Melbourne Writers Festival 2013: 22 August - 01 September

I am excited to be living in Melbourne, as it means that I have greater access to the Melbourne Writers Festival events this year.

In particular, I will be taking advantage of the numerous free events whenever I don't have classes, including the First Nations Australia Writers event, which I hope to use as a part of my news story assignment for my journalism unit. I was able to do something similar last trimester by combining a journalism new story assignment with my attendance of an event held by the Emerging Writers Festival. I attended and reported on the EWF poetry cafe event back in May, at which I had a chance to see Randall Stephens and Maxine Beneba Clarke read some of their works aloud to an audience.

Scrolling through the list of free events MWF is hosting, I noticed that Maxine Beneba Clarke is launching her new collection Nothing Here Needs Fixing, so I might try and make it to that event too. Of course, I've made a huge list of events I'd like to go to that are being hosted by the MWF this year, and I've got my fingers crossed that I'll be able to make it to most of them. I'll surely be taking advantage of the fact that living in Melbourne means I have better access to all sorts of writerly events and festivals.

In other news, I had some of my high-school friends from the year-level below me contact me earlier this week to ask for help and advice on one of their tests in literature, regarding the need to write an imaginative piece which mimics the style of Haruki Murakami in his collection of short stories after the quake. Some of you who were with me last year might recall how in love with Murakami and this collection of short stories I was when we studied it. Apparently, the literature teacher read my piece to them as an example, because I got 100% on this piece. I was really flattered to find this out and even more so that a couple of the current students would contact me for advice. So I'm hoping they all did well and I secretly wish I'd been sitting that test with them, because it was so much fun and I'd literally take any excuse to study Haruki Murakami again. They all think I'm crazy, but I swear it's not a bad thing!

Last of all, I believe the mid-trimester break couldn't have come at a better time. It's not QUITE half-way through the trimester, but I am once again sick and looking forward to the next week of recovering, catching up on Breaking Bad, writing, and getting some assignments done (by which I mean procrastinating...). So I don't get to officially learn anything this week, though I'm sure I'll gain some sort of new knowledge without being in a classroom.

Any Aussies out there going to the Melbourne Writers Festival? Any other festivals on out there that my fellow bloggers are attending? Past success come back to haunt you? Up to date with Breaking Bad? Assignments? Let me know what's going on with YOU! 

- Bonnee.

Rainbow Highlighters Make EVERYTHING Better

I'm still alive, nobody panic! I've just been studying (procrastinating) and completing practice exams despite the fact that the past two weeks have been school holidays. My real final exams are less than a month away, and wow, where did the time go? I am so nervous, but so excited. Cannot wait to be finished with high-school!

Anyway, I brought my awesome packet of highlighters into my English and Literature practice exams because I knew there were passages we'd have to read and analyse and write an essay for... It wasn't quite as fun on the English exam, but I went to town and had a ball with the Literature exam :) 

Let's just say, the exam paper was a lot more colourful when I gave it back than it was when they'd first given it to me. 

What's everyone else been up to? Writing much?

- Bonnee. 

Writer's Update: 100%

First of all, I'd like to apologize for being absent from blogspot for the last little while. I'll come and read peoples blogs again soon!

Secondly, I'm proud to announce that I finished reading In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. While it was really had to get into, I ended up thoroughly enjoying it. I am studying this non-fiction novel for literature. It's the last text we study this year, and I will be doing a close analysis on it and some of William Blake's poetry on the exam. I'll recommend this book. There is a lot of seemingly unnecessary detail, but it's all part of the style and Capote's aim to communicate the facts of the Clutter family and their murderers.

Next, I'd like to brag: Remember how I mentioned that for my literature assessment after studying Haruki Murakami's short stories from the collection after the quake, I had to write a short story mimicking his style? Well, I got my results yesterday. I got 100% and I was over the moon about it. Literally did a bit of a happy dance and almost cried. Ha ha :)

In other news, I wrote another chapter of Katherine, accepted the fact that I need to put Evergreen away until I have more time to concentrate on the edits and started writing a new fanfiction for the first time in like, two years. Any Avatar: The Last Airbender fanfic readers out there? The link to my FanFiction.Net profile is in the Find Me tab.

That's all this little author has to share for now. What has everyone else been up to? Promising to come and read everyone else's blog soon!

- Bonnee.

Writing Like Another Writer - Murakami

My apologies for not being around to post or follow other people's blogs recently. I'm caught up with school and a performance of Oleanna which I'm starring in with one of my brilliant teachers and friends.

Meanwhile, in my Literature class, our assessment task is to write a short story that could fit in with the other short stories in after the quake by Haruki Murakami. In preparation, we were given the task of choosing one of the minor characters and writing something from their point of view, 600-800 words. The point is to try and adopt Murakami's style as best we can. My practice short story was about Frog from Super-Frog Saves Tokyo and it's set before the original short story.

It proved to be a bit of a challenge to me. I don't usually write out a plan for short stories; that's something I usually only do for chapter-length work. But it was a requirement for the class. Then there was sticking to the word limit. I'll say now, my practice story was NOT 600-800 words. It was over 1000. But my teacher said that was okay, it's just as long as when we do the assessment, I am able to write the full story within the time-limit (which is normally around 100 minutes).

What I found most challenging was trying to adopt the style of another writer. It's easy enough to start and end a short story suddenly. It's something many authors do with their short stories. But Murakami only describes certain things about the characters and we only really meet them at first on a surface level. Everything else he writes is really to the point and he doesn't pretty anything up. He writes about things as they are and it really pulls the reader in.

I think the actual assessment task will be much easier. I get to make up a character and a story myself, instead of using something Murakami has already made. I'm actually a little bit excited for this :)

Have you ever tried to write like another writer? How did you find it? 

- Bonnee.

Latest Readings

For my yr 12 English and Literature classes, I had to do a little bit of reading over the past school holidays.

First of all, English. We read The Crucible by Arthur Miller. The play was interesting, and some quotes really stood out to me. I'd already seen a movie-version of the play a couple of years ago and had a better understanding of some of the action in the play because of that. We were given 80 comprehension questions and told to do 60 before we came back to school. I may have overdone my homework and done the extra 20. Why not? I had the book there in front of me, and I was reading it. We watched the movie in class this week, and it was interesting to see how the play was adapted into a different medium. The task for studying The Crucible is a context response (just like when I read The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif by Najaf Mazari earlier this year), so we have also been learning about the real events in Salem during the witch trials in 1692. It's been pretty interesting. I'm not too keen on context responses, but I'll kick butt and get an awesome grade because I want to. 

In Literature, we were told to read after the quake, a series of short stories by Haruki Murakami, set after the Kobe earthquake in 1995. Oh my God. I LOVE them. They are strange. They are weird and they are different and he manages to bring some element of sex into all six short stories, but he does a damn good job of it! I LOVED reading them and I am eager now to read even more of his work. I've been going around randomly saying "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo", the name of my favourite short story. It has been interesting to do a bit of research and draw parallels between the author and the actual even of the Kobe earthquake and how he's incorporated both himself and those events into his stories. Brilliant read. *Please note that the title was intended to be written without capitals by the author. 

Has anybody read either of these books? Or something else by Haruki Murakami? 

- Bonnee.

A Terrific Tuesday!

Well today has been quite full of reading/writing related business. 

I prepared for my literature SAC (School Assessed Coursework... these are like tests), which meant highlighting important quotes in the screenplay Bastard Boys by Sue Smith. Tomorrow we have to write an essay discussing a prompt in terms of the views and values of the characters. It shall be interesting. 

After that, I thought I'd get ahead in literature and start reading over the poems by William Blake which we will be studying next. I didn't enjoy reading from Blake when we studied him earlier last year, but this time around, I seem to have more of an appreciation for him. Half of the poems we are studying are the ones we touched last year, but we didn't do any sort of assessment on them last year; we just touched on them. This time we're going into detail. 

Once I was done with the poetry, I had a bit of time to kill before lunch and decided to jump on a computer and do some more recreational writing. I have now finished editing 26 out of 37 chapters of Evergreen: A Fallen Star, and I also started writing a short story which I've titled Lost in Paradise. You'll hear more about both of these another time! 

Last but not least, today was the English SAC. We had to write a context response to a prompt, incorporating themes from the text The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif by Najaf Mazari and Robert Hillman. The awesome part about this SAC was that we could choose our form; expository, persuasive, or imaginative. I, of course, chose imaginative, and wrote a kick-arse short story of roughly 1000 words in 100 minutes. And I was pretty proud of it. Hopefully it will give me a good mark. Should I share it with you guys when I get it back from marking? 

Who else got up to some exciting stuff related to what they're passionate about? Please do share!

- Bonnee. 

My Canon of Literature

After reading a blog by The Bookshelf Muse last night, about 'canon of literature' I had a bit of a think about it. The blog entry I read explains that your canon of literature is a list of books out of all that you've read which touched you so deeply that you still go back to them years later. The Bookshelf Muse blog explains that it is important to identify your own canon; it shows where you came from and what you value as a writer.

So today, I thought I'd share my little list. I'm only 17 and was not a big reader as a child, so it's not an extensive list at this point. But here it is.

Jenny Angel by Margaret Wild. Yes, it's a picture-story book, wow! This was illustrated by Anna Spudvilas and I remember first reading it in yr 2... well, I remember my teacher reading it to the class. And I remember thinking that it was beautiful. After I moved schools and began to hang out in the library a lot, I remember seeing it when I was in yr 7 and picking it up to read it, because of all the books from my childhood, I remembered it. Since finding it in my school library, I have returned for the pleasure of reading that book over and over and over again. It's a sad story about a girl who's little brother is sick, and she believes that she is his guardian angel and can save him. Now I see that I value sibling relationships in my writing, which is very evident in my novel Evergreen: A Fallen Star, where the three protagonists are brothers and sisters, yet best friends all the way. I will eventually obtain my own copy of Jenny Angel... it's been a whole 10 years since I first read it and I'm still in love with it.

Dragon Rider by Cornelia Funke. I read this for the first time in yr 6, so I was about 12. How many times did I read it? At least 5 in that one year. It's by the same author who wrote the Inkworld trilogy (Inkheart, which I also loved, and Inkspell and Inkdeath which I am yet to read). This story is about a silver dragon and his brownie friend who are on a mission to find a new place for the other silver dragons to live safely, because humans are invading their home. On an epic journey to the Himalayas, they befriend a human and a manikin worker of their enemy; a gold dragon, who's diet had consisted of silver dragons until they had disappeared. Obviously fantasy and friendship; topics which I love to write. The idea of the epic journey to an unknown place, and an enemy who remains unknown to the protagonists for a long while, is found in Evergreen: A Fallen Star. I will admit now that the copy of Dragon Rider I own is actually my mothers, but she's never read it and never will, and I doubt she'll notice it's absence now that I've abducted it from her bookshelf and placed it on my own.

Hitler's Daughter by Jackie French. I read this first in yr 5 (so I was 11 yrs old) and I didn't understand much of it at all. But what I did understand, I enjoyed, and I fell in love with it completely two years later, when I had to study it for English at school, and understood it better. A girl tells her friend a story as they wait for their bus to take them to school; the story of Hitler's daughter. As far as her friends are concerned, it's just that; a story. But one boy is suspicious and curious and wants to know more, undecided on whether he believes the story to be true or not. All the while, the story is told beautifully to the readers as they flash-back through time to World War II. The end of the story has that good old sting-in-the-tail effect and leaves the readers unsure of how fictional the story is too. I can't think of any examples where this books has been reflected in Evergreen: A Fallen Star, except that on more than one occasion, stories are told between the characters. I did have a copy of this book at some point, but it's disappeared off the face of the earth. I'm pretty sure I gave it to my best friend's little brother when he had to study it for English a few years later, and I never got it back because the friendship fell apart and I am no longer on speaking terms with that family. Damn...

So that's my short list of canon literature, and my little rant about it. Has anyone else read any of these books? What about you guys, what do your canon lists consist of and why? I hope to add more titles to this list in due time.

- Bonnee.

Emma

What's my favourite genre? Probably fantasy. Yeah, definitely fantasy.

Ya know what the first book I have to read for my Literature Units 3/4 is?

Emma, by Jane Austen.

I have been labouring over this horrific excuse for good literature for the majority of my summer holidays and it's finally almost over... and by over, I mean I've almost finished reading it. It's actually very far from over, so someone please come and shoot me now because this is the most boring book in the world, or as one of my friends said, "Emma is the shittiest shit that ever shat." ... or something along those lines anywho.

Hopefully, the reading will be finished by tomorrow night and I can start the book I'm studying for English Units 3/4, which is The Rugmaker of Mazar-E-Sharif by Najaf Mazari and Robert Hillman. The English group who studied it last year said it was pretty alright, and from what I've been told about it it doesn't seem too bad.

Claim to fame: I met Najaf Mazari  and Robert Hillman themselves last year. First published authors I'd ever met.

Introduction to The Author

So I figured I'd start a blog to keep people updated with my writing. I guess I better say a bit about myself for those who don't know me so well. 

The Basics:

The name is Bon, I live in Australia and I'm about to start my last year of high-school. After I finish high-school, I hope to go to university, get some sort of BA degree and work as an editor. I hope to work for a fiction publisher or maybe even as someone aspiring writers send their manuscripts to for proofreading before it goes to a publisher. 

My Writing:

I've been into writing for a few years and I want to get published. I write constantly; short stories, flash fiction, poetry and novels. I have finished one novel which I've sent in to Penguin in the hopes of getting published, but I haven't heard back yet. In the meantime, I have started a new novel (a sequel to the first) and hope to get it published after the first one. 

My First Novel:

The first draft was 23 chapters long and a little over 80,000 words. 

Before I sent it in for consideration at Penguin, I edited it up to 37 chapters, and just short of 78,000 words. I won't give any huge spoilers, but in short, it is about three kids saving the world and set in an alternate universe which is largely influenced by our world's Asian cultures, particularly Japanese/Chinese. 

Title: Evergreen: A Fallen Star

Genre: Fantasy/Family. 

Target Audience: Teenagers and Young Adults.

Status: Complete, Not Published. 

My Second Novel - The Sequel:

This is currently in-progress. I have the first draft of the first 5 and a half chapters written and several more chapters plan. I know what I want to happen in the story, but planning and writing are still BOTH underway. The sequel, in short, is about three kids - the same three from the first novel - saving each other. Actually, it's much more complicated than that, but I can't explain it sufficiently without spoiling the first novel. 

Title: Evergreen: Thorns of the Heart

Genre: Fantasy/Family

Target Audience: Teenagers and Young Adults

Status: In Progress. 

Another Novel: 

This one has nothing to do with either of the other two I've mentioned. It's something I've started and been working on every now and then. I have the first 3 chapters written and an incomplete, rough outline of the rest of the plot which I will finish and divide into chapters when I'm not focusing on the other novels. At the moment, it is named after and inspired by the song 'Demolition Lovers' by My Chemical Romance, and I've had many ideas for it because of the band and some of their other songs. At the moment, it's about some troubled teenagers finding their place in the world with help from each other. 

Title: Demolition Lovers

Genre: Action/Romance

Target Audience: Teenagers and Young Adults

Status: In Progress. 

Other Writing:

As I said earlier, I do a lot of short stories, flash fiction and poetry. This is mostly for fun and to keep myself writing when I'm not concentrating on a novel. For the most part, I'll direct all this myself, but recently I've been encouraging friends and peers to give me writing prompts, topics and requests. Anything that I particularly like is kept and once I've published a novel or two, I hope to also publish a collection of short stories or poems. I also have ideas, outlines and plans for a few other novels that I hope to write and publish at some point. 

So that's what this blog is going to be about, just in a nutshell. Me and my writing. I'll just randomly tell you about new ideas, my progress, and let you know if I get anything published. 

Peace out.
- Bon xx