When I Turn Forty - Part One: a short story

This, I believe, will be a three-part short story, at least. I have had this idea lurking in the back of my mind for some time now, and have tried to write it on a few occasions. Don't expect anything spectacular. :)

It’d been a busy day.

Susanna got up at six o’clock this morning because she couldn’t stay in bed any longer for excitement. She woke her parents and opened her presents, and helped her mother make the cake, and decorated it herself and left her mother to clear up afterwards. She played with her new toys between floods of visiting relatives. Then she helped with lunch, and ate lunch, and put on her party dress and had her hair brushed and decorated with a pretty hairband, and bounced around the house until her friends arrived. Then she bounced around the house with them, and they played with her new toys, and then Susanna’s dad took them all to the cinema, and then bowling, and they ate pizza in the café in the bowling alley. And they talked and laughed and yelled and laughed and played with their balloons and their food and laughed until Susanna’s father thought he would be deaf for the rest of his life.

Now finally, at eight o’clock in the evening, they were alone again. The dark had fallen outside the frosty window, and the father sat in the kitchen washing the pots, staring listlessly into the water, exhausted. The mother sat by the fire in the sitting room reading a novel when her little girl skipped into the room with a picture book and a smile on her face. She pushed her mother’s novel out of the way and clambered up onto her lap, handing her the picture book. Her mother took it, put her arms around the girl and held the book in front of the two of them, but did not open it. She said,

                “Did you enjoy your birthday, Susanna?”

                “Yes, Mummy,” the girl said sweetly, grinning round at her. And then, remembering her manners, she said, “Thank you for my presents.”

                “You’re welcome, sweetie,” her mother said, smiling. “Is it good to be six?”

Susanna nodded eagerly, but the weariness from the day was clear in her contented little face. She patted the book and looked at her mother, who said, thoughtfully,

                “Now that you are six, what is it you would like to be when you are forty?”

                “A fairy!” Susanna cried happily.

                “A fairy,” her mother chuckled. “That’s lovely.”

And then she opened the book and proceeded to read her daughter to sleep.

*

A year passed.

Now here she was again, seven years old, after another busy birthday, and her father was in the kitchen reading his newspaper, and her mother was in the sitting room by the fire knitting. Again Susanna scrambled onto her mother’s knee and handed her a book to read.

                “Mummy, will you read to me?”

                “Of course, sweetie. Have you had a good birthday?”

                “Yes it was very – yes I really, really, really liked it.”

                “Good. What’s it like being seven?”

                “Big,” Susanna replied shortly.

Her mother smiled. “And what would you like it to be like when you’re forty?”

This time Susanna thought about it. “That’s really old,” she said after a minute. Her mother laughed, and tried not to think that she would be forty soon.

                “Not as old as, say, ninety.”

                “That’s really, really, really old!”

                “Yes, but what would you like to be when you’re forty?”

                “I’d like to be a princess.”

                “Really?” She should’ve expected that. “And how would become a princess?”

                “I’d marry a prince,” Susanna said, as if it was obvious. Her mother supposed it would be, to a girl who’d watched so many Disney Princess films.

                “Oh? Which prince?” her mother asked, wondering whether her daughter would say Prince William or Prince Harry.

                “Prince Charming!” Susanna said, and her mother realised that at this age, there were no princes in the world other than Prince Charming, not even the Princes William and Harry. “Can we read now, Mummy?”

                “Yes, dear. Once upon a time…”

*

In the year that followed, a lot happened. Susanna started Junior School, and came home one day to tell her mother shyly that she’d made friends with a boy in her class called Archie and one day they were going to get married and live happily ever after. Yet another day, she came home and told her mother in tears that some of the girls were being mean to her.

When she made friends with these girls, she invited them to her eighth birthday party, along with Archie and a few other friends. As it turned out, these girls only went for the cake. Susanna’s eighth birthday was when she learned that life isn’t perfect.

That evening, she went and curled up on her mother’s lap and put her arms around her and buried her face in her shoulder. She gave her no book to read, not this year. Her mother held her and rocked her as Susanna said,

                “Why do they not like me?”

To which her mother replied, after a minute’s thought, “I don’t know, dear. Some people aren’t very nice. Unfortunately that’s just the way it is.”

                “Why?”

                “Because everybody’s different and that’s just how some people turn out. Not very nice. Besides, not everybody’s parents are very nice. That might make them a not very nice person.”

                “I have nice parents,” Susanna said, and her mother smiled and hugged her only daughter closer.

                “Good,” she said. “We do try to be nice.”

                “I don’t ever want to be not nice like that,” Susanna declared, shaking her head.

                “No, I hope you’re not ever like that. What would you like to be instead?”

                “Nice,” Susanna replied simply. “And friendly and kind.”

                “What about when you’re older? When you’re forty, what would you like to be by the time you’re forty?”

And Susanna said, “Didn’t you ask me that last year?”

                “I did. But things change in a year. Now that you’re a bit older, what would you like to be by the time you’re forty?”

Her daughter stared off at the far wall with a slight crease between her eyebrows. Eventually she said, absently,

                “Princesses aren’t like Cinderella and Snow White anymore, are they? Like, the princesses in magazines and things, they don’t look like princesses, do they, with big ball gowns and tiaras and…things. Do they?”

                “No, my dear, princesses aren’t like the ones in fairytales.”

Susanna wrinkled her nose. “Then I don’t want to be a princess.”

                “What do you want to be, then?” her mother asked her softly.

                “I don’t know,” Susanna admitted.

                “What about… An actress? Or a singer? A musician? A writer? An artist? What about a vet, or a doctor? A teacher? A designer? Maybe an astronaut? A chef? A horse rider? Or an explorer? I know, what about a ballerina?” But as her mother listed each one as she thought of them, Susanna just shook her head.

                “I don’t know, Mummy,” she said. “Well, really, I’d like to be a fairy. Or a dragon trainer.”

                “A ballerina can be similar to a fairy.”

Susanna thought about that, then said quickly, “No. No it’s not, Mummy.”

                “Okay, then.”

And that was the end of that conversation.

Why you should always reread what you last wrote the previous day before you start writing again

I just found this saved on my computer - it's a 58-word extract from my novel which I wrote last summer. I thought I'd post it on here for your entertainment. You'll see why I removed it. :)

"He worked here, once, before he died. It will have been sold from here, made in this very workroom behind me here.” He pointed his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the curtained archway.

                “Does he still work here?”

                “No,” the shop keeper said bluntly. “He’s dead.”

                “Oh.” Saffie was a little taken aback. “I’m sorry.”

This is still not a good time to be blogging

You guessed it, I have other more important things to be doing right now, although for once not many other things. But I figured I'd still like to say a little more about why I'm blogging, as I've been meaning to for a bit now. There are four main reasons, really.

Firstly, editing. I know from my previous posts that if there is a written form of verbal (and here's a word I hate having to spell) diarrhoea, I have it. But you guys don't want to read seriously long posts with no point to them. So I know now from taking part in NaNoWriMo (mentioned/explained a few posts back) that I can make things really wordy when I want to, to seriously increase my word count; let's see if I can learn to write things in as few words as possible instead. Or at least edit things down to as few words as possible. :)

Secondly, purpose. What's the point in me writing if nobody's going to read what I write? I lost confidence in writing websites such as FictionPress after hearing that some people have had their work plagarised, and there was nothing to prove that the writing was mine. After all, only me and my friends know that Lady Scarlet of Stormhold (my penname on FictionPress) is me; that could be anybody. Of course, just as on this blog, all my writing is mine. I just needed somewhere to post my writing where people can read it after I stopped posting on FictionPress, where I feel more secure that it is obvious whose work it is: mine.

I hope that makes sense.

Also, if nobody reads your work, then you don't have anybody to give you constructive criticism, you have nobody to help you to improve, and that's not going to get you very far. Writing is one of those things where you kind of need feedback, otherwise you have no way of knowing if what you've written is any good or not. And that's a very important point.

Thirdly, confidence. I think sharing my work will help me with my confidence, and yes I do have confidence issues, I have struggled with them probably since I was about eleven. I am considerably better than I used to be, but currently these worries have been changing - ie, before, I worried about not having friends and things, but I have a lot of good friends and have done for a while and am much happier than I used to be; the worries now are about the future (I won't go into it; this is not my journal). If I can feel confident in my writing, then I can feel confident that I always have that to fall back on if any other career plans fall through (although of course, I'd love for my writing to be my first career not my backup plan, but unfortunately life doesn't work like that).

And finally, experience. I remember at the creative writing club at my school a few years ago, a girl in year 13 was telling us how she was trying to get her novel published, and how difficult it is for young writers to get published just because of your age and therefore lack of experience. You don't need qualifications to be a writer, but you do need experience - practice makes perfect, as they say. So if one day this blog helps me get published in some way shape or form, brilliant. :)

I'm sorry for the length of this, I hoped I'd be able to keep this short, but... Oh well. Have a nice evening, everyone! :D

Wolf Killer: a short story

This wasn't what I planned on posting yesterday, but I didn't have time to finish writing it, so I found this short story in my old Year 10 English book instead. Admittedly I didn't technically have time to be typing it up and editing it, but it's done now. So, here it is! I hope you enjoy it, feel free to comment. And hopefully I'll post you the other story (probably a two-part story) next week, and on time, and not when it's quite this late (eleven PM last night, ten PM tonight, that's seriously late for me). :)

The warm yellow light of the sitting room lamp flooded out onto the back yard, highlighting the darkness of the woods beyond. Inside, a small girl sat with her parents and a book, and all three smiled. Neither mother nor father minded the time, or their daughter’s bedtime, for they didn’t usually get to spend time with her. They would have read together well into the night and gone to bed with happiness in their souls, had the girl not looked out the window.

                “Daddy,” she said, turning to tap his shoulder from her place on his lap. “Look. There’s a wolf outside.” She pointed, and both mother and father looked to where her little hand indicated.

The lone young male wolf, the runt of the pack, stood on the edge of the garden, in a patch of darkness just out of the woods, barely visible. His yellow eyes glinted as he looked longingly in at the happy family.

Her father lifted her off his knee and stood, watching the creature’s shadowed outline warily. The wolf met his gaze, calm and pleading. The father’s gaze hardened, and he strode suddenly for the door.

                “Go to bed,” her mother commanded quietly, hurriedly, trying to keep her quivering voice under control, before she strode after her husband, reaching down to touch her daughter’s back in an attempt to usher her from the room as she did so. The girl resisted.

“Don’t hurt him,” she begged of the closing door. The moment she was alone, she ran to the window and pressed her nose against the cold glass. There were her parents’ silhouettes, her mother’s hovering a short way from the back door, her father’s advancing aggressively across the back garden towards the wolf. He had his gun, and he had it aimed right at the creature’s nose. But the wolf did not watch the gunpoint that threatened his life. His hopeful, desperate eyes met only hers. She placed her hand against the window: a sign of friendship.

Outside, the father yelled at the creature, and, alarmed, it turned its muzzle to see for the first time the danger that lurked right in front of it.

He turned tail and ran off into the trees.

That night, the parents slept fitfully, worries of their daughter’s safety flitting through their dreams. But the locked back door was no consolation to the girl. She laid awake and listened for the wolf’s return, worrying only of the poor outcast’s wellbeing. Sure enough, she heard his helpless whining and his scratching on the door about an hour later, and she could not sleep for feeling his sorrow.

In the early hours of the morning, she could stand it no longer. She slipped out of bed and from her room, careful not to make a sound. She crept down the stairs, silent as a shadow, and reached up on her tip-toes to unbolt the door at the bottom.

The first her parents heard of it was a bang and a shriek. The mother, terrified, sat bolt upright in bed, listening intently, her heart racing. She climbed out of bed to check on her daughter only to find, to her horror, her bed empty. She cried out and ran down the stairs, her husband now on her heels. At the bottom of the hallway, they were greeted with a cold breeze from outside, and stepped around the carcass of the battered back door. The father fetched his gun from the cupboard under the stairs and the mother cautiously pushed open the sitting room door.

Inside, the little girl sat beside a scrawny yellow-eyed wolf with tangled grey fur. Both mother’s and daughter’s eyes widened; the mother stepped back and laid a hand on her husband’s shoulder, the daughter laid a protective hand on the wolf’s flank. The wolf blinked dolefully up at the parents; the father clenched his jaw and tightened his grip on the barrel of his gun.

                “Sweetie, get away from that monster!” the mother called.

                “Daddy, don’t hurt him!” the daughter called.

But her words were drowned out as her father took aim between a pair of startlingly yellow eyes and fired.

She never did find out what that pleading look in his eyes was for.

Friends and novels

Last year, probably in June, I had a vague idea of something I wanted to write inspired, I think, by Kristin Cashore's Bitterblue and Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus.

I don't know if anyone has ever heard of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo as it's informally known, but it it's an online challenge in which you have to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November and it is awesome. There is also a summer version of this online challenge called Camp NaNoWriMo, and last year Camp NaNoWriMo took place in June and August. I had exams in June, so when I started this novel, I did so in August. I got to 41,000 words. I didn't even get to halfway through my plot. So I gave up.

At some point I told a friend about this novel on Facebook, and a while later - I don't remember if it was days, weeks, or a couple of months - he asked me how far I'd got with it. When I told him I'd never finished, he was disappointed, because he said it'd sounded good. And this has stuck with me. If ever I finish this novel, I have one potential reader. Hopefully.

So recently I started rewriting this novel. For a while it was called 2012 Novel, or Untitled Novel, or My Novel, you know, the one about... And then my friend Emma named it Barnabus. And then I named one of my characters in it Barnabus, because I didn't want to lose the name when I replaced it with the proper title, and because it made naming that otherwise nameless character so much easier. And now I finally have replaced that name with a proper title. First I called it Our Parent's Faults. I didn't like that, but it was a title all the same. I have renamed it in the few days since then. I wouldn't be surprised if there was already a book with that title, but I am much happier with it.

I hope to finish my novel one day. Maybe within a year. The first draft anyway. It's a fantasy story set in a fictional city, about a girl named Saffie, and her mother's past. I'm afraid I can't comment on whether or not it'll be any good, and I can't promise you that it'll ever get published, or ever get finished enough to consider being published, and I'm not going to tell you any more about it either, but I thought it'd be nice to share that I am writing a novel, and a little about that novel that finally has a satisfactory title.

Also, I said that I'd post a short story every Wednesday, and today is Wednesday, but I have been busy, so I will post you all something tomorrow instead. And luckily, I do know what I'm writing for you all. I just haven't finished it yet. Happy Wednesday evening, guys! :)

The Aftermath: a short story inspired by a slightly disturbing dream I had ages ago

I've saved this from the abyss that is one of my notebooks. I apologise in advance. Partly because it's a bit disturbing (or maybe that's just me remembering the creepy dream when I read it), and partly because it was only edited a bit, when I typed it up. (Don't tell anyone, but I would've edited it more tonight, except that I nearly forgot about posting something... Ssh!) So, yeah. Enjoy... if you can. :) Please tell me what you think! (Again - or at least, I think I put this last time - I'd rather you weren't too mean, it helps absolutely nothing. Thanks!)

If it had not been so quiet, then maybe it would have been better.

The anger of man and nature had long since subsided here, and he had long since stopped thinking. The scene was dead. The sky had cleared, the storm clouds leaving a vast, empty darkness in their wake, giving the lonely stars plenty of room to cast their eerie white light down on the ice. Not even a slight breeze whipped the water into waves; the forlorn blocks of ice drifted aimlessly among frostbitten and bloodied corpses, the shadows, the lifeless shells, of the soldiers – the humans – they once were. He didn’t know how many of these barely recognisable bodies they would be able to recover for identification and burial, if they attempted it at all. He knew some were lost already, pulled by the strong tides of the storm and their heavy armour and weapons deep into the bottomless unknown.

In the midst of the battle with both the enemy army and the elements, he had lost his sense of direction. And part of his arm. He had no idea where he was, other than that he was on what they called the Ice Road, the wide pathway of glistening cold solid water that never melted. All he knew as that if he had any chance of surviving, he had to move, before he froze, before he bled to death.

His echoing breaths were probably the only breaths in this stillness for miles around as he pushed himself to his one good foot with his longbow, gripped tightly by fingers far past shivering. It was a desolate place, the Ice Road, even without the atmosphere of death that lingered, even before the battle, in the air. He wondered vaguely, as a frozen body – face-up in the water, mouth and eyes wide open in a final expression of terror and despair – bobbed against the edge of the Ice Road, whether anyone else had survived this long.

It was doubtful.

Step. Step. Step. Pain. Pain. Pain.

Men littered the road, like toys abandoned by a spoiled, careless child who had spilled cherry juice over the white carpet. It was the blood of friends, the blood of enemies, the blood of strangers that stained this white carpet. His mind was numb; he could spare no energy on thought, as with every strained breath, he felt what was left of his arm throbbing and leaking lifeblood, he felt his injured leg crying out at every half-step, he felt life’s hourglass ticking by. Ticking, ticking, ticking. There was no sense of time here, but hours had surely passed. The darkness and the ice were never-ending.

It was one of those nightmares that you just couldn’t escape; no matter how far and how long you walked, the whole of empty eternity still stretched before you. In the midst of a frigid Northern winter, in pain, he knew he should not reach the end of his journey. He finally became aware that he wouldn’t be able to move his remaining hand from his longbow if he tried, so hard were his fingers frozen to it for support as he limped on. But he would die out here whether he was attached to his makeshift crutch or not. It was unimportant and he forgot it in moments; his laboured breathing, painfully loud in the painful silence, fogged his head so that if ever he looked back, all he would remember was ice and blood and a blur of pain, pain, pain.

At one point, he realised he was exhausted. Starving. Suffering from blood loss. But stopping was not an option. If he stopped, he would only be able wait to die. Moving did not make enough warmth to do battle with the cold, but it would be so much worse if he simply sat and let it get to him. He would die on his own two feet, fighting for life, whether one ankle was broken and half-slashed to pieces or not. He returned to his ghostly thoughtlessness.

In the end, he didn’t realise he had reached the first Northern village until he had almost walked straight through it. So focussed on moving forward, no matter the speed or lack thereof, was his brain that he had not even registered that there had not been a trace of war’s destructions since a mile and a half ago. He hobbled to the nearest house and knocked on the door, and collapsed on its opening.

His last thought was that his mind must be deceiving him.

New Year's Resolutions

There are several things I would like to blog about today. Rewriting a novel I started writing last year. Writing prompts. New Year's Resolutions. And Kristin Cashore would like to start a trend in which writers post pictures of their toilets, which I would now proceed to do, but I can't be bothered to go and take a picture of our toilet and upload it onto my laptop. So, I shall do that another day. Sorry, Kristin Cashore. I suppose I should thank you for being my favourite author, but... :P

And since I've been thinking about this one for a while, I'll do New Year's Resolutions. Now, I know a lot of people talk about New Year's Resolutions in January - our school, for one, had our annual assembly about it last week - and you're probably all sick of hearing all about it all over again. But I just thought I'd tell you my resolutions.
 1. I will get all my school work done as soon as I get it (which I'm breaking right now...) so that I don't get behind and stressed.
 2. I will revise everything constantly. Well, almost constantly.
 3. I will make sure that all my stuff has a place, so that I can put it all where it lives and keep my desk/room tidy.

And I suppose I'll add this one on, because even though it's one I'll enjoy, I'll forget about it amongst everything else if I don't:
 4. I will make an effort to write more, especially longer projects which I tend to give up on/get bored of, and the daily writing themes, which I tend to ignore (also, I will remember to blog :P)

So the point of this is that, I noticed in our annual New Year Resolutions assembly that our Head of Year talked as if most people tend to forget about a New Year's Resolution once it's broken. Like a promise; you can't go back, it's too late, you can't change that you broke it, therefore it's broken until you remake that resolution the next January. But I don't see it like that. If you're serious about the resolution, then show that you're damn serious about it! Make an effort! If you break it, so what? Try again! You don't get anywhere by giving up. Therefore, I make my fifth resolution:

 5. I will make a genuine effort to keep my resolutions even if I break them or have already broken them, and I WILL NOT GIVE UP!

To quote The Script: Winners never quit, quitters never win. That is all. Happy belated New Year, guys. :)

Secrets: a short story

I haven't told anyone I know that I've started a blog, so I figured I'd write you all something about secrets. Also I couldn't find anything on my computer that I've written that's short, finished, and satisfactory. One day I'll post what I wrote in creative writing club on Monday, as I said I might yesterday, but today is not that day. I'm quite scared of posting my first short story or piece of writing or whatever, to be honest, mostly I'm nervous that anything I post will be really, really terrible... so if you can't say anything nice, then please don't say anything at all. I'll get the message. :)

This is off the top of my head so I apologise in advance for its shortness and possibly how rubbish it is, depending on how this goes. But in the meantime I've posted some stuff of my FanFiction and FictionPress profiles, the links to which are on the sidebar-y thingy on the left. This story includes characters from a longer story that lives only partly in writing and mostly in my head, and this is not something that takes place at the beginning, but that doesn't really matter for the moment. :) So, please enjoy! Feel free to comment if you have any... erm... comments... but please don't be too mean because that won't help anything at all. :)

 The walls were beginning to close in around her, a sea of white paint drowning her under its waves. She had been here weeks now. It was not a small room, most certainly, but that did not stop the feeling that it was a cell - for that, she supposed, was what it really was. A glorified prison cell. The paintings and the clean bathroom and the comfortable bed couldn't fool her, not when she was trapped without a single window.
 It was driving her crazy. But maybe that was what they wanted.
 No. She knew what they wanted.
 Secrets. They thought, why would she tell us things if we locked her in a damp cell and didn't feed her? But their kindness only made her suspicious. She had known what they wanted right from the start. Why steal the king's daughter and hold her at ransom when they could get more for the king's best advisor? Besides, her family wouldn't have left her this long. They would have paid. Her father, her brother, her sister-in-law, Cody... No. They couldn't know where she was, not if she was still here.
 She rubbed at her wrist, the skin paper-thin. She could see her veins. Her veins told stories, but only to her. There had never been a time she was more glad of that. If anyone else heard the stories her veins had to tell, they would hear secrets that weren't hers to tell. Her father's secrets. Her brother's secrets. Her friends' secrets. The court's secrets.
 The fact that others couldn't hear the stories her veins told was the only thing that kept them from knowing she had been feeding them false information all this time.
 She might have been the most trustworthy person she knew, but oddly she was finding that she was a very good liar.

I DON'T WANT ANY MORE C'S!!!

I have a biology exam tomorrow morning. I am terrified. And stuck on C's! The past two tests we've done in lesson, I've got C's, and the two past papers I did today and yesterday, I got C's. In GCSE, my lowest was a B. One single B, in French, three marks off an A. Actually, no, I'm forgetting that speech I did for English, I got a C for that, but I still got an overall A. I hate the idea of me giving speeches. I hated that speech in particular. "How do you think society should be improved?" I DON'T KNOW, YOU'RE ASKING THE GIRL WHO RARELY HAS OPINIONS CAUSE SHE'S SO SLOW TO MAKE UP HER MIND, AND RARELY VOICES THEM WHEN SHE DOES HAVE THEM!!!!!!! See, all the other groups got to make fun speeches. I can't remember what like, but still. I suppose I could write a speech on improving society now, after I've had a year or so to think about it. If I could go back, I'd write it on education. Our education system seems a bit pointless to me. We study to pass exams. HELLO? Anybody see the problem here? How about, that we have life after exams?? That doing well in the exam doesn't mean that you'll be able to actually apply that knowledge? And the mark schemes! Seriously! Marking my biology past papers earlier, I was just... so annoyed. I thought I'd done well in that past paper. Like, at least a B. But you see, I knew I'd got the answers vaguely right. Somewhere in all the drivel I'd written was something akin to the right answer - or at least, the right answer that I'd learnt. But no. They ask you absurd, misleading questions like "The diaphragm helps to bring about the changes shown by the curve A. Explain how." when they could have just put, "How does breathing work?" and I wouldn't have looked at the graph above the question and gone, "Hmm, I wonder what this shows?" when I should have just been writing down everything I could remember about how the diaphragm relaxes and makes the chest cavity smaller and increases the air pressure and decreases the lung volume.

This is why I hate exams. They never, ever ask you straight questions. Ever. And I never, ever know what they want me to put to make them give me the mark. And I don't think you would - some of the answers they want are ridiculous. I swear you'd have had to have not only done ALL the past papers available, but actually MEMORISED the entire of all the mark schemes to know what they want you to put. It's honestly, seriously ridiculous. How on earth will learning a freaking mark scheme, half of which is gibberisch anyway, help me in later life? I want to learn biology! I don't want to learn mark schemes! Biology might one day be helpful to me! A mark scheme will NEVER be helpful to me!!

See, Sir, if I could do that speech again now - with a subject that really gets me angry and that I actually think should be improved in society - or if I'd have thought of this at the time, then I reckon I could've got an A. Or maybe a B. (It should be noted that it may also have helped if I'd been feeling particularly well, and awake, on the day)Though to be honest it wasn't really the English I needed to worry about. It was the French.

Anyway. This wasn't supposed to turn into a rant about exams. It was supposed to be quite a short post, because I have last minute revision in the form of one last past paper to be doing, and I don't want to go to bed particularly late. But I'm going to post again tomorrow and I probably won't mention the exam because I'll probably be sick to my back teeth of talking about it, as it's in the morning and we have to stay in school all day. Actually, I'm not entirely sure about that. But I'm staying in school anyway - one lesson I can catch up on, but four's a bit much. So tomorrow I'll post a short story or something, maybe what I wrote in creative writing yesterday and hopefully I'll be doing that every week after that. :)

And I wish when they tell year 11's that A Level is hard, they tell them that A and A* students get C's. Because I'm only just realising just how hard A Level is.

Distractions

It seems that anything and everything can be a distraction from English Literature essays. Even ones about The Importance Of Being Earnest (I love Oscar Wilde. If ever there was a guy who would make an amazing gay best friend... He's just so freaking awesome!!). I tell myself I won't go on my email, I'll finish this essay, but then I seem to forget that I won't just get distracted by emails, I'll get distracted by music videos and awesome video bloggers on YouTube, my own blog (which has been sitting in the back of my mind since the first post going, "Hello! Don't forget about me!"), and of course any of my surroundings (or a new document on Microsoft Word) coupled with my imagination and amazing ability to stare into space daydreaming about absolutely nothing... But back to the blog. I... I forgot what I was going to say... that's bad... and annoyingly normal... I hate my memory. I hate essays. Trying to think of something else I hate now, 'cause I can't just leave that hanging, it's begging to be turned into a list of three... Oh, and personality tests you were sent to by previously mentioned awesome video bloggers are also good distractions. There was this colour one which worked particularly well.

Anyway. Ahem. Distractions.

So I figured since I was distracted enough by thinking of what I might possibly write on my blog, since it'd be a bit stupid to just publish one post and leave it at that forever and ever and ever, or just, you know, for another week or so, cause a few people have looked at that first post (probably by accident :P), and they're not gonna come back if I don't post anything else (mind, I wouldn't blame them for not coming back, it's probably better for their sanity lol). Anyway I figured I may as well use up my distracted-from-essay-writing-time in a better way than just watching YouTube videos and get out the blog post that's been writing itself in my head for ages.

Right. So, I would like to use this blog to post bits of my writing so that I have a reason to write things and will therefore improve by practising (and actually getting things done, 'cause most of what I write gets started and never finished and then lost somewhere deep in a notebook or my computer hard drive) and maybe I'll get some constructive criticism (pretty please? :P) and I'll an audience and therefore an incentive to write. I used to write things for a few writing websites but I've become paranoid about plagarism despite how unlikely it is so I've taken some of my writing that I'll want to edit and use for a later date off and just left the old stuff I wrote when I was about 13 that nobody'd want to nick anyway.

I need to think of other things to say to start a new topic other than "So" or "Anyway".

Or "Right."

What I thought I'd do is, after the New Year, I'd post a new short story every Wednesday (because I may possibly have time to do so on Wednesday) and then a chapter or something of a longer project each month, I don't know what yet, until the whole thing is written and online. Except, of course, that it's already the New Year and we've already had the first Wednesday when I was hoping to post something, and... I... haven't... :/ Oh, and this weekly short story thing excludes times when I'm busy, namely when I have study leave (yes, I have time off, but it's to revise, not to write/blog!) and exams etc etc etc, 'cause it'd just be too much of a distraction (haha, would you look at that, we've come full circle! I didn't plan for that to happen, either!) and I just think 52 short stories is a little bit daunting (though it's already down to 51 now)... Though I might be able to manage it. I have far too many ideas cluttering my head. They're not even all good. In fact, most of them are absolute rubbish.

I guess it's back to my essay now. I'm already over my word limit (and confused) and not even finished yet... :/

Happy New Year everybody! Good luck with keeping your resolutions! (I think I've broken mine already: "I will not get distracted from schoolwork"... damn it...) I apologise for writing too much (yeah... I do that... it makes up for not talking much... well, I've got to voice my thoughts somehow... I reckon this beats talking to myself... yeah, you're agreeing with me that your sanity would be better off if you left, aren't you? :P ...And I'm doing it again - writing too much pointless stuff... shut UP, Beth!) and I congratulate you on reading this much. :)

Au revoir! (THAT'S the third thing that I hate!! Learning French!!! :D )