosques and murdered fifty people. This is unprecedented in New Zealand, for although there have been shootings before, never at this scale and never for explicitly political/religious/racist reasons. 

Like I said on Tumblr, it feels like the end of our innocence. Whenever we saw these attacks overseas, we would inevitably tell ourselves: "that will never happen here." No more. 

In a bid to process all of this, I'm going to write down the events of the day, as they happened to me.

Christchurch Writer's Festival

This has been one of the longest weekends of my life, all thanks to the biannual Christchurch Writer’s Festival.

On Friday I was very lucky to have the opportunity to interview author Laini Taylor about her Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy. The vid is currently posted on Fantasy.Lit, so please check it out. Laini was very generous with her time and enthusiastic about her trilogy, with plenty to say about her inspiration, the creative process, and the upcoming film adaptation.

Eventually I’ll post it here as well, but I want the site to have exclusivity for a few weeks.

On Saturday I attended two panels, the first called The Truth About Writing KidLit with Gavin Bishop, Melinda Szymanik and Tania Roxborogh, and the second The Changeover: Thirty Years On with Stuart McKenzie, Elizabeth Know and Karen Healy.

The first dealt with the discussion on whether or not children’s literature should be ranked alongside adults in terms of quality and respect (yes!) and gave each of the three writers a chance to share the difficulties in writing for children – basically you have to say more but with less words.

The seminar on The Changeover was special – although this book by Margaret Mahy wasn’t a formative book of my childhood (though it was actually published the year I was born), it is a hugely important one in regards to how the supernatural can be used to accentuate characterization and theme. If you haven’t already, please read it.  

Plus I found out that a film adaptation is in the works, which was news to me!

An amusing thing happened immediately prior: a woman approached me and said: “hi” only to blink and realize I wasn’t who she thought I was, covering her mistake with: “I’m glad you’re here!” before fleeing. Turns out she was Karen Healy, a speaker at the second panel.

And on Sunday I attended Supernaturally with Laini Taylor and Elizabeth Knox, moderated by my friend Helen Lowe, which was filled with insight, compliments, and the inevitable Twilight discussion. Now this I can share with you:

The rest on this playlist.

And yes, if you watch both this and my Laini Taylor interview you’ll notice that the presence of beverage holders threaten to overthrow both recordings – first a disposable coffee cup and then a water jug. Let’s pretend they have thematic significance as symbols of creativity and replenishment (there’s only so much I can do with a Tablet).

And finally I attended Beyond the Veil: Historical Ghost Stories, with Diane Setterfield, Rosetta Allan and Coral Atkinson, admittedly because I wanted to hear Diane Setterfield, author of The Thirteenth Tale (though I’m certainly going to track down the published work of the others).

I even summoned up the courage to ask her what she thought of the BBC adaptation of her novel (she liked it, and said it was the closest she’d ever get to seeing inside the mind of a reader considering it was a creative endeavour that was more-or-less completely outside her control).

There were a lot of familiar faces there; I ran into my MA supervisor and my old high school English teacher, and was pleasantly gratified that both of them recognised me. I chatted to a few nice people and came home feeling re-galvanised in regards to my own creative efforts – which is naturally the main point of any such festival.

Which also means I’ve entered my most recent manuscript for the Tessa Duder Award, a New Zealand based competition for YA books. I don’t hold out much hope for actually winning, but at this stage it’s all about just getting your work out there.

Greetings...

Yes, it would appear that I finally have a blog. I’m not entirely sure what took me so long – perhaps it’s the steady realization that LiveJournal has reached the end of its lifespan and Tumblr formatting still hasn’t found a way to allow for decent conversational threads. So here I am.

And here’s what to expect:

Painfully optimistic updates on the progress of my own writing. I have a number of finished manuscripts and am currently trying to find representation for the latest one (aren’t we all) and keeping a record of the process feels like the grownup thing to do. Or the professional thing. Take your pick. Depending on how it goes, I may well end up posting extracts or full chapters of my work here in the hopes of generating some interest.

Reviews for various books, films and television shows that I enjoy.

The Snow White Project. This is something I’ve been planning to do for years now. Given that Snow White is my favourite fairytale, I’ve been organizing a marathon of all the Snow White related films with the intention of examining how each one deals with the basic setup of the story and its various components. I want to examine every character, every plot element, every innovation made by each film and see how they relate to each other and the original Grimms fairytale. I’ve already done some preliminary reading, and there’s some fascinating stuff about the symbolism of the old story (three drops of blood, the seven dwarfs, the tempting apple) which I can’t wait to start comparing to the more modern filmic updates. Then comes the fun part: judging which adaptation did it best.

Commentary on various tropes. This is another project I’ve been planning to do for a while. Like many, I suffer from a TV Tropes addiction. You’ve been there. You know what it’s like to start scrolling through a page of their extensive database only to look up and find that five hours have passed. For your own safety, I won’t provide a link. But one thing I’ve always loved about the site is its Most Triumphant Example page, where tropers add what they think is the most quintessential example of any given trope. Since I love playing around with the building blocks of storytelling, I’m going to start making my own lists of the best examples of my favourite tropes. This one might take a while to turn up (and may yet appear on Helen Lowe’s blog – see below), but stay tuned.

Cute pictures of my niece and nephew (my BFF’s children).  

Links to other sites, particularly FantasyLiterature.Com (where I’m a reviewer) and On Anything Really, the blog of my friend Helen Lowe (where I contribute articles in the Big Worlds on Small Screens feature).

I’ll be keeping most of my fan-fiction on LiveJournal, though to be honest, that’s only because there’s only one story in the works: an oft-delayed BBC Robin Hood fic that I’m committed to finishing, but can never find the time to really work on. However, I never start something I didn’t intend to finish, and hopefully my gradual shift here will allow LiveJournal to remain the platform for those still clinging on to hope that it might one day be updated. Which it will. Eventually. But you won’t have to worry about that here.

So there you have it. That’s the purpose of this blog and hopefully one that I can keep updating on a regular basis.


And for those who have just tuned in: here is my LiveJournal and here is my Tumblr. See you around!