The day the earth fought back.

Happy new year!

welcomed it in style this year, jandal wars, cool people, fire dancing, terrible badminton, rum, food (etc).


I like it when people are straight up. Not mean but honest, put your cards on the table and say what you feel. No beating around the bush.
If I'm going to be brutally honest and say what i think then it would apply to my book-writing-ventures as follows.

Firstly publishing. I said from the beginning, the aim of this wasn't to be a published author,( read this) it was to see if i could actually do it. I stand by that, though now that i have made it this far i think about 'when this is done and published', to be honest i have started to think that the moment this book is in print will be the moment it is truly 'finished'.
I don't want people to think i'm deluded, sitting here thinking thinking 'I'm writing the next best seller,' it isn't like that.. just 'I'm writing my book. my book makes me happy and it makes me sad and if everybody else hates it then so be it. It might be terrible (it's a bare-bones draft, it's not meant to be amazing) perhaps edited  it'll be better -perhaps not. we'll see. to see it in 'book form' would be a dream come true, so perhaps i should think more about it.

University.

My classes from march are as follows, English literature (narrative, genre stuff), Art history (analysis whatsit and historical whatsit) film (101) and writing. I'm excited about finally getting around to making these choices, but secretly wonder how it will affect my book-writing-ventures. I can't live without writing, my notebook army agrees... My aim is to finish this draft before march, i should be able to do it, it's more than halfway there, then i have the task of editing, finding me some readers then what.....???
sometimes i wonder, if this was published then it's 'book one', 'book one' of a proposed five books, and if i published this then i would have to sit and write book two -hell, knowing me I probably will write it anyway, i'll have too.
I wonder if it's possible to be a university student and a novelist simultaneously?

good thing i like chaos.


On a far less than cheerful note, not a very smiley faffing blog post (I'm sorry).

Visited Christchurch for the first time since all of the big earthquakes (and by all i mean so far). I realized that it was bad, but i suppose that recently i had started to think about it less, like the quakes were dying down and it wasn't as big of a deal anymore or it just kept happening so you don't think about it as much. It's become weirdly common now to just live with quakes... like they're completely normal.
The center of the city is still cordoned off -since the Feb quake- which is just so odd.. all of the tall buildings in the city, the shops it's all just empty, dilapidated, destroyed. There's tall grass growing in places where there shouldn't even be grass, over-grown spaces where there used to be proud buildings, holes in the road and tall fences you can't cross.
the seaside was worse, most of the houses were just empty, roofless or clinging precariously from the broken edges of the coastal cliffs. There's tattered tarpaulins hanging over hollow windows, buildings with no sides -like weird cross sections- and the roads have moved and become bumpy, broken or drowned in liquefaction.

The weirdest thing was the quiet. We stood in a park next to the fence -right at the edge of downtown- and it was dead silent. The city center and the apartment buildings around it have been empty since February, looking around there was like walking into some strange, macabre, museum exhibit -maybe because that's where we learn about these disasters... Everything within has been preserved as it was in February, the day the earth fought back (almost everything) they can't do anything till the quakes stop, and the quakes don't stop. you can see onto the balconies of high rise apartments, the tables there are still lying on their sides where they would have fallen after the February Earthquakes, furniture inside too has fallen against the windows where it has remained and shall remain.

http://www.geonet.org.nz/earthquake/quakes/recent_quakes.html

 War zone, that's what people told me it looked like. which is so true. Christchurch is like a war zone.

kia kaha.