08.21.11
Posted in Journal, Writing at 9:34 am by Natalie
I have dreams every night, sometimes they are really crazy ones (like the man-eating guitars that were chasing me earlier in the week), but what is common to all of them is that I have absolutely no control over what happens next. So why is it that when we talk of our hopes and aspirations for the future we call them dreams?
Is the reason because we think these things are just as ephemeral and intangible as the dreams that entertain (or horrify) us each night? Am I naive to think that with a plan, a goal list and a lot of hard work I can attain my dreams? Have I read one too many self-help books?
The other phrase I hear a lot is ‘dare to dream’ –like there is something inherently dangerous about doing it. Again this could be the self-help books talking, but I think it would be much more daring not to dream. Without dreams what on earth would motivate you to get up each day? If you are not working toward something, what are you doing?
Apologies for the existential post, but I have been letting my dreams slide a little over the past couple of months, but it doesn’t mean that I have let them go. I just took a little lazy break and now it is time to get back to the dream grindstone.
I can’t imagine living life any other way.
Happy writing,
Nat
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08.17.11
Posted in Journal at 9:14 pm by Natalie
I’m reading ‘The Pillars of the Earth’ by Ken Follett at the moment. It has been recommended to me by countless people, some as their ‘favourite book ever’. I have to admit, I am struggling with it. Sometimes.
None of us want to read a book where everything goes perfectly for the lead character all the time, that would be boring. Equally (as this book has taught me) we do not want to read a book where everything goes wrong all the time. This story covers a span of some 30+ years (and over 1,000 pages) and our band of ‘good guys’ constantly face struggles to overcome various adversities, then they come out victorious, only to have it all taken away from them by something unforeseen.
This has happened time and time again in the novel, to the point where every time things are going well I get frustrated because I know something out of left field is about to come and destroy it all again, usually somehow involving the ‘bad guys’.
Sometimes I find myself really enjoying the story, putting off going to bed so I can stay up to see what happens next. Sometimes I want to throw it across the room because the conspiracy of coincidences which have once again undone all of the good guy’s work just annoys me.
I will not say it is a bad book, it is well written, fantastically researched and the characterisation is good. But for someone who doesn’t get a lot of joy from the misery of others, it can be a bit exasperating at times. I can see what others love, but the constant feeling of frustration is dampening the enjoyable parts too much for my liking. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not asking for it to be Hollywood, but even reality is not that peppered with bad fortune.
Perhaps if it was cut up into a few different books, where the victories for the good guys were the ends of the books, and the coming undone was the start of the next, perhaps then I would be more forgiving. If for no other reason than you would have longer to enjoy the victories.
It has really opened my eyes to what I do and don’t enjoy in a story, and the ongoing rollercoaster ride just gets a bit same-same after a while. The sudden plunge when you are not expecting it can pull your heart into your throat the first time, but when you have been there six or seven times before, it just starts to feel like a bumpy ride.
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08.03.11
Posted in Journal at 10:50 pm by Natalie
Yes, the weather warmed up a bit this week, and it felt like Spring! I don’t know if it is a coincidence, but I wrote some new words this week, and I should have my next eBook out by the weekend. I know this break from the cold is probably just a tease, but I’m making the most of it with a celebration of the end of winter with a photo log…
Goodbye winter colours…
Hello spring workers…
And let’s not forget the dragons…
There may have been some photo manipulation in one of these pictures…
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07.31.11
Posted in Journal at 6:17 pm by Natalie
I know I’ve written about perspective before, but I had a brush with perspective of a different kind today and it surprised me. This was a case of the same person looking at the same thing through very different eyes. The subject of this perspective was Dancing Queen by ABBA, and the person was me.
I remember listening to Dancing Queen as a child and dreaming that one day I could be that dancing queen. But 17 seemed so very far off, it was over a decade away and I was sure it would never come. I had to be content with dancing in the lounge room by myself.
Then I remember listening to dancing queen again, this time in a nightclub during my first year of uni when I was 17. It’s funny, but when the techno tunes were not playing, Dancing Queen was still a favourite. I clearly thought myself very much the dancing queen as I was usually among the first out on the dance floor.
Now, as I listened to it today, I lamented that my time as the dancing queen (now ten+ years in the past) was forever behind me. Again I would be relegated to the lounge room if I wanted to relive my time as that royal with rhythm.
How funny that one song could bring back all those memories, mixed with all those very different feelings over a space of just a few minutes.
Now you’ll have to forgive me for cutting off early, but the lounge room beckons…
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07.24.11
Posted in Journal at 1:37 pm by Natalie
There is an upside to this rather miserable time of year, and that is the beginning of whale watching season. Being located in Adelaide at the moment, I’m well placed to pop down to the high peaks of the Victor Harbour bluff (or any one of the cliff edges that look out over the Southern Ocean) to watch the Southern Right Whales as they frolic around, give birth to and then play with their babies.
Yesterday we heard there was one such cetacean playing off Victor Harbour, so we all jumped in the car and set off on the one hour trek (with many games of eye-spy and twenty questions along the way to defer the inevitable ‘are we there yet’ from little miss six).
To add a bit of spice to our quest there was also a storm rolling in which we were desperate to beat. We could hear the crashes of distant lightning punctuating the old-time tunes on the radio (because we were listening to am radio as dad was driving and he is a big believe in ‘driver picks the radio station’, no matter how desperately the passengers protest. So really the lightning sound was a bit of relief).
With the first splatters of raindrops on the window (splatters, not patters, these were big drops that looked not unlike clear seagull droppings) we arrived to search the slate grey ocean for signs of life.
Did we see any whales before the storm drove us back into the car and a further torturous round of twenty-questions? I’ll let my photos do the talking…
Whale in the distance
Close up of whale
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07.03.11
Posted in Journal, Writing at 5:11 pm by Natalie
What is it about the scary story that captivates us so much? Love them or hate them, when you find yourself listening, you just can’t turn away. Not only do we love to hear them, but we love to tell them, and this is not limited to the natural story teller, we all have our spooky story to share.
At a recent dinner party a woman in her seventies, not prone to flights of fancy, had us all captivated with her story of driving through Bacchus Marsh one night and being followed by extremely bright lights in the sky (at one point Bacchus Marsh was the Australian UFO hot spot, but she didn’t know this).
We were all rapt, hanging on every word as the hairs on our skin prickled. Her fear glowed as fresh and real as if she had just stepped from the car after the incident now over forty-five years in the past.
Once she had finished her tale we were all momentarily silent, chilled with the sincerity of her retelling. Then, as always seems to happen, the other scary stories around the table surfaced.
It seems we have all had at least one brush with a ghost or unusual lights or phenomenon that just can’t been explained by science, and the best way we can try to understand these experiences is to share them. By turning them over with others we hope to find the truth, and if that remains beyond reach, at least we can find comfort in the sharing of our fear.
So is it any wonder that people are drawn to scary stories; to find that thrill, the excitement, the fear, and come out on the other side unscathed (albeit carrying a few hidden tracking devices we can’t quite remember having inserted). I love scary stories. I love telling them, imagining them and above all, hearing them. No wonder I was always drawn to speculative fiction.
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06.26.11
Posted in Journal at 8:23 pm by Natalie
I was showing the 6 year old ‘little miss’ the fairy toadstools growing in the paddock across the road. Between these lovely red with white-dot storybook toadstools were slimy brown toadstools, which looked a little like fresh cow pats. Being the speculative fiction writer that I am, I asked her the question; “If fairies live in the pretty red and white toadstools, who lives in the slimy, gross brown ones?”
Little miss looked at me with the condescension that only a child can muster, shaking her head as if she pitied my stupidity. “That’s where the boys live, of course!”
I should have known!
Anyway, time for another photo blog, so here are some of the fairy houses around the garden…
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06.19.11
Posted in Journal at 9:05 am by Natalie
I was one of the many (few?) who set my alarm for 4:30am on Thursday morning to get up and look at the lunar eclipse. I have seen one before, in January 2000 on the night before I flew out of the UK. Back then I had a standard film camera loaded with black and white film. I fared slightly better, more than ten years later, with digital equipment and a tripod.
For those of you who did get to see it, you will probably agree that what is really striking (which the photos never convey) is how much closer and more three-dimensional the moon looks when it is totally eclipsed, shining with that odd red glow. Really, is it any wonder that people think the end of the world will be heralded with a blood red moon?
The 2012 End of Days event (one of my favourite topics for fiction writing –both humorous and serious) begins with a blood red moon. In fact this is one of the things which is used as an argument for this date in 2012 as being the real thing, because so many cultures mention this same lunar signal; the Christian Bible, Aztecs, Incans, Hopi Indians and the Egyptians among others.
Obviously Thursday’s eclipse was not the beginning of the end, or I wouldn’t be publishing this post, but just so you don’t get too nervous next time the astronomers and TV weather men tell you to look skyward (December 11, 2011). The other common link is that the End of Days blood red moon is not an expected event, in fact there is the suggestion that it is not even the Earth that casts the shadow…
Happy star gazing!
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06.05.11
Posted in Journal at 5:53 pm by Natalie
This weekend I saw an excellent exhibition on the machines of Da Vinci, and while he might not have invented the Cryptex (as claimed by Dan Brown) he was certainly no slouch. When he wasn’t painting, drawing or sculpting masterpieces, he was inventing things which have made all our lives better, and in some instances he invented stuff for things that weren’t yet invented (like pitch and roll measures for aircraft –yikes).
This of course left me feeling completely incompetent. The only thing I’ve ever invented was a delicious chicken/caper pasta sauce and a hot drink for getting rid of colds which tastes like sweet dirt and smells like well-used wet sandshoes.
But I am not alone. A lot of people I know have never invented life-changing contraptions or created beautiful works of art. So why was Snr Da Vinci so prolific and the rest of us so useless? I think The disposable heroes of hiphoprisy might have hit the nail on the head within the lyrics of their song; “Television, the drug of the nation, breeding ignorance and feeding radiation.”
When Da Vinci and his compatriots finished a long day at the office they did not flop home to watch the latest unreal reality TV or endless enigma within a riddle within a red herring drama. No, they entertained themselves. They invented things. They got creative.
So this week, in the lead up to WriMoFoFo I’m going to record any ‘must see TV’ (of which I might add there is very little) and I’m going to see if I can get my creative juices flowing by banning the idiot box (as my mother likes to call it). I’m going cold turkey… Starting tomorrow.
Nat
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06.01.11
Posted in Journal at 5:47 pm by Natalie
Last week a sk8ter boy in Tasmania spotted a UFO, not once, but twice. Not only that, but he managed to capture it on video using a tripod, or else he has a much steadier hand than your average UFO cameraman;
Looking at the video it could be a UFO of alien origin, or it could be a blimp, or it could be some lights strung up over his back fence. My favourite suggestion so far is that it is the reflection of the guy’s modem in the window. Yes, it could be that.
The thing that gives this story plausibility is the emphatic denial the media was quick to heap onto the story. The bureau of meteorology suggested it might be the Aurora… err I don’t think so. Even a six year old raised by camels in the desert could probably tell us that the blinking lights are not the aurora.
Air Traffic Control confirmed there were no aircraft in the area at the time. What time? I checked out flights and they are pretty regular in and out, not to mention private aircraft. And just turn off your transponder and you are invisible to ATC.
The military ‘did not comment’ –perhaps they were never asked? See, this could have been the clincher. The military have the real radar that spots everything, but they didn’t comment.
The thing that was not reported was did anyone else who was not in Sk8ter boy’s house see the lights? I know Tassie is a bit cold at the moment, but I refuse to believe no-one was out and about on Saturday night!
You cannot help but wonder if the media beat up is in fact a conspiracy. If they make such a fuss each time flashing lights are seen, soon enough we’ll just ignore them all. As Fox would say I want to believe.
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