In which I discuss madness and the fictional people that live in my head.

So another year has rolled by and I'm faced once again with a sheer wall of words.

It's November tomorrow, by which I mean I will start work on another novel tomorrow. I don't know how many 18-year-olds (or how many people at all, for that matter) can say they've written three novels in three consecutive years, but as of 1st December, I will be one of them.

I hope.

I have a lot more responsibility this year, I'm at university, I've got a boyfriend, I've sort of got a social life, although most of my interaction still occurs via the internet or with the imaginary people in my head. Which is to say that my characters are very real to me, and not that I'm schizophrenic.

I attended my very first write-in yesterday. Well, it was the welcome meet up. It was a lot of fun, I was a little overwhelmed at first, and a bit shy since I'd rolled in on my own with no idea what to expect, but everyone was really kind and friendly. It was so nice to be able to speak to people in real life that understand the sheer, blissful, horrid, gut-wrenching madness November represents to me.

Although I'm daunted by the thought of writing a novel in a month I don't think I could go without it from now on. It's like a drug, I like to put myself under such pressure, I like to juggle every aspect of my life and let everything revolve around this novel that I'm writing.

I have a system this time, over the last two years I was at college and could get away with pushing a deadline, but now I'm at university I know that deadlines are set in stone, so I have to be more flexible with my writing hours. Here's the decision I've made: try and get at least two days ahead over the course of the first week. That way I can drop a day if I need to.

I'm also going to try and write maybe an extra 150, 200 words a night, which is a couple of paragraphs, really, nothing at all. It'll all count towards inching ahead and giving myself some leeway that I'm going to need desperately towards the end of the month. How long that well-intentioned idea will last, though, who knows?

I hope no one minds me doing this, like, at uni and stuff.

You know what? Fuck them if they do. This is my thing. I started this long before them and I'll continue for as long as I damn well please. Writing is a passion, everything beside the education I've paid for is coming second. (Except Craig. Because, y'know, he's my boyfriend. Favouritism.)

I will be at every write-in bar one this year, since I'll be at Memorabilia on that Saturday. Which will be a day where no novelling will happen, all the more reason I need to stay ahead. It's better to be ahead than to have to catch up, is what I think, because when you begin to fall behind all you become aware of is catching up, and that's not exactly something you want to be doing. So yes, those are my theories.

I'm glad to be bringing my characters back again, they're like old friends I haven't seen in a long time. I've missed them. Although I have been planning this since February and I've been editing my novel from last year in between so they never actually went away... hm...

Ok, I have a better analogy. They're my best friends in all the world, and this is the road trip we've been building towards all year. And it's going to be fantastic.

See you on the other side.

-Katie xxx

To distract from how blog-lazy I've been of late...

...A review! I wrote this last year when a girl from year 10 reviewed Twilight in the school library magazine. Being of (sort of) sound mind and decent taste in literature, I was a little infuriated by it's glowing review of a book I find utterly atrocious. This was my reply. I just found it on my hard drive and thought I'd share. A real blog post soon, I promise!

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Twilight Book Review: A Response.

Firstly, I believe that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, if you want to believe that Twilight and it's satellites are astounding pieces of enrapturing literature then that's fine. However, then I in turn am entitled to my opinion, which is this.

Twilight is one of the worst books I've ever read.
I say 'one of' because I've read a lot of books, some of which have simply not been for me, some have been predictable and others have been aimed at a much younger demographic. Twilight, I am sad to say, is one of the select few that covers all three of those bases. Except it is the latter masqurading as something more sophisticated.

As I read through the review of it in my college magazine I was not surprised at the review written by a 16-year-old girl with delusions that real love is all sacrifice and stalking. Rather, I would've been more shocked if someone had chosen to review something worthwhile like The Gone-Away World or The Name of the Wind, then I would've been less apathetic.

She said that it was a tale of true love's struggle against impossible obsticles. It's not. It's another teen romance with housetrained 'vegetarian' vampires, where every character is impossibly attractive and if they're in any way normal looking they're shunned as geeks, or spotty or generally not worth talking to. This is something that bothers me, mainly because most people are normal looking, every teenager gets spots and, for four or so years of their life, looks... not unattractive but normal. It's normal to have faults. Crooked smiles don't count. The truly beautiful are the elite and confined to Hollywood, no one looks incredible when they wake up in the morning. Everyone has bad days. Even Megan Fox.

When reading Twilight, because I have, I nearly lost the will to live, but I did. I spent much of my time expecting something to happen. The first line alone suggests that something should happen, and yet nothing ever does, and when the time comes for the final battle, the taking on of the Boss, so to speak, Bella passes out and due to the first person narrative, we miss it. So I read 400-odd pages for nothing. It seems to me that Ms. Meyer got so caught up in the wish-fullfillment of vampire romance that she forgot that something exciting is supposed to happen in a book and so tacked on a plot three quarters of the way through.

Also, it's teeming with... not grammatical errors as such, but syntax errors, it's full of stentences that only just make sense. I'm a writer, I write a novel every November for National Novel Writing Month and I know that there is a rhythm to reading, you don't read every single word, and if something trips you up, especially at a crucial point (and those are few and far between in Twilight) having to read something again can really ruin the intended pace and tone of a scene.

To conclude, I found Twilight, whiny and boring with vaugely unsettling undertones. Which isn't to say there are no positive points about it, there are some good slices of description and what could potentially be some fullfilling, well-rounded characters. The problem I have, however, is that the former are fleeting and the latter are almost completely ignored.

If you have any sense or reason do not read this book, it's a waste of time and energy. Leave it for the delusional twelve-year-olds who believe they're going to be whisked away by a sexist creature of the night with anger management problems who's 'just doing it because he loves her.'

Katie over and out!