Psst.

Remember all those times I was on here stressing about uni?

Two B’s! Damn I love being slightly above average. I don’t suck as an editor after all.

Names and lack thereof

Grr grr grr. I’m having trouble naming the bad guy in The Waiting Room. It’s annoying the hell out of me, because I never ever have a problem naming ANYTHING:

Example one: I named my new laptop Albert, for no reason other than it suits it.
Example two: I named the statue of the frog that Mum bought at Penguin market Farnsworth.
Example three: I named my cyclamen plant Cyril.

If I can name random inanimate objects why the HELL can’t I find a name for this guy? He’s doing it deliberately. He’s sitting in my  mind with a smirk on his face saying “Come on. Name me!”

Gah.  What do you name a slightly insane guy who does things just to see what would happen?

In other news I nearly fell off my chair at the news that my beloved Tiggers beat Hawthorn yesterday. Am running out of reasons to hate Terry Wallace, Joel Bowden and similar.  There is a (small) distinct possibility that we could still make the finals.

Now THAT would make me fall off my chair. Although to be fair, it wouldn’t really matter if we did because there isn’t a team kicking around who is going to beat Geelong.

(Back in Melbourne. Meant to be looking for a new house, cleaning and other similarly domestic things. Am in actual fact sitting on the floor in the lounge room watching Andrew Gaze have forty fits about the Boomers v Lithuania and trying to find a name for a crazy bad guy. At the moment he’s named after a boss I once had, which is mildly appropriate.)

Aussie aussie aussie…

Aussie Aussie Aussie (Oi Oi Oi)

I would just like to point out that Channel 7 are in fact completely hopeless. Because I had the Olympics on all day yesterday I got to watch Stephanie Rice win a gold medal FOUR TIMES. Good on her and everything, but seriously. Am still annoyed that they went on about the soccer being live but was in fact delayed so they could show the first episode of ‘Make Me A Supermodel’. Well fair enough really, I mean Australia doesn’t have any type of modelling reality show…oh wait…

It turns out that the one of the girls who got a silver medal for Australia in the synchronised diving used to dive with my cousin. This clearly makes me cool doesn’t it? My cousin tried out for the Sydney Olympics but didn’t make the team (the trials were outside on a really windy day – fact: you would not get me on the 10 metre tower for all the whiskey in Ireland).

As much as Channel 7 suck, they do have Tom Willams doing random Tom Williams-like things, and that’s bringing me a lot of joy. But until they bring in multiball for all Olympic sports and get the spectators to start piffing balls at the athletes competing, I fear this Olympics is going to be completely unremarkable.

That said, I was watching yesterday when they interviewed the Aussie bronze medal winning canoeist. When they asked him what he was going to do with his medal he said without a thought “This is going straight to the pool room.” That alone deserves a gold medal. Go and watch The Castle for more information.

YA-what?

Riddle me this, riddle me that. I was reading a post on the Absolute Write forums about what constitutes a YA book, and I’m confused. Someone said that the two main points of a YA book are a protagonist aged 13-21, and the story should contain coming-of-age elements.

The reason I’m so confused is that I read The Book Thief by Markus Zuszak, which is apparently considered YA fiction, but I thought it was targetted at adults. And then I was thinking about To Kill A Mockingbird, and wondered how a book like that isn’t considered YA. I guess that is a different example, because it’s such an old book and it was written before YA existed. The Journey  by John Marsden definitely qualifies as YA, that was one of my favourite books in high school. 

I’m intrigued.  Genre questions tend to swamp my brain a bit. It’s like back when all of a sudden there was an Emo music genre, but when I asked people to give me an example of said emo music wars would break out. Until My Chemical Romance came out with Black Parade, which brought an end to the fighting.

All of this has successfully served to divert me away from writing. I am up to 7K, and if I didn’t procrastinate so much I would probably have hit 10K by now. Ah well, at least I have the Olympics and Mum’s mental cat Georgie to keep me company. Last night Georgie tried to get involved in the boxing and started whacking her paws against the TV which brought me large amounts of amusement.

PS: Was sad to see that Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn died during the week. A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Someone said on the news that they should start teaching his books in schools in Russia. Think this is a marvelous idea, much better than invading Georgia (in my humble opinion).

PPS: Word count update 8192.

Baroness Von Procrasinate

So: amount of words written in the last week = 0. Stalled at 6166, due to the many and various procrastinations that Tasmania has to offer, such as:

Eating my way to Devonport and back through the raspberry farm, the cheese factory and the Belgian chocolate factory. 
Going on the Boags tour in Launceston with a bonus four pots at the end
Going on the Launceston Ghost Tour (lots of photos of orbs)
Hawthorn v Brisbane (most boring game ever)

However, last night I dreamt that I had to send the full manuscript to someone and I hadn’t finished, so this week is all about parking myself in front of the TV, watching the Olympics and typing my butt off.

(Have also been uploading pics to Flickr from my round the world trip from 2006 – go check it out!)