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I made myself soooooo mad this week by being an absolute dumbarse. Now I must share this frustration with you.

I got a good couple of lines of poetry stuck in my brain one night and saved it in the notes on my phone so that I wouldn't forget. So far, so good.

At work the next day, there was a bit of idle time between calls so I thought I'd have a crack at making something from the two lines I'd thought of. Now, for some dumb reason Google Docs, Drive and Gmail got blocked at my work a couple of months back even though all the contractors like me have a work email THROUGH GMAIL. Anyway, I'm used to using Google Docs if I'm writing in a browser, but I had to find something else to use since it was blocked at work. I ended up settling on Calmly Writer, which I kinda love.

I put together a couple of stanzas I was happy with (I won't say it was good, I'm sure it was terrible). And then the phones got busy so I minimised the browser and forgot about it. Then at the end of my shift, I closed the browser out of habit ...

Without saving the damn poetry.

I realised my mistake, but alas, it was too late. This app does not auto-save like Google Docs. My (terrible) poetry was gone. 

In memory of writing lost, please share your saving failures and tales of writing long gone.

Freedom of Expression: IDAHOT

I went to an awesome event on Tuesday night: a belated celebration of International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHOT). Deakin Writers Club and Deakin Pride Queer Society organised and hosted the event together at Hares and Hyenas, Melbourne's (most popular?) queer bookshop. Of course, being on the Deakin Writers Club team, I didn't even need an excuse to go and hang out with my fellow writers, my friends from the Pride Club, and those that belong to both parts. The event wasn't limited to the club member either, which was great. I'm not sure how many from outside of the Writers or Pride club were at the event, but I know there were definitely people from different universities.

It was a fantastic night, with beverages and finger food courtesy of the clubs, some great live music, and readings from whoever wasn't afraid to jump up in front of the mic to express themselves. The theme for the night was freedom of expression and it was great to see how many people got involved, attended the event, and made it a great evening. Even little old me jumped up at one point with a poem about refraining from sticking labels on people or trying to define them by one particular aspect of that whole. Some of the music and readings that were shared were funny, casual, and happy, others were sad, personal, and took a lot of bravery to share. I guess the best part of the night to me was that we had all come together in a place where no one had to feel like an outsider, or like they didn't fit in; a place where everyone could say what they wanted to say and be themselves.

I made a couple of new friends over the course of the night and didn't make it back to my unit until past midnight, but it was worthwhile. In class on Wednesday morning, my Creative Nonfiction teacher and I had a conversation about the event because she had been there too, and she had read some poetry (my goodness, she has an amazing voice!). I thought it was brilliant that she had been invited by the clubs to attend and that she had been so willing to participate. She was very understanding about me being all sleepy in her class.

Have you been to any writerly or pride events recently? Or a combination of the two? 

- Bonnee.

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.

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. 

Walking Naked

One of my favourite poems in the world, and I stumbled upon it after reading the book Walking Naked by Alyssa Burgman. The book was a wonderful read with some well-explored, real, brutal, honest themes. I was captivated by this book and honestly could not put it down.

Back to the poem!

A Coat - by William Butler Yeats
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there is more enterprise
In walking naked.

What's your favourite poem?

- Bonnee.

An Idea of How Much I've Written

If you don't feel like reading much, just pay attention to the stuff in bold. 

I keep everything I write these days... and save multiple copies of it in different places. Three different places. One copy on my laptop, one copy on my every-day-use memory stick, and one copy on an emergency memory stick which I tend to forget to update.

Having said that, I'm a bit of a neat-freak, and when you have THAT MANY Word Documents in one big folder, things tend to get a bit hectic. I solve this problem by dividing my writing folder up into more manageable sub-folders:

• Evergreen, where I currently keep all of the files related to the two novels I've written/I'm writing, Evergreen: A Fallen Star and Evergreen: Thorn of the Heart. This includes the full manuscript, synopsis and cover letter to the first novel, the original story-lines, chapter planners, fragment and ideas and chapters written out in separate documents, both the first drafts and the final drafts. The two stories themselves have their own personal folders, respectively titled, within the Evergreen folder. There are about 76 Word Documents in this folder, and counting.
  

• Short Stories, where, obviously, I keep a record of all the the short stories I've written. Directly inside this folder, there is another folder titled The Garden Swing and Other Stories, which I one day hope to call my first collection of published short stories. This folder holds 21 documents containing short stories I've written; MOST, of which are complete.
  

• Songs and Poems, is one which I don't touch so often anymore, especially not the Songs side of it. There are 103 poems (including 13 Haiku), 101 songs, and one other document containing random lines that I might incorporate into another song or poem at some point. So this folder has a grand total of 205 documents! 
  

• Last of all, Summer Projects, which contains 15 documents worth of story-lines, some of which might have hope of one day becoming novels, and another 9 folders containing documents of briefly-started or partially-written novels, (including Demolition Lovers, which I mentioned in my first blog-post). There are 52 documents floating around in there! 

Of course there's a bit more, but nothing worth mentioning here. I'm just telling you the important stuff here. All of the above would suggest that there are 354 Word Documents on my laptop that range from being somewhat mildly important to of extreme importance... and this suggestion would be correct. The number will continue to rise over time, I'm sure. :)

So there's a little more insight into my stuff! Like it? You better!

Peace out,

- Bon xx