Eyes of the Cosmic Whale
“…leaving the heavens naked, glistening blue-black, like the belly of some cosmic whale…”Archive for Writing
Writing: my anti-drug
Nanowrimo is fast approaching and I’m enjoying every second of the preparation.
The cons is that I’m spending less time studying and focusing in my IGCSE’s.
The pros is that I’m having so much fun, it’s hard to put it into words.
The brainstorming in the last few days has been neverending. Today, while in the library, the character on mine who is a conspiracy theorist suddenly became an avian flu conspiracy theorist. And then I could just see him, in the Biblioteca Nacional (which I’ll have to visit, since it’ll be a recurring setting), flicking through old archives and suddenly screaming out loud “I knew it! It’s all because of the chicken exports!”. And then I saw Marlene, telling her mom to stop buying chicken, and her mom asking why, and she saying “I’ve got this half Swiss friend that told me. The embassy keeps sending them stuff”, and of course her mom would be like wtf? (And she doesn’t even know he’s like 50!)Naughty Marlene would have to fake knowing him from the public speaking classes, because the truth sounds way surreal.
The truth is way surreal. Their truth. This truth. Read the rest of this entry »
Nanowrimo, here I come!
Oh yes. This year, I’m going to try Nanowrimo. I say “try” because there’s a million impediments. For a start, the IGCSE exams. They’ve already started and I can barely believe it. The ones I’ve had so far haven’t been so hard, but then there they were Spanish and French and those are easy subjects. The ones that scare me are those that are coming up…history and sciences. Yikes.
The IGCSE’s finish on November 16th. So let’s say I don’t write anything until the 16th- I still have half a month to go. Today I realized I’ll also have the retiro de confirmación and stuff…but I hope it works out. I hope I get to write. Which is the whole point. Man, I’m going to have so much fun!
Today I reached a point in which I can say: Nanowrimo, here I come! I’ve got a plot and it’s slowly piecing up. Well, it’s not a complete plot, either, but the ideas come in the form of patches and patch by patch, I hope I’ll be able to make the quilt.
So far I’ve got 4/5 main characters and most of the plot. I need a twist and I need the end. But it’s working out.
My plot in one sentence: a failed psychologist decides to try and help people by putting motivational quotes on the back of a fake dollar in the street.
It sounds…weird like that (it’s hard to put it in one sentence, there’s so much I’d like to say about it). But it’s going to work. I’m going to make it work. I hope so.
I’ll keep you updated 
.
And now, ahoy, I’ll do more Paper 1 History questions.
C:
Tough world and uncertainty scares.
I’ve been thinking about the future so much, and yet it’s still blurry and confusing. And somehow, yesterday I worked out what bothers me so much. I’m scared. Allow me to explain, though.
Let’s go step by step. The calling I’m following right now is that of international relations. That’s because I’d like to work in the UN and defend human rights. But now let’s be realistic. Even assuming I manage to choose the right university, settle in easily and get a diploma, how many chances do I have of actually doing that? The answer is: not many. And what else comes to mind when one thinks of international relations? Politics. And politics are a complicated, complicated thing.
It’s politics when people in Puno stone the mayor to death. It’s politics when Sarkozy leaves a meeting with Putin drunk, only to give a conference in that state. It’s politics when schoolchildren have to question the legitimacy of Woodrow Wilson’s actions, or Truman, or Stalin. And even if I probably won’t get to be president or whatever, but still, politics are a complicated, complicated thing. And very often I wonder if I have the personality (and the stomach) to deal with being a politician. And very often I wonder if it’s not the right thing for me. Politics are interesting, but to be the politics…it scares me.
And when people ask me what I like doing, it’s writing. Of course, there’s a million things I enjoy doing, but I suppose writing is high on the top 10 list. And yet writing is also scary. Writing for your food? To pay for your rent, your bills, your clothes? It sounds risky. And, it’s a very corrupt media. Once I saw a movie, an Agatha Christie sort of thing. It was a mistery set in a small town in the UK, and it was about a writing festival. Between the publishers, editors, ghostwriters and writers, they all ended up killing each other. But then there, I’d like someone to name one uncorrupted media. Journalism is complicated too.
And it doesn’t help not to know where I’ll be living. Because the whole “where I’ll study” complicates things more. You would think having the whole world ahead of you is an advantage, but it only makes things a lot harder. There are two main scenarios, though. Will I be able to go somewhere else, somewhere far away, where I’ll be alone and exposed to so much of the world’s hardship and without anyone I love with me? Will I be able to cope with all of it? Or, on the other hand, will I choose someplace relatively mediocre because I’m unable to leave the safety of home’s nest? Where will we be? Oh, where, where, where?
But I tell myself, I also have two years to overcome what needs to be overcome and to work out and organize my jumbled up thoughts. I have two years still for God to tell me where He wants me to be.
Because truth be told, right now I’m uncertain about so much, I need His answer.
It’s good to have this whole thing, in a way, out of me.
“If I get it all down on paper, it’s no longer inside of me, threatening the life it belongs to”. Three cheers to Anna Nalick’s musical wisdom!
And now, with a lighter mood, the joy of the calm , awesome music Grey’s Anatomy’s soundrack is made of and the duties of writing and correcting for the Journalism Interhouse, all lying next to me, I sign off.
Start the week with a smile! It always makes a change, always C:
Entrenched in quotes
-’expectation keeps us standing
but it’s the unexpected
that changes our lives’-
I found the quote while studying learning for the History Mock Exam. Suddenly, in the lower right corner, a quote caught my eye. There it was, written in cursive and with a pen that wrote in a blue different from the one used in the timeline itself.
My first reaction was a smile of approval at the quote itself, followed by intrigue. Where did this come from? Who said it? Faithful old Google could not find an exact match, only something roughly similar- a quote from Grey’s Anatomy (*bricked*).
But then I thought, halt there! Last year I didn’t even know of the show’s existance! How could it be…? And then the scene flickered through my eyes. Me watching Grey’s Anatomy on the laptop, finding that quote excellent, muttering it to myself as to not forget it, grabbing the closest copybook, my beloved Orange debate one, opening it in a random page, scribbling what my memory could recall.
Turning the quote into something that wasn’t Grey’s Anatomy and that wasn’t my own, but something in between. This is the explanation I give as to why I didn’t annotate the author of the quote. (There remains the chance that it’s from somewhere else) Oh well.
Walking down the tight rope
About three weeks ago I was writing an article for a local, school magazine. Wanting advice, I decided to ask someone I greatly admire to read it, who also happens to have an extraordinary understanding of words. By this I mean their meanings, their connotations, and so on.
What this one person showed me was that there was a difference between telling the truth and directly affecting someone’s life.
That was just how I realized how complex journalism really is. What is the balance between being honest and divulging perhaps too much about someone’s privacy? “They said that in an interview!” someone said to me, “If they said it in the interview, that means it’s ok to publish it, right? They were conscious it was being taped.” But were they? When you’re being asked question after question, are you focusing on actually answering them, or on measuring every word?
Personally, I believe it’s the first reason. The temptation for the jouranlist, of course, is great, particularly with the juiciest material. But every other quote could be seriously compromising the public’s perception of a certain person. Journalism is walking down a tight rope, and sometimes we just have to make a choice between what’s best for the readers or what’s best for the main characters in the piece.
[LATER] The choice is hard, and now I feel I have left my thoughts without a conclusion. The reality is that if we missed out all of the crude bits in testimonies, stories would be disfigured and tergiversated. Censorship would result. Life isn’t butterflies and rainbows; even butterflies have a brown side to contrast the shiny turquoise one, and the rainbow has darker colours as well.
Much does depend, though, on the actual topic and the content of the interview. And thus the choice remains; and thus we cannot be liberated from the tight rope we walk, in which we must carefully calculate and choose where the next foot will step.
