Young Adult vs Adult Fiction.

(http://thehui.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/old-couple-743330.html)

Some where between these perhaps?

(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_h0OGhdVfTVA/R47OmwtH0FI/AAAAAAAAASE/L-bYfAFCEkg/s400/a_teens2_2.jpg)

Just busy writing away and thinking about the divide between young adult and adult fiction.

My protagonist is young ( early twenties) and the story is a coming of age story. Although there are older characters, the story centres on the life and times of the lead and friends growing up and finding themselves in the world. On this basis alone, I think it leads towards young adult fiction.

Now, there is no intention to litter the story with sex, drugs or violence but I don´t feel as if it is a story I would share with a 16 year old, even though most teenagers would relate to it.

Is there a definite divide between the two genres or is there some kind of middle ground? Would it be too ambitious to market an idea like this to a purely adult audience who might find certain parts rather juvenile?

New year, new project.

To be writing my first post for 2010 on the 11th of March is probably a little slack. Sorry.

I have moved back to Adelaide and am now working. You would think with all my free time, I would have updated this blog.You would have thought wrong.

It´s funny how things impact your life. I really wanted to develop this blog, but I guess other things got in the way.

Well now I am back. Back to square 1. Back to basics. Back.

This year is all about writing for me. Writing, improving on my writing and learning about how the writing industry works.

At the moment, I am tinkering with an idea. It´s in gestation and the moment and I am predicting the birth of a book at sometime in the near future. I have never been so focussed and it seems everytime there is an opportunity to sit down, I am back onto the idea again.

I will be linking a lot of writing resources that I have found in the last couple of months to this blog and if you are out there and tapping away at a major piece, I´d like to hear about it.

Sia

A quick break from some last minute study.

I love Sia. She´s originally from Adelaide, she has an amazing voice and seems to be completely mental.

It´s great when you come across an artist with a bit of spark and originality.

As you can see , her latest cd ´Some people have real problems´ is very adaptly named in modern times.

Find her on youtube.com.

Catch up.

Although it was a while ago - I thought I´d upload at least one picture from the States.

Just three major assignments and one week seperate me from finishing this Masters. Counting down the days seems to be an understatement.

I´ve moved back from Melbourne to Adelaide, where I am from originally and have already found a job. No more poor student life for me , ever. Not a materialistic person by any stretch, but how I´ve missed money and the agency it gives.

This is round 3 for me living in Adelaide. Two years ago I would have said two rounds too many, but it has been great so far - that said, I have only been back for a week. The weather and the beach have both been great after a winter in Melbourne spent under a slate sky and hiding in doorways to escape the rain.

-----

On a completely seperate note, I thought I would have my first gripe of this blog and it is firmly directed at the saturation of the marketplace here in Australia with all things breast cancer related.

Before I begin, breast cancer is tragic and the Pink Ribbon campaign is rightly raising funds for research into it, but I can´t help but feel a litle disturbed at how many companies are coming up with products or modifying their own products in the aim of promoting breast cancer / Pink Ribbon awareness.

From TicTac

To bottled water:

To paper towels:

It seems that everyone in on the bandwagon and that makes me think: How bankable is charity?

The Pink Ribbon campaign is incredibly well known here in Australia. Is this an attempt to sincerely sponsor the charity or boost sales?

Will we ever see the same attention paid to other cancers such as prostate, testicular or colon for example?

This month is Movember (http://www.movember.com/) which aims to raise funds and awareness of mens health as well as mental illness (http://www.beyondblue.org.au/). Movember encourages men to grow a moustache for one month while attracting sponsorship from friends, family and colleagues etc..

If even 5% of the attention could be redistributed to other cancers and causes then there would

a good chance of really promoting awareness and hopefully saving lives.

Just a thought.

Road Trip

Since being back in Australia, I´ve missed my friends. One in particular.

We always had this plan to do a road trip and after thinking too much about it, I have decided that I am going to go. So I´m set. I am flying to L.A in the first week of September for two weeks.

I want to go out into the desert and visit some of the amazing sights. Monument Valley and Zion National Park are high on my list. I´ve been to the States before and although I didn´t really think much of the place before I went , I soon began to love it. The scenery is amazing.

----

On another note, my long time unrequented love called me on Skype the other day just for a chat and although I am very happy in my current relationship, I couldn´t help but feel an old fire stirring.

I let how I felt slip the last time we spoke and that was met with awkwardness.

We never had, or will have a relationship ,so how can it have that effect?

How can I , who have convinced myself that I have come so far, be instantly brought back to where I was before?

How cold it has become.

Sitting in my flat with teeth chattering has made me realise just how cold it has become over the last couple of days. I live in Melbourne, which is infamous for slate grey winter skies and streets packed full of black swaying coats as people hustle up and down them.

This winter and the rain it brings are exactly what Australia hungers for at the moment and although it is cold and my teeth do chatter, I don´t mind that much.

This month is my semester break and I am taking the opportunity to work everyday I can. I am saving my money for an overseas adventure at the end of the year. Latin America, particularly Chile, Peru ,Bolivia and Argentina are high on the agenda and I just need to get some pesos together.

On the story front, two of the short stories I had finished were met with praise from my friends who also write. They said I need to fix a few things here and there. I should have been happy with this, but alas I am not. Perfectionism for me is somewhat of a vice and the idea of rewriting sections and editing do not sit very well. I think it is a lesson that I will need to learn..

I´ll add it to a growing list.

Crash

Late Sunday night my friend offered to give me a lift to the train station.

We had spent the whole weekend catching up and he gave me a lot of good advice - advice that I had probably ignored too long to be honest. It was the kind of advice that once your hear it, it echoes throughout your mind for weeks on end, bumping and reverberating until finally it settles.

It was advice about taking chances.

Then sitting in the car, I was flashing back to our conversation earlier that night when we hit a semitrailer as we merged lanes. It was the result of a spilt second decision. An serious error based on a thought conjured up in a nanosecond.

The car skidded and slide across the road under the momentum of the trailer until we went up onto the pavement and luckily neither of us or the truck driver were injured. It could have been very serious if some other variables ( the location of street lights and fences for example) had come into play.

So much for taking chances. How can such small actions sometimes have such big consequences?

Facebook demons

My policy towards Facebook has bent and swayed from time to time but today I have come to the realisation that I, do in fact , detest it.

It´s vapid and showy.

Then , on a second thought realised that it was indeed a lot of my ´friends´that I don´t like on facebook or in the real world.

People have moved on and changed, or they haven´t . Either way I want to cut some of the ties that have binded me to them.

I have started a part time job while I studying and I am going out for the first time for dinner with my co workers. I am looking forward to the idea of meeting new people and developing a new set of friends.

This last year has been a simple but constant repitition of a theme - start, finish, end and new.

.. and as they all rushed forward over the ridge to claim what was now theirs , they, for the first time saw what it really was. The barrenness that now greeted them, put a lot of things into perspective, the value of a name and another the mentality of the masses.

Turning to each other, they realised what a dangerous combination they were.

-------------------------------------------------------------------


I should be doing my assignments. This I know, but to be honest, I am not finding this degree particularly interesting.

Welcome to my very theoritical Masters. Sometimes I wonder if anyone has actually worked in the field at all. Soon I must write a research proposal. My Masters is not actually research based and this research task will never actually be researched. But it makes one of my lecturers feel a bit important. So why not? Bang it into the compulsory subjects list.

Maybe I should drop out.I had thought about it, but seeing as I have already invested the money into it and I know that a nice, shiny new Masters from this University will go along way in my area - it is just a matter of plouging through it.

In class , I look around and see the foreign students who are , for the most part, paying a fortune for this course. The smell of easy money wafts down the faculty corridors.

This degree and others, it seems have been plastered together in an animate form to create what can only be described as a cash cow and is the University milking it!

All this aside - life goes on. I am now working and I love it.

The relationship grows and strengthens as it takes its course. Around it all , for me at least, it this newly acquired sense of vulnerablity. This is a first for me. Being in control has always been my goal and now to let it slide a little from my hands and meet someone elses in the middle, is a strange sensation.

We are different people. Completely different. Reflecting on this , it is an exciting challenge, but it is also an obstacle of sorts.

Oh well, let´s see..

all is new

I got into university. I am studying now.

I moved to a new city. I am living there now.

Below this apartment, the traffic roars.

I met someone amazing. I´m not going to add more.

I am pinching myself to see if this is really real now.

Once again it is the famine or the feast. Out of the blue all of these things have come together. This pattern seems to repeat itself with regular occurance in my life.

---------

It rained the other day. The first time it has rained since I have been back in Australia. Months. I missed it a lot.

Sitting in a quiet pub in suburban Dublin talking to my friends and telling them how as a child I used to get excited by the prospect of it raining, I would watch my friend´s amazement. It rained nearly every day while I lived in Dublin. It´s taken for granted. But this week, like an enthused child, I lay out on a inner city balcony , back against the wall and legs in the rain - just like I did as a youngster and it felt just as good.

Stay -and- go

From stay or go to stay and go.

I´ve applied for post graduate study here in Australia. It´s something that I have wanted to do for a while, but being me, I had been putting it off .

So now is my chance. I am going to do it.

But not here, I am leaving my city. If I am going to be back in Australia, then why not experience another city? It´s my comprimise for returning in the first place.

I´m going to work while I study and travel in my breaks.

There you go ...

Stay and go.

Mending Fences.

I have caught up with a lot of my old friends and in the years that have past it seems that there have been a couple of incidents. In the backcatalogue of our group there seems to be some dents and scratches that weren´t there before. I didn´t want to pry - let sleeping dogs lie, but I must admit I was curious as to why some people now behave in a different way when they are around some of our other mutual friends.
It seems perspective can be as much of a hinderance as it is a gift and although some people may ask for your advice, they really don´t want to hear it. Maybe it is just that as we get older things seem a bit more complex now. I don´t know.
I would like to think that because I have missed out on the goingons I could play a role to help mend some fences.

Stay or go?

(Australia on the left, Europe on the right)

A decision to be made,
a card to be played.
A hope to be stayed,
a dream delayed.

Stay or go ?
Christmas was great. My family loved the suprised. I was exhausted.
Stay or go?
Friends are in good spirits. The nights out have been entertaining.
Stay or go?
A job opporunity on the horizon and an old friend set to visit.
Stay or go?
I miss speaking Spanish already, not to mention the tapas.
Stay or go?
A friend of mine from Spain now lives in Peru. It would be kind of cool to visit.
Stay or go?

A recipe for one exhausted boy.

Take:
a cab, a train, a tram, five airports, four countries, twenty two thousand kilometres and a suprise return.

Blend them in over fifty two hours.

Served best when accompanied by various sleepless nights, anxiety and a sparse scattering of future plans.

What now?

When things happen in this life, they are normally, never to be expected. Receiving a letter explaining the rejection of the renewal of my residency status here in Spain put me into a spin. Within the space of two days I needed to make plans to cancel my trip to Turkey, quit my job and organise my way back to Australia. Tomorrow is my last day in Spain and I have quite a list of things to do. There is a box to be sent and things to be thrown out or given away. I am , at present, scrabbling to find something to cling to and there seems to be no certainity on the horizon except uncertainity. Things have just changed far too fast for my liking.

This next step, this fast approaching turn along the road, is not very well signposted. I will spend Christmas with my family for the first time in years and go from there.

Nostalgia

Last night I sat at a table with my peers. It was the work Christmas dinner. Wine was consumed in healthy (or not so healthy) doses and seated next to me was a coworker who I have worked with for about six months, but we have never really talked. He told me about his wife and daughter and he asked me about my plans for Christmas. I told him I was going to Turkey. He said that he had never been there, although he had travelled quite a lot. Elaborating, he told me about his travels in South East Asia. There were stories and within my mind a book opened and a page turned. It is always interesting to talk to someone you don’t know very well and discover that you actually have a common past or interest. He then went on to speak about my country, Australia, and how he and his then girlfriend travelled around it. Describing a mountain range that I have visited since I was a child was a catalyst and I began to visualise the rock formations and the lay of the land as he spoke. It seems that they had visited a lot of places near where I come from and I, probably aided by the wine, was awash with nostalgia.

I asked him if he had the opportunity to experience summer evenings where the air would become electrified and it would rain with lightning illuminating the vastness of the land. Where thunder shatters the stillness and you gain a perspective of how small you really are as a dot on a great, terracotta brown canvas. He said yes and then the main course arrived.

Projects Projects.

Today it is raining and my friend had continued on their journey, so I thought I would get cracking.

I´ve divided my life into four squares. Each one has a focus (i.e social or health) and something that I want to do , change or fix. For the first time, there is a lot of emphasis on the creative square. Stashed away at the moment are about seven short stories either completed or smuldering away. My aim is to have about twenty for a collection. Here´s hoping that these pictures that I am taking can conjure up a few more ideas.

Have you ever looked on the street and found random things discarded? Stepping out earlier in the lashing rain to take some photos of the deserted streets , I came across this shoe. There has to be a story behind it.

A city and a friend in black and white.

A friend´s visit was a great opportunity to take some photos of my new city. Like a chance to view everything again through the eyes of a new arrival - I got to see a lot of things in a different light.



It was also great to see how grown up we have both become. I used to be worried about the idea of getting older, now I embrace it. It seems, somehow, things are sorted in a way I didn´t really expect. A pleasant suprise.


Work is wrapping up soon and then I am off to Turkey. It is a country that I really love . It will be a great place to pratice my budding photography interest.

There are hundreds more photos to post. I´ll will try and work through the ones I like and then add them as I go along.

Restart

This beginning is actually a false one.

Ten years ago some friends of mine and I wrote blogs for a while. Mine didn´t amount to much. A perfect reflection of my life at that time.

There were some very awkward times. Like a lot of people, looking back at photos of school , I don´t really recognise myself. A lot has changed in years that followed it . So much so, it seems hard to even trace the path to the point where I am now.

I left my school, my university and my country.

Maybe that is why I wanted to try again.