friendlyhag

I made another Frodo/Sam fanvid set to a cover of mirrors by Sam Tsui and Kurt Schneider.

Today was the first lecture of my genre writing class. The general overview made it seem like what we will learn will be really interesting. The lecturer made lots of jokes and was fun to listen to. I'd actually seen her before at my godmother's book launch because they're friends. As an incentive to make people attend lectures, they want students to come to lectures cosplaying as the book or genre being discussed that week (obviously, this is optional). I don't think I'd dress up but it'll be fun to see other people do it.

Later this semester we will be required to plan a novel in a genre of our choice and give a three minute pitch about it. Then we will be required to write the first 3000 words of it. I'm not sure which genre I'm going to choose yet. I have way more experience reading and writing romance, so that would be the easy choice. I also like the idea of trying to write high fantasy, but I feel like maybe I haven't read enough of it to be any good. I've had this vague idea for a while of a high fantasy story with two elderly women as the main characters. Whether that idea will see the light of day, I'm not sure yet.

After the lecture I wandered around the nature-y part of campus for a bit. I love how at this time of year so many different birds hang around the lakes. I saw around seven different types of water birds there. And when you look up the trees are filled with cockatoos, which are my favourite type of bird. Seeing all of them makes me happy.

My friend Danielle came over the other night which was really nice. She lives in Melbourne so I don't get to see her often these days. She hung out with my sister and I and we watched the movie Notting Hill. None of us thought it was particularly great but it was fun regardless. By about half way through the movie it seemed apparent to us that the two romantic leads weren't actually that well suited and barely knew each other. We were like: yeah, you like each other, but i'd give your relationship two years tops. So when the movie ended with her laying with him, pregnant, it felt like a really ominous ending to us, even though it was supposed to be happy and romantic. Maybe we've gotten too cynical haha.

I enrolled in my subjects for this semester. I decided to take the plunge and do the genre writing class even though I'm not that confident in my ability to write original fiction. I might come to regret it, but hopefully it will be ok. At least in this class you only need to show your writing to the teacher, as opposed to having a bunch of your peers critique it. I'm required to read a lot of books for that subject, which means I need to put reading Lord of The Rings on hold for a bit. One of those books is Game of Thrones, which I was struggling through but it has finally started to get interesting. It's making me want to give the TV show another chance.

I'm still working away on my Ryan/James Wilfred fanfic. When I started it I only intended it to be a quick 2000 word story, but it just keeps growing, it's like I only know how to write longer stories. I kind of want to hurry up and finish so I can start writing other things. I've been wanting to start writing Frodo/Sam fics for a while. I'm a bit intimidated though, as far characters go they seem hard to write, or at least easy to write badly. I've been finding some particularly good Frodo/Sam fics recently, which inspires me to write but also makes me feel like I could never write anything that good. But I want to give it a go soon anyway.

I finally got Pokémon Sun! I can't believe it's taken me this long to get around to it. I was so sure I was gonna chose Rowlet or Poplio, but then in the moment I just had to choose Litten. I'm also training an Alolan Meowth named Randall. I'll post a picture of my team when I fill it out.

I've been working on writing a Wilfred (US) fanfic about Ryan and his ex best friend from law school, James. I'm honestly really surprised that nobody has shipped them before. I'm basically writing it because I went to Ao3 and was disappointed that their weren't already fics about them for me to read. It's weird how almost non existent the fandom is for this show.

Just putting it out there, but i'd love to have somebody to give me a second opinion on the choices I've made with characterisation and filling in the gaps of their past. If you're interested and you're familiar with the show/characters, send me a message.

 I've been really conflicted about which subjects I want to do at university this semester. I had previously been really certain that I was going to do a writing subject about genre fiction that looked really interesting. But the problem is that the majority of my writing practice has been fanfiction. I don't know if I'm good enough yet to commit to a class where i'll be expected to write original fiction with a deadline, then be expected to show it to people. I know that the solution is to practice writing original fiction more, but it's so hard to make myself do that. If I ban myself from writing fanfiction and try to only write original fiction I end up writing drastically less and less often.

I'm fine at coming up with plots, it's the characterisation that I get really stressed out about. Because I have no practice at introducing a character's personality and making the reader like my them, because in fanfiction it is assumed that the reader already knows and likes them, so it's just not a thing you need to think about much. Controlling the pacing of how quickly the reader is supposed to get a sense of who the character is stresses me out.

I don't know, I like the idea of doing a subject where I read a bunch of books and learn about writing, but I'm not sure if I'm ready. I need to decide soon.