Word of the entry:
 
query: a question; an inquiry; an inquiry from a writer to an editor of a magazine, newspaper, etc., regarding the acceptability of or interest in an idea for an article, news story, or the like: usually presented in the form of a letter that outlines or describes the projected piece.
example: Head on down to Let The Words Flow for Query Week!! Also, why don't you query your way around FP and check out my new chapter? And shush, that was totally used correctly.



Well hello there everybody! This week is QUERY WEEK at Let The Words Flow!

Today, Sarah Maas (sjmaas) is posting about her experience with querying the fantastic QUEEN OF GLASS which includes the winning ticket (aka the query letter that landed her an agent).

On Wednesday, Savannah Foley (savannahjfoley) will be posting about her experience, and will include her query letter for the awesome, awesome ANTEBELLUM.

And then, on Friday, Mandy Hubbard (mandyhubbard) the published author of PRADA AND PREJUDICE, will look at both the query letters from an agent's point of view.

Sweet deal, right? The week is all about trying to cater to any questions aspiring writers have about querying agents, so if you have any, feel free to stop by.


In other news, I FINALLY posted a new chapter for TIME IS A FUNNY THING. Check it out HERE.


Also, I saw a performance of Georges Bizet's Carmen yesterday. Twas quite good. It completely changed my outlook on the libretto/story. I used to think Carmen was just a capricious, flighty, slut. Now I absolutely think that Don José is a psychotic asshole. I mean seriously. She told him like TEN MILLION TIMES to get the hell away from her and he kept coming back and eventually was driven to kill her. Screw that shit, man, I'm glad she died in the end, if only because she got rid of him. Not only that, but the lady playing Carmen, (a certain Rinat Shaham) basically had the best French accent, the best acting chops, and the best characterization depth. I was quite impressed by her.

Some might think my favourite part would be the "Habanera" aria, simply because of its popularity, but it was actually most of Act Two that had me spellbound all-round with music, performance, and setting. At the very beginning was "Les tringles des sistres tintaient" which is also known as "Gypsy Song". It's très cool. Very strange and mysterious, and it's happening at night, and there's some insane tension building :O.

Good stuff.


In other news, I found this absolutely touching video, and must share.






C'est tous! Check out my chapter! Check out Query Week! Have an awesome day!

Just a quick post. I had to do a book review on Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid in my Writer's Craft class, and I thought I'd put it up here.






All About Billy the Kid …Or Maybe Not
Biljana Likic

When you pick up a modern book of poetry, there is a certain flexibility that has to be established right from the start: you won’t always understand everything. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje is no exception. The intriguing, fictional window into the life of notorious outlaw Billy the Kid, a.k.a. William H. Bonney, a.k.a. Henry McCarty, will leave you feeling disenchanted, but not in a bad way.

On it’s own, the poetry is interesting. Its experimental form and phrasing is understandable poem by poem, but don’t even try to put it all together. The book illustrates Billy’s life so well, and so simply, that by the end of it, you don’t really know what you’ve just read. It’s like one of those conversations you have that you can’t remember the next day because you weren’t really talking about anything.

This is why this book is so hard to review. I can talk all day about how Billy didn’t really have a fixed character, constantly fluctuating between broody and cheerful, or how Angela D. would seem like a perfect ditz in one poem, but the only sane person in the next. I’d only be talking about the characters, though, and not about what I believe why the book was written.

I feel like in writing these poems, in taking this deified figure and producing a scattered portrait, Ondaatje was trying to say that maybe there was nothing very special about Billy the Kid; perhaps his life felt as ordinary to him as ours do to ourselves. Maybe the reason the first question in your mind when you close the book is “What the hell did I just read?” because you can’t pigeonhole a person. No matter how much you try, you’ll never be able to stuff every facet of a real human being into a single piece of work. That’s why Billy the character has so many different faces; because in real life, a person will act one way to one person, and another way to the next. Rarely is a person genuine to everybody.

The book in itself is much too short to give us more than mere glimpses of Billy’s overall personality, and this is why by the end of it, you have no clue what you read, or why you read it, or even what type of person Billy really was, but it seemed worthwhile anyways, just like the conversation from yesterday. Not to mention that giving Billy a fixed way of acting would completely ruin the mystery. By showing snippets of regular life, Ondaatje successfully gave us a book on Billy the Kid without boxing him in and taking away the myth factor of his life. At the same time though, he does an admirable job of showing us how normal a legend can be.

So now comes the question: Will you, after only having read this review once, be able to say what it was really about? Probably not. I planned it to be that way. The difference between this review and Billy the Kid is that you can read the book as many times as you want, but you will never be able to fully understand it. If that bothers you, stay away. However, if you feed off trying to crack open the unknown, I invite to read Ondaatje’s book of poetry for its merit and its mystery.

Word of the entry:
 
forty winks: a very short nap, usually not in a bed; origin believed to be biblical: Noah and his animals endured forty days of flood, there are forty days of lent, Moses was on Mount Sinai for forty days and forty nights...it's deemed the appropriate amount of "short".
example: I am tired. Perhaps I should take forty winks on that couch, because forty winks is not too much to make me drowsy, even though, in truth, every nap makes me drowsy...



Why hello there! What a beautiful Monday noon! Beautiful, because I don't have school today! Ah, bless exam time, when I don't have to study anymore.

Basically I'm posting because I'm a bit stuck with TIAFT... I've been cutting a lot, and I just murdered a darling (sob sob) so now I'm trying to figure out how to ease the story along without the murder being obvious... I'm sorry for the wait, for all those ten awesome readers that are reading it.

In other news, I've been invited to join Let The Words Flow!! So now you'll see even more of my articles and ramblings! :D But hopefully the ones on LTWF will actually be helpful, as opposed to totally centred on me like this one.

Also, Savannah J. Foley posted a new vlog on LTWF about "failing better". Extremely inspirational and well worth watching. You can check it out here. I highly recommend it. Anybody who has soubts about making it into the publishing world should watch it.

And that's all! Hopefully I'll hit a stride with TIAFT soon and I'll have another chapter up quickly. Sigh... We'll see.

Today, I have the wonderful honour of guest-blogging on Let The Words Flow!

LTWF is an awesome, awesome blog hosted by FictionPress.com veterans that are on the road to publication, if not already at its golden end. It's just a few months old and there's already so much great advice and information that an aspiring writer can use. And I had the tremendous complement of guest posting!

Here it is!

Woot!

I wrote about the importance of reading and critiquing the Works in Progress of other authors, and some of the things I've learned in doing so.

I hope it's helpful! :D Let me know what you think!



Also, birthday shout out to my friend Mary! And to Mozart! :O

Word of the entry:
 
lachrymose: suggestive of, or tending to cause tears; mournful.
example: These commercials will make your mood quite lachrymose. Unless you're a terrible human being. No pressure.



Commercials have been getting insanely better than they used to be. Probably due to our lack of attention span. And there are a lot of really funny ones, and ones that are super touching, but there are also ones that are absolutely terrifying.

I have a book review due in my Writer's Craft class tomorrow on THE COLLECTED WORKS OF BILLY THE KID by Micheal Ondaatje, so, as per usual, I am procrastinating. I was browsing Youtube videos and somehow I started watching all those shock-factor "Be safe or you'll regret it" commercials, and let me tell you, after a while, they take their toll. 

I thought I'd post some.

This first one's actually from a string of commercials by the government of Canada. They're about work safety and preventing accidents. You can find them on Prevent-it.ca, I'm pretty sure. At the beginning, they'd show one of those generic "Oh hey Steve, can you do this for me?" and he goes and tries to do it, and then he's somehow killed, and the person that asked him goes all "There's been an accident!!" and Steve gets up and says "It was no accident." Then they evolved into ones like this next one, which, if you ask me, is MUCH more powerful. They've become a bit infamous, because people, for some reason, think they're a hoot.






And then you have ones like this UN one, that's about landmines. As somebody who comes from a region in the world where landmines aren't uncommon, this one hit pretty hard. There's a lot of stuff going around, with people saying things like "Dude, why the hell would there be an unexploded land mine in a soccer field?" And I totally get that. But please, for the sake of the message, suspend your disbelief. It shouldn't be too hard.






Too far? Maybe. Not as far as this one, though. And you even hear crap about this one! "Oh it was just made so that the government can justify 'wasting' money on speed cameras. And look it's totally sexist. It's completely ageist." My god, man! Stop being so damn paranoid! Yeah, sure, government propaganda is everywhere you go, but you're just spitting in the face of anyone who's ever lost somebody because someone drove too fast! (And by the way, song choice in this one = AMAZING.)






This one is just heartrendingly touching :(. You may cry. Just a warning. I still have no clue what they're advertising, but I figured, it was on TV, so it counts here.






And finally, this one is just....so terrible...but it might put into perspective as to why some people think these kinds of commercials are funny. Underneath every commercial that I looked up, there was always somebody talking about how funny it was. To be honest, I don't let it bother me anymore. I refuse to be drawn into stupid Youtube debates, so a lot of the times I just let the comments wash over me.

But, I guess this could help you see why some people think they're more dark comedy than drama. And I suppose if you saw that scene in a movie like Hot Fuzz, you'd probably laugh. It all seems to depend on setting. Of course a part of you would think that you're terrible for laughing, but you'd probably still laugh.

Or you'll pull one of those, "HAHAHAHA no that's not funny! Stop laughing! That's terrible!"

Grrr.....If you find it funny, just laugh. Don't pretend you don't and then criticize others.

So yeah, here it is. It's not the same video as the one above.






Hahahahahahahahahaha.

Stop laughing! That's terrible!

Word of the entry:
  
exam: informal, an examination, as in school; test.
example: Exams are stupid. That's all I have to say.



Yes, exams start next Wednesday. Fortunately for me, I only have one, which would be on the subject of (you may laugh, in fact I encourage it,) Philosophy! So I'm not hating it so much this year as I did when I had like five or six in past years. And I guess it's great that it's on Thursday, so I'll have a whole week to myself while others take theirs. I just have to remember which philosopher said what and I'll be fine!

...Hopefully.

In other news, this is just a post for the sake of posting. I'm really not going anywhere with it. It's a product of extreme boredom, and because of this, I thought it fitting to do another....


When I write my bestseller/When I marry rich...

I will touch Stonehenge and kiss the Blarney Stone.


Stonehenge is extremely well known for it's supposed celestial alignment and use in pagan rituals. The site used to change hands through British nobility until sometime after WWI when it was given to the state. Up until 1977, people were allowed to walk around them and even climb them, but crazy erosion forced the state to rope it off. People can still walk around and through the stones at times like the equinox and solstice, and I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that you can make special bookings to go right up to the stones.

I plan on doing this. I can look at things and see that they're old and that's great. But when I touch stuff that's old, it's like I can feel the history and the weight of time. And if I'm going to go to Stonehenge, there is no way I'm not going to touch them.


The second, the Blarney Stone, might be less well-known. Supposedly, when a person kisses the Blarney Stone, they receive the Gift of Gab, so they can successfully court and woo their true love, or just flatter their way out of sticky situations.

Now I know what you're thinking. "Biljana, you already have the Gift of Gab."

But nobody except for my faithful readers believes me when I tell them.

...So yeah, nobody believes me.

It just seems like it'd be an experience. There are countless theories about the Blarney Stone, one of which (and this is kickass) is that it was part of the Stone of Destiny, the Lia Fáil, on the Hill of Tara in Ireland, and another of which is that it was the rock on which Moses struck his staff to produce water for Israelites when they were fleeing Egypt, and even that it was a part of the Stone of Scone, which was taken by England from Ireland as a spoils of war in the 1300s and put into King Edward's Chair, on which practically every subsequent monarch had been crowned. The Blarney Stone was given to Cormac McCarthy in the 14th century in recognition of a battle he supported, and then in the 15th century it was set into a tower of Blarney Castle. It's now a hugely popular tourist attraction.

So here's the tradition. You climb up to the tower, lie down on your back, hang over parapets with somebody holding your ankles, (and a couple of iron bars there to hopefully stop you if you slip,) and kiss a stone that looks exactly the same as any other stone in the castle foundations.





Fun times.

It's also rated as one of the most (if not the most) unhygienic tourist attractions in the world.

I guess I'll just have to go after a rainfall, which, in Ireland, shouldn't be too hard.

Word of the entry:
 
bloviate: to speak pompously.
example: Allow me to bloviate about my new TIAFT chapter on FictionPress.



I finally finished Chapter 7 of TIME IS A FUNNY THING!!! WOO!! It took so damn long. It actually took something like three weeks of staring at the document almost every day. But! I plowed on! And now, c'est finis! The full manuscript now contains exactly 35,226 words of very edited and re-written story! I'm quite proud of myself. I feel like I'm actually moving this goal forward. I feel like soon, soon, I'll be writing my own quarries... :)

Go check it out! The link is in the column on the left.


In other news, in the actual manuscript, Chapter 7 is really Chapter 9, which would make my title so much more relevant, but I'm keeping it anyways. Yesterday, I saw the movie Plan 9 From Outer Space!

That exclamation mark is in the title. Don't let it fool you into thinking it's terribly exciting. What that movie is, is terribly hilarious.

IT'S HILARIOUS.

It's supposedly the worst movie ever made, and with the director being Ed Wood, I'm somehow not surprised. It's terrible. Like, so so terrible. Both my friend and I were like "Well...how bad can it be?" We were in for a pleasant surprise.

The people were badly cast, the plot was horribly shoddy and had way too many holes to count, the dialogue was cringe-worthy enough to sound like a parody, and some of the actors didn't even know their lines.

"And if you see anything, run like th-lighting!"

Almost a direct quote, right there.

Here's a clip.




Clearly reading from queue cards. And really? "Future events will affect us in the future?"

Oh, Ed Wood...Your lack of skill physically wounds me...

...As I laugh at it.

Word of the entry:
 
birthday: the day of someone's birth.
example: It is my birthday today! What would the world have done had I not been born on this day eighteen years ago?



Probably rejoice.


So I'm eighteen today. It feels a bit weird. I feel like now, if I do impressive stuff, it won't seem as impressive as when I could've followed it with, "Yeah, and I'm only 17." From now on, people will associate me with university, and not high school, with adults, and not teens, and with maturity, and not...immaturity.

Sigh... It's all very sobering. Whenever the subject of being 18 came up in these past few weeks, I'd squeal and be all excited and my friends would all laugh and joke around. I got a lot of cracks about how now I'll be able to buy lottery tickets and porn.

Psh. As if I'd ever gamble.

Also, I can now vote. Meaning I'll have to actually pay attention to elections and such. Bleh. Politics just make me angry.

It's also been almost three years since I started writing TIME IS A FUNNY THING. Three years. I can hardly believe that I've stuck with something so long. I can hardly even believe that I'm getting to be where I am. A year ago, if somebody had told me the amount of improvement my manuscript would undergo, I wouldn't know what to say. Now, when I look at some sections, I don't even know where they came from. The experience and transformation that I've undergone in terms of my writing style and maturity has me baffled most of the time. Other times it has me cringing when I look at older stuff. And already, plot bunnies are hopping around in my head, for plays and novels, (another surprise: I never thought I'd be writing plays,) and I'm just itching to finish TIAFT to get started on new projects.

Probably most surprisingly though, is what I want to do in university next year.

Get this: Medieval Studies Specialist, BA. Possible Minor in English.


Yes, Medieval Studies.


Lol. Laugh it out, everyone else does. But you know what, they also kind of laughed when I told them about writing. Probably because I was only fifteen (holy crap that seems so long ago.) So maybe Eighteen does have it's privileges. That is, aside from political equality, access to lewd materials, and a green light for gambling.

Haha damn it all if that won't drive me to hell...


Anyways, I'm going to stop with the pessimism and melodrama. I hope everybody had a good past week! :)

I'll be back soon to post about something exciting :O:O.

If they were comfortable with only listening to my music for the rest of their lives, then I'd be perfectly fine with it. Otherwise, I'd likely go insane. Music is a large part of who I am, and at the risk of sounding pretentious, I've learned way too much about the history and about what sounds good, and I've been exposed to too many masterpieces that I can hardly even listen to the mainstream radio stations anymore. I am really open to new stuff though, and I'll listen to anything so long as I like it, but "horrific taste in music" is just.....no. I'm sorry.

And with the New Year comes a New Theme and a reprieve from Word of the entry!

I hope everyone had a very fun New Year's Eve. I went over to a friend's house and a couple of us just had a funny, vinyl records-filled night. Twas fun :).

In other news, I saw Sherlock Holmes!

EVERYBODY GO WATCH IT NOW!

See I was a bit iffy about it because as much as there is potential for greatest, there is a lot of potential for error. But it was great. The chemistry between Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr is SO FANTASTIC :D:D. I was really happy I saw it :).


But now, unfortunately, it's Friday. Any other week I would've been happy that it's Friday. But it's vacation time. And that it's Friday means it's my last official winter break day :(.

Come Monday, back to school....


Sigh...


Also, I feel like, with the new year, I should have some kind of list of goals but... Honestly, I suck at goals. As soon as I write them down, I don't want to do them anymore. I do however have that one secret goal that I'm sure anyone can figure out. So I'll just keep it in my head and have faith that people are cheering me on anyways :).

Word of the entry:
 
lugubrious: mournful, dismal; esp in an affected, exaggerated, or unrelieved manner.
example: Other than making me laugh at its fanciness, the word lugubrious also perfectly describes many instances in the TWILIGHT series.



I do apologize to any TWILIGHT fans, it's not that the books aren't sinfully addictive, no matter how groan-inducing they are, it's just that, let's face it, they're not very good. And my opinion that she only wrote the ones that came after because they were marketable does not make them better.

Before I go on though, NEW CHAPTER'S UP! of TIAFT! Check it out, if you so please :). And I did that at the risk of having my own words about TWILIGHT thrown right back into my face :P.


But back to TWILIGHT. The only reason I'm posting about it is because I found this high-larious video. It's a bunch of good excerpts from commentary done by RiffTrax. They're pretty funny.




And just in case you don't know who Harpo Marx is:





Ohhhhh Twilight. I suppose I should thank it for being the source of much laughter, however unintentional it was.


Anyways, I'm off to try to write the next chapter! I'm a bit unsure how to continue it smoothly, so that'll be a fun challenge.

Ugh...fun my ass.

Word of the entry:

widdershins: counterclockwise; in the contrary direction.
example: I can just picture that scenario.
                 "Turn it widdershins."
                 "...What?"
                 "Widdershins! Turn it widdershins!!"
                 "Uh..." (turns it clockwise.)
                 "No, no! Widdershins, you fool!!"
                 (world explodes.)




So I went to a comedy bar last night, the first time ever, really, and it was pretty fun. There were two groups that went up, and the first group was an improv troupe that my friend knew personally. They were the reason we went, to support them. The second group was the regular weekly sketch comedy/improv troupe. The first group was better. The regulars wrote some kind of radio show. It was...kind of annoying. One of those things where you know you're supposed to laugh because it's a joke, but you just don't find it funny. Also, because it was a radio show, they felt the need to put on character voices, which I strongly dislike with very few exceptions. There were some highlights definitely, some parts where I laughed a lot, but I wasn't very impressed. I was left a bit disappointed that the troup that was my age was hella better than the troupe that performed there weekly.

But!! In the last half hour of the weekly troupe people's time, they gave a chance for a band to perform. And they were AWESOME.

They're called The Wilderness of Manitoba. They're super super mellow and very indie. They're songs are all pretty slow but they're so nice to listen to because the harmonies are beautiful.

Check this out.




Yeah...so relaxing...

This is their myspace, for those interested. They're pretty low-profile still, and not many people know of them, but they have an EP out. I don't know how available it is in the States, but they're still worth looking into.


C'est tous, everyone! I'm off to a potluck dinner with friends!


That's a lie...I have no friends...

That was another lie. I thought it'd be funny.

I do have friends.

I'll stop now.

FOOD. Seriously. I'm the type of person that will take half an hour eating a sandwich, if it's good enough. I was eating chocolate ice cream (FAVOURITE) today and it was all I could do to not close my eyes in bliss at every spoonful.

I have one friend that will always make fun of me and how I eat, because I'll inspect it before putting in my mouth, cutting it up and spearing it with a fork and looking at it to make sure none of it fell off and stuff. Honestly though, there is hardly anything more unsatisfying than expecting something like a mouthful of spaghetti and getting only the sauce on the fork.

I'm a little more subtle about it in public, though :P.