I Hope Writing Gets Easier

Trying to find an idea to write about is tough.

Not because actually finding things to write about is hard, but because I made a decision to write primarily on uplifting, positive, inspirational topics. That's been difficult because this year has been the hardest of my life so far and my mind has been extremely negative.

But I'm confident that this, like anything else, will take practice. So, I'll keep writing and pushing through my doubt. I'll fill my blank mind with worthwhile ideas to share with others.

Star . 

Who Do You Think You Are?: Self-Righteousness on the Web

I don't feel I have the expertise or the right to ask others to give up their valuable time reading the shit I write, even if it's good shit. I also don't want to join the imposter syndrome club, it's oversubscribed.

I'm deeply troubled about putting my voice out there and writing articles and web content - less worried about it being ignored than I am worried about it being so deeply despised that somebody would want me dead.

But for some, that's a good thing. Whether people love or hate the article - they care about it. It made an impact. I know in a business sense it's far worse to be ignored. But I've never been the business-savvy kind.

Star . 

What does your life mean?

[Though when I say 'your', I really mean 'my'.]

Loads of inspiration at the beach today. Am about to sit down and bang it all out, but I have a lot of worries that I need to breathe out into this blog first.

My parents aren't going to be around one day.

I get that now. I understand that I will still be living my life, making decision and friends, doing my job, doing my best to be happy and make others happy, and they won't be there to talk to if I am sad, I won't be able to hear my Dad joking with me, I can't hear my mother's soothing voice, I can't share my joy with them when something good happens, I can't say, 'look at what I did!' or 'look at this book I (highly tempted to say 'writ'... it almost rhymes) wrote!', I can't give them more reasons to be proud of me and not feel like I was a miserable, wayward daughter, because they won't be there. This won't mean a damn to you.

I know I always said I'm never going to have children, and I'm highly skeptical of relationships, but I can see why people go through it. The fear of loneliness is paralysing. If you've lost your family, why not start your own?

I have endless brothers and sisters though, some that I don't even know about. It's so, so bizarre to think that they hold a fragment of my (my father's) genes and may pass them on. But it's my parents who make, or rather complete, the family. Dada and Mama talk easily about 'when they die' - they've lived their life, they've long accepted that it will one day be time for them to go. I'm 20 and I can't fucking accept that. I am such a fucking emotional wreck already that it might realistically destroy me. I don't want to watch them deteriorate.

Sorry for the swear. I feel like crying. (Okay I'm lying. Just wiped away my tears.)

On the drive back from the beach, Dada spoke about his parents heritage, about how my great grandfather came from the Ashanti tribe, in Ghana I think (will need to double check that) and was supposedly the caribbean equivalent of royalty. That stuns me. My Dad exaggerates sometimes (then again who else could I ask?) but he doesn't lie. I already knew that my ancestors were, by the standards of the time, wealthy. Royalty? Interesting.

Now look at me. Waiting for my student loan to come through so that I can have a smile on my face. Because, as you know, money is magic.

My grandparents and greats will never know that their son's son had me, that I am sitting here typing about them on a machine they could never have even imagined. This sort of thing tears me the fuck up. (Sorryfortheswear.) My brain, my stupid brain, can't stop turning it over. Also, this depressingly beautiful/beautifully depressing Heavenly Sword soundtrack is probably not helping... (endingcredits)

Awwwww laptop power run out... hang on while I get the cord...
Slightly lost my train of thought now...

Sometimes the world feels huge. Sometimes it feels so small. I feel like I have power to do anything when I'm elated. At other times, I am nothing, nobody, swept away in fifty years to be forgotten and replaced by another billion humans.

I can't help it. I know one day I will mean nothing, but I do want to feel that I made a difference while I was here, maybe changed the world for the better? On the drive back, I kept wondering to myself, imagine if I died on this motorway and all of this work, everything on my laptop and email that I have crafted and jigsawed together over the years of my life, poof, gone, just like that.

Like my old friend, Hannah Defoe.

I didn't know she had died until I sat down for my break at work last Saturday and opened the Metro to see her picture and details of the court case surrounding her death. I was stunned, I couldn't concentrate on work all day. There's more. She hadn't died recently. She passed away a long while ago. I've been disconnected from facebook and rarely speak to my old Dance Umbrella friends, so of course I wouldn't have known. But it makes me feel beyond strange, beyond unsettled. Hannah Defoe passed away, I didn't know or feel a thing while her parents must have felt their whole world turn upside down. It's not enough to say my heart goes out to them. My heart won't be worth a thing to them. They want their daughter.

I wanted to blog about it, but didn't know how. Hannah is one of the few people at Dance Umbrella that I can think of and remember exactly what she was like. She was really funny, she had a wicked dance style, I'd say she spoke lowly most of the time and didn't raise her voice much, she had nice wavy hair (in the Metro photo it was straightened), and she was very cool, if you get me. As in, very suave. Is suave right? (Probably not) She was great fun to be with and I don't remember having any issues with her, but we weren't close enough friends to have that squabbling going on.

She'll have friends that can give a description ten times better and more accurate than that, because that was how I knew her when I went to Dance Umbrella and that had to be four years ago.

I am completely different to how I was four years ago and depression had definitely touched me in a bad way. I'm pulling out of it, but I'm not as optimistic as I used to be. So although I felt shaken and upset at discovering she was gone by an impersonal means, I was also upset that I hadn't kept up with who she'd become and that we'd fallen out of touch. Linking back to four-ish paragraphs ago, that was why I started thinking hard about if I was just snatched away. Hannah was 20 when she passed, the age I am now.

I really pray that her parents can get to the bottom of the issue and find peace. Maybe not happiness but peace, at least.

Yeah, lots of dark thoughts circling my head today, the ravens. It's like, you get one, and others come.Oh, on a completely different note, I've discovered I don't hate seagulls so much after all! They have a pretty amazing way of flying against the strong breeze from the sea. Loved watching them, actually. Though... not when they came too close.

Today is the first day in the last two weeks that I haven't felt like my existence on earth was using up valuable air and why am I still alive again? What the hell is it all for? Whose grand scheme dictates that I should be here, wishing to not be here? Feeling like I'm out of sync with a world so eager to eb cut above the rest that it can't take a breath and see that there is a destructive element that is touching lives, nature, their own children...?

So in comparison, today was definitely a good day. Well, until now, I guess...

I think I could say more, but I need to end this because I have to write the material I thought up today for my book before bed. I think I will leave the Vlog today, maybe tomorrow though. But I won't do it if I wake up happy, because... why kill the mood?



Star .

p.s. Sorry for the typos. Fix 'em later.
p.p.s I always say that. Oh well.
p.p.afteritookashower.s. Took tired to write my book now. Tomorra. Gonna hit the hay.

Life Is Short. A Writer's Life Is Shorter Than The Average Person.

- because there's never enough time to write it all down.

A Banner for one of my older creations, 'Dreamer'. The premise was amazing - it haunts me even to this day - but the execution was embarrassingly awful. That story will never see the light of day again unless it has a SERIOUS makeover.

“You can conquer almost any fear if you will only make up your mind to do so. For remember, fear doesn't exist anywhere except in the mind.”

-Dale Carnegie

The Very First Novel

When I was younger, I had this funny little daydream that it would be cool if I published a book when I was eighteen, just to have said that I's completed a book at that golden age. What a bloody idiot I was.

Now, I am much more adamant that the book I publish is outstanding, over anything else. I would love if a film studio asked for film rights, or if I published it in my teens, or if I got the exact cover I wanted, or if I saw it being advertised on various TFL platforms, yada yada yada. But WHAT is the POINT if the book I've written wasn't up to scratch?

The Fear

Oh, so many.

The fear that it won't sell.
The fear that my book won't 'move' people enough. That they just won't care.
The fear of criticism about something that I should really have known already.
(- ie. the fear of missing something important.)
The fear of it not being original enough (Remember my The Hunger Games / Battlegame Forfeit problem?)
The fear of not being able to publish every idea I've ever had. But that may not be possible anyway, if you saw my notebook.

Thing is, fears are just fears. They only exist in the mind. Half of those fears are just little nagging tics, not real fears. I can fight those. But my mind wanders.

The Habit

At this rate, I'll be lucky if, by the end of my life, I get ONE book finished.

Every time I hit a road block in one novel, instead of fighting it through, I jump to another. I have no fewer than ten in working progress, right now. I stopped Battlegame after the Hunger Games film was released. I wouldn't say I 'gave up', rather - I 'lost heart'. Perhaps I'll take it up later on in life (lol).

I'd been working diligently on The Urban Piper, until the rewrite of DVTJ caught my attention, and I wholeheartly, eagerly and excitedly threw myself into that. I don't regret it - but it's meant that TUP has been sitting there fermenting. I NEED TO BREAK THIS HABIT.

Like I said recently to my best friend Lola, there's kind of no point continuing to write like this. Instead of having the novels finished one after the other, It's much more likely that when I'm forty, I'll have fifteen books finished at the same time.

The Name

I've spent quite a while trying to get this damn pseudonym set in stone. I think I finally have it, the one I want to use. I've dipped my toes in so many genres that I may actually have to use two. Or a few.

But the problem with me, as everybody knows, is that I go through periods of hating my own name.

So I may get bored of it anyway.

Curious Things

Pride And Prejudice And Zombies?

Should people be allowed to rewrite classics? I mean, the copyright on P&P has probably expired, yes, but I prefer adaptations like the whole Pride And Prejudice to Bridget Jones thing. It shows that Helen Fielding did actually have to do some work decided the setting and characterisation and whatnot. It's funny, because I do like fanfics. But fanfics are simply that - fan fiction. I wonder what Jane Austen would think about somebody writing zombies into her tale. Haha, I can quite imagine that the fear of zombies would be considerably less than the fear of not making a suitable marriage.

 I am going to read P+P+Z anyway, but the reason why I brought it up is because it made me think. What if someone, in the distant future, does that with my stuff? With all the books out there today, I somehow doubt people will look back at my work and want to mess around with it. But still, I wonder what they would do. I wonder what they would do with my plots, my characters, my creations.

... I don't think I would like it, to be honest.

Book-to-Film!

I see most of my creations as movies in my head. So much so that I am wondering if some of them should be written as scripts from the start. It's true that one of my fantasies is to see Quest, Architect and Detonator on the big screen. Oh, and Nine. I can't imagine them being anything less than awesome.

But at the same time, I wouldn't be able to STAND anybody else having control over my vision. I don't know how other authors do it. I think I would weep over the slightest change. I would have to direct and produce it and cast it and edit it all by myself. O_O

I leave that one up to God.



Star xx
________________________________________

The Urban Piper (Development)

(I'm supposed to be writing my uni essay right now. Deadline Monday.)

I'm shuddering as I write this: I am so in love with my story. It's insane. I adore my characters, they now walk and live completely on their own. How bizarre to think that made concepts I thought up years ago are alive, doing their own thing, living their lives and playing out the story their own way.

The Urban Piper, QUE$T, Architecture/Clear Faith, and Detonator are rioting around my head. Whenever I play a certain type of music, one of the latter three start playing in my head, like a movie. The Urban Piper isn't yet 'set' to music, but that makes it even more amazing how one action, or thought, or spark of inspiration makes several scenes unfolded in front of me.

Well, I say 'in front of me'...

The Urban Piper is so, crazy. I know Nicole, Chante, Jaiye and Jansci Blythe, the Piper himself - especially Shaire (Alleycat), Kitten and Leigh, like we're close friends. They tell me, 'I wanna go here, and do this'. 'I don't want to go out with him.' And Airo tells me, 'Ummmm I think it's time I made an appearance in this bitch!' I'm really excited to get it finished. It's a bit of a struggle, but with the end so clearly in sight,  gotta keep trying. So many secret things unfold and reveal themselves, and I'm like AHHHHHH I CAN'T BELIEVE I THOUGHT OF THIS!

There are a few issues really bugging me though.

US or UK English? Set in Paducah or London? Or in a fictional town? Is that like, a cheat, if I do that? I wondered whether to make it supernatural, but now there's enough substance without that. Also the chapter are arranged by location, and in each chapter are three parts. I'm wondering whether to leave that or take it out. Eh. *shrug* I'll figure it out.


Real Life

Okay so, back to what's up with me. I changed my diet drastically, now it's mainly fruit and veg, little bit of protein in the form of meat or nuts, drowning myself in water, tea and organic pressed apple juice from Sainsbury's and spending a fortune on all these organic vegetables but GUESS WHAT?

Sleep has come easy. Insomnia's been banished. My depression has pretty much lifted. I knew this would happen when I changed my diet but putting it into practice and feeling the effects?

....well yeah, that's pretty fucking amazing.

I have my moments were I feel really lost, alone, or sad or angry for no reason. I still think this world is going to shit but I'm trying to think positive (lol clearly). I gotta keep it up - I think it's going pretty well so far! I'm just glad that I can finally stop with the depressing suicidal blog posts. To think, I started up this blog for my bloody fiction and I've hardly posted any!

In terms of alter-egos, S.K. has taken a hike. I'm back to me now, but who am I? Well... I guess I'm Star.



Peace and Love.
________________________________________

12/12/12 & Tribute To thenewb5online.forumup.com

A Banner I was using a lot on the Forum. 

It's the last time the date will be the 12th of the 12th of 2012 in my lifetime. The next time will be in the year 2112, when all of us are dead.

SO, to celebrate that very joyous and happy tone, let's reminisce.

 -

Without The New B5 Online forum, I wouldn't be the writer I am today (whatever the fuck that means, but you get the point.) When I was most inspired to write, I was part of a great community that consisted of a bunch of motivated, hilarious and intriguing people - who I'm sure exist in the world somewhere and aren't paedophiles (LOL) - my point is that I don't personally know anybody like the Forum Girls in real life. Which might be insinuating that I didn't have a life back then, I don't know.

My 'Forum Days' feel so, so long ago, but there are some things I remember as clear as day.


B5

The recurring topic - and point - of the forum. This boyband has done more comebacks than Diddy, though admittedly they only changed their name once - to Audio. -sigh- I shake my head and slap it and cringe and vom.

The point is, their comebacks were rarely successful after they left Badboy Record (Diddy's label) and it was a shame, as they kept trying and were making progress. Of course, until they renounced R&B and started doing all the shit that's making Usher and Black Eyed Peas more these days. Yeah.

I will never deny that 'Put Me On', 'Erica Cane' and 'Ice Cream' were songs so great that compared to the rest of their album, you wonder if they were on crack when they recorded it. They were like Drake - when they were bad, they were REALLY bad, but when they were good it was like, 'Well durh! Where have you been hiding the last two tracks?' B5 had personalities that were so perfect for crafting stories, plus they kept contact with their fans through various social networks. And after all, they were the source that brought the Forum gang together.


Stories and their Writers

This is the part where I sound geeky and nerdy, but it's kinda important to me so stfu.

Roundabout the time the forum started up, there were some people doing stories that EVERYBODY loved. There were so popular and constantly being 'BUMP' -ed. ('bump' means they want to to write more.)

-Secrets

by SavageSwagg, or Jahmoni Nicole as we knew her after. I don't what  WHAT it is about this story that was so addicting, but it was probably because its twists were so good and unpredictable that you couldn't stop reading. I keep refreshing the story in my head so I don't forget it.

-There was this one story that was a Twilight fanfic with B5 in it. Loads of people loved it and I remember it being somewhat interesting. It was written by Pink Bandana Stories. (I would be so pissed after writing a story that good and then finding Fifty Shades published... fail)


Since then, there have been so many things that I've read and loved, or that have inspired me. Some of them, I remember more than others.


-Part Of The List,

by... IheartBryanBreeding or something? I'm pretty sure her name was Emily. She wrote in a very special way. Even when the story fell down, she engaged you.

-Something about Anaconda and buns

Kasey wrote that one. God, can't even remember what her screen name was, now. But the story was SO. FUNNY.

-What I Want

By best friend Lola wrote that one. God, she is hilarious. I loved that story because I could hear her voice in it. Also - sorry Lo - it was kinda predictable, which made it fun to guess in advance.

-Divine Drugs

by intenseSOUL, who was actually Hassana (I'm pretty sure. Could've been her twin Rashana, but pretty sure it was the former.) This story was so full of potential that I read it over several times. RANDOM FACT, but that was what inspired my Kiss Kiss Bandits in the very first place, but you would never guess because it did a lot of evolving. Then after, her 'Bossits' story reminded my of KKB, which was quite ironic.

-Houstatlantasvegas
by wtfitsRissababe aka RISSA!!! Oh, what a shitload of fun. This one was the BUSINESS. So much drama, I could barely take it. Aye, Karissa was good, and she knew it.

Man, what else was there? I can barely remember.

EDIT: I REMEMBERED ONE!! (Well no, I went on the KKB forum)
-Living With The Enemy,
by Carmela!!!! Can't remember her screen name but who cares? It's CARMELAAA! To be honest, I think I preferred Deadly Kisses and that awesome one about Zion. But LWTE had so many memories attached to it. Aw man. Nostalgia.

-by brygirl or something - aka Chante. She had one that was really good but I can't remember it's name. I can only remember 'Masquerade', which was another one she did that wasn't AS good. Damn.

EDIT: I went on the KKB Forum - it was called BEAUTIFUL MONSTER!!! Hehehehehehahahee

-Love At First Sight

my Forum homie Kamaria (b5grl01 or something?) had this one that was like a modern day Midsummer's night's dream, without the supernatural faeries and that. It was really cool and I distinctly remember Carmela and I threatening her to finishing it (something about a N!gga Be Cool stick...?)

And then of course...


Writers and their stories

First, I just  HAVE to say,

- ChilosaSwagg aka Shaire !

Probably shouldn't be saying this, but all of her stories were my favourites, so I guess that single-handedly makes her my favourite writer on the Forum. It's a little depressing how good she is. Anyway. She wrote;

- The Dirty

- List Of 31
- Without An Eraser (WAE)

- Lottery

- And another which she never finished =( All my favourites.

Man, I wish I could remember all of the rest...
Ah I do remember one of them!

-cocominta
She also had a really edgy way of writing that was very very awesome. She wrote;

-Paraplegic

-Blend In

And they were just as inspiring as Shaire's. There were many more who I'm not doing justice. There were some talented peeps on there. By the time the forum shut down, it wasn't even about B5 any more (no offence B5, lol).


People who will forever stick with me

Mainly for showing faith in me when I had none and just being crazy and cheery and brightening my day. I use most of their names in my fiction so that I never forget them. -ahem- Shoutouts:

Kamaria, Nicole, Carmela, Chante, Shaire, Camara, Adrienne, Tally, Marie, Crystal, Miya, Chawntae, Tie,  Jasmine, Hassana, Rashana, Karissa, Lani, Rosie, Brianna, Portia, Stephany, Aaliyah, Alei Charisma, Nina Marie, Jahmoni Nicole, Yari, Kasey, Erica, Nay, Shakira, Janice, Nikki, Tiara (Tiarapahpiin) - and I don't care what ANYBODY SAYS - Kandi, whoever she really is. Thank you for the memories, guys.

If I've forgotten you, leave an anonymous comment underneath and shout yourself out!! Hey, that would be as exciting as hell.

 -

Okay, reminiscing done. About an hour until 12/12/12 ceases to exist. Better use it to catch up on overdue University essays. Or some SLEEP. Ciao.



Peace, Love.

Star xx

________________________________________

About - Time-Travel

*please mind the gap between the spoilers and the blogpost. (it means there's spoilers, ignoramus.)*

I want to write a book on time-travel theories. I know. I don't know what the heck I just said either. I don't even watch Doctor Who.

But there is still something about the whole concept that appeals to me. I don't reeeally like watching time/dimensional-travel things, not because I don't like them, but because the possibilities are so vast that it kinda scares me. The idea of changing something in the past that will rob you of everything you know in the future, that's just frightening.

Just think about Sliders. They create some freaking warp-portal-thing, next thing you know, they're all doomed to wander though dimension after dimension until they can find their way home, and as there are millions of possible realities and dimensions, the chances of that happening are about zero. Maybe there's an actual decimal figure to represent what your chances are, but it has so many noughts after the decimal point that you might as well call it zero. Or infinity.

Parry Trotter

I liked the Harry Potter time-travel, I suppose. That wasn't as scary as some versions of the same thing might have been. In The Prisoner Of Askaban, Harry and Hermione have to go back in time to save the day as usual, only in this instance of time-travel, it's like they're bystanders. Kind of. They can see themselves doing all the things they did, but they're not ghosts and they're not floating orbs of consciousness. They're physical, like copies, or clones; they can touch and communicate with things as if they were the Original Harry and Hermione. Even their past selves, if they wanted to.

I'd never heard of that type of time-travel before. I'm used to people going back into their own bodies, taking with them all the knowledge they gained in the future so they can stop whatever happened that time from happening this time. But... really? If you went back into your own body, what if you only knew what you knew the first time round you were living that period of time. Thinking about it is weird.

Consequences

The most mind-boggling bit about time-travel is that unless they've been there and done it, no-one can EVER accurately predict how or if things would change. We can only speculate, and a lot of speculations I've heard have been unbelievably crap. You mean to tell me that you went to the past, changed a bunch of shit and returned to the present with your memory of the travel intact and nothing has changed?

Okay - one.

What is the guarantee that you'll retain that memory? If you continued to live out that timeline, maybe. But if your RETURNED to the present/future instantly, who can say? It's the world as you know it, so maybe you wouldn't notice a difference. But who knows. Maybe you would say, "Hang on... this isn't right.... this isn't supposed to be like this, I must have changed the future!!!!"

Aaand two.

I've always wondered about this, because I hardly ever see it in science fiction - shouldn't the very fact that you travelled to the past changed the present/future? Say you went to the past and did NOTHING, just stood in a particular spot for two minutes and returned to your time. The very fact that you travelled through time was DIFFERENT to the original timeline. Maybe your footprints were a home to some bugs. Maybe your presence made more carbon dioxide and less oxygen in the air that originally would have been. Maybe you just behaved differently with your knowledge of having made the travel. Shouldn't that mean that the present is different the moment you get back?

Hmm! That reminds me a little bit of The Butterfly Effect, which I love (as scary as it is), and also this film that I think is called A Sound Of Thunder, also surprisingly good. I don't know why 'surprisingly', maybe because it started off slow. Can't remember. I love musing about pointlessness like this. Pointless now, yes...

... but once I've found a good plot from this and it's in a book, it will be pointless no more.

Star's Dream:

The Warning/Philosophy Prophecy

At the end of March 2011, I had one of those dreams where in plot, it is incredible, in action, it is vivid and terrifying, and in trying to get the f--- out of it and wake up, its a frantic struggle.

A close colleague of mine and I had attended a Philosophy seminar, at which sat the four teachers who had tought me the subject at college. We listened with curiousity, wondering why everything said was so symbolic. As we listened, dread dawned on us. What was being said wasn't just theories, hidden in their words was a prediction that a war about to erupt. And not just that, they were telling us where to go and who our enemies were.

My colleague and I couldn't believe it. We rushed out of there and summoned up as many forces as we could military, special forces, an army full of people with every skill you could imagine. We could only get to our enemies base by ship, so we sailed. He was Captain of the ship, and I was the Master Archer. I planned to direct my archers to shoot from afar if they tried to apprehend us by water, otherwise we would quietly manoeuvre into their base and take it from there.

The point is, we failed. Pretty much our whole army died and we were about a blink away from death too when my colleague and I activated a time-travelling ability we had, that can only be worked together. Learning from out mistakes, we tried to confront the enemy again without success. Our only insurance was that we had our time-travel ability. It was like a safety-net. We could try anything we wanted and if we messed up, go back and do it again. However, on our third try we were silently ambushed and my colleague was instantly killed, cutting me off from our ability as it can only be activated together.

As the only survivor, enemy soldiers took me into the dungeons of their base and tortured me. In a fit of unbearable pain, I activated my ability alone - an utter shock to me, as I didn't know that I could. The good news is that it sent me back to the right place and time - the bad news is that without my colleague, it did not sent me back to the same timeline. At the seminar, when I tried to explain to my colleague about the impending doom, he was really confused. He didn't understand and thought I was crazy. I approached the philosophers, but they didn't believe me. I was lost in a dimension that was both the same and completely different.

Not gonna lie - despite being complicated,

my dreams can be fckin awesome.

Day 4.
Dawnstar xx

P.S. What is Doctor Who a Doctor of? Time Travel? If so, who authorised this? I'm sure there's no PhD in such a thing.

________________________________________

The Beginnings Of Something

Mr Aaronovitch is right. It's time to kick my arse into gear. (Also the weather is too nice to be sad today. Nice weather is a rarity in London. (ALSO I am making an effort to take natural moodlifters. No more wallowing in self-pity.))

:)

At the moment I am trying to consolidate an ideas that came from three smaller ideas I had merged into one.

Idea 1
A kind of ninja-assassin school that focusses on assassination, espionage, infiltration and the like. Students are divided into 6 groups, and either one knows what the other five are learning at the school. So what are they learning? Good question. When I figure it out, I'll let'cha know.

Idea 2
The concept of a 'Doppelganger' - in German this means 'double walker'. I think it basically means somebody who looks strikingly similar if not identical to another person but are not related at all. If those two people should meet, one of them will die.

Last Winter I went to an interview, and I met a girl there who had a... startling resemblance to a girl who used to be in my English class, Sophie. Sophie ended up dropping out but when she was in class I spoke to her quite a bit. The girl at my interview, Tanya, was shorter and had slightly darker skin, but her features were a bit similar and the way she talked was exactly the same as Sophie, she did this weird thing with her mouth that made her words come out in a unique and unusual way. When Tanya introduced herself I was half expecting her to say her name was Sophie.

So I added to my idea. In my Ninja/Assassin school, every person has a Doppelganger. To meet your Doppelganger is rare, but if it should happen, the two must stay together, or both will die if they separate.

Idea 3
A classic Nintedo 64 game, The Legend of Zelda: Majoras Mask, features a land called Termina which is almost identical to the land of the original game, called Hyrule, but in Termina the towns of interest were placed at each compass direction. I had a thought. It would be quite cool if you could enter a portal that would allow you to explore different regions. For example you would have Home Region, and then the territories North, East South and West. But when you go through the portal, although Home Region is the same, the territories have changed and become Alternate North, Alternate East, Alt. South and Alt. West. It's not a particularly strong idea yet, as I still have to figure out the technicalities of this so called 'portal', but I'm getting there.

Hey. All this mind-mapping is great.

Maybe one day I can actually write something

*rollingmyeyes.*

Star xx

About - Magic

You know when you finish reading a book, and you begin to compare things you admire in those stories before you begin to think concernedly about your own work? That's where I am now. And you know when some books you read are so good that they inspire you to write - while others you read are so good that you dejectedly think you can never be that good? After reading Rivers Of London and Moon Over Soho, I'm slowly drifting from the happy former to the angry latter.

When I thought about Ben Aaranovitch's books, I realised that a great deal of knowledge had been demostrated in them in various areas; jazz culture, the geography and history of London and Soho, and the policing system. Thinking about my own endless creations, I embarrassedly and guiltily admitted to myself that in almost all of them, whenever I didn't know something I simply made shit up instead of doing the relevant/necessary research. I understand that this is not the behaviour of a writer who wants their creation to be thorough but, in my defence, I'm quite lazy.

I always had in my head that I'd get the answers eventually, when I'm a bit older, maybe do a bit of travelling to find the answers to gaping holes in my stories, or just sit at the computer and do hardcore research. I said that when I was about fourteen; I'm nineteen now, and I've barely gotten anywhere. I don't want to turn around my find out that I'm twenty-nine with my notebooks gathering dust.

I suppose that's also why I love fantasy and science fiction so much - the endless possibilities, the mysticism, and the simple fact that almost anything can be decently explained if you're smart enough. Kinda like my close writer friend Annie, who could dynamically talk anything into making perfect sense. If any of my books get published and become audiobooks, she's hired to do the voiceover.

As always when I read a fantasy book, reading Rivers Of London and Moon Over Soho has refocussed my love for for the supernatural in books. Thinking about Ben Aaranovitch's use of magic, how the forma seals the idea and the scincere fixes it in place - or something. (might have to read it again.) It reminded me of how bleak my own magical experimentations are. In recents years I've drifted away from fantasy and written a lot of very easy, non-challenging and non-overly-thought-provoking teen fiction, including complicated romances and ridiculous gang fights. Now, just like when I read Magician by Raymond E Feist, and watched my sister play Second Sight on my brothers old xbox all the way to the end, and listened to my close writer friend Annie tell me about this freaking crazy story about four witches inspired by the song Crush On You by Nero, I'm desperate to get back to that place when I was so full of ideas that I had to always always have a pen, for fear of forgetting any little thing that popped into my head.

That said, lets brainstorm. Ideas?

  

Mental Exploration: Magic

For the record, none of the titles of these stories are permanent and are subject to change. But for now, I'm just calling them by whatever first gave me the idea.

Contractarianism.

The general idea was to explore the notion of having magic only connected to certain body parts, as an permanent but limited bodily enhancement, and not so much a Use Anywhere On Anything type thing. If that makes sense. Thus, magic linked to the eyes might allow the magician to see further through space, or to see forward or backwards in time. Magic linked to the ear might heighten the magician hearing, or allow them to understand animals, or allow them to understand various languages. Magic linked to the hands might allow what I'm currently calling Touch Magic; potions, herbal charms and jinxes, maybe. These were the powers I gave to the main characters in this story, but what I can't explain is where it all comes from.

I quite liked the idea of Gods and Goddess being a energy source by being an higher entity that never dies, and therefore always emitting some sort of heat, brainwaves, electrosomethingwave, some scientifical shit like that that can eventually be explained to make sense. Unfortuantely, I got a B in Science GCSE so Annie will have to do it - she's taking Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Maths at A Level. Yeah. I bet you're saying what I said: Holy fuckin' shat.

Bleach

But for obvious reasons, I absolutely cannot call it that! Actually, lets call it;

Detonator/RIP

Even though the intital concept has changed so much, I don't think that even relates to the story. Its more Sci Fi, actually. It's sees a msyterious substance being discovered on Earth and evolving human beings and incredible rates. The main character, towards the rear end of the story (none of it is written down yet, I'm too lazy and blue) had the substance accidentally squirted into her right eye. There is a moment a terrible agony as it acts as an acid and ruins her eye, and then micro-organisms grow at rapid rates to replace it with an organ that, although looking similar to an eye, has about ten thousand more functions including sight in the dark, infrared, being able to dilate and contract the pupil by choice (a zoom in and out function, basically), and much more, but I shan't list them here until I run them by Annie and make sure it is scientifically possible, even by vague standards. Also, I don't want people teefing my ideas. Heh.

The problem here is that aside from the whole evolution thing, I can't get more specific about the substance itself. Is it solid or liquid? What colour is it? Does it have an odour? In what way(s) is it harmful? And so on and so forth. At the moment, all I got is that "it's like bleach". But we already have an existing substance "like bleach", and its bleach. And it will make you blind, if you squirt it in your fuckin eye, like I almost did to myself a year or two ago, which was how I got this whole idea in the first place.

The Quest To Get Paid

This one, I adore. The magic here is simply drawn from the earth itself and the rule is simple - whatever you take, you give back. Every spell has a price. You take magic essence from a bush to use, you must nurse that bush make to luscious green health or risk your magic turning into a kind of black magic, "polluted magic" I liked to call it.

The main character is a warrioress and thus one of my favourites; she is of earth magic, and her enemies are of air. The problem here is that her task is to locate possessions of an ancient council, of which there were about twelve, including half-gloves of fire and ice, heavy metal boots that control pressure in the earth, a terrifying helmet that gives of an dark glamour and increases the speed, strength and stamina of the wearer, and the Black Sword that drinks the blood of its victims and allows it to act of its own accord. After that, I'm completely out of ideas. I wanted a pair of earrings but it seems to mundane - a whip or lasso was too Wonder Woman. Every item I thought of made me think of something I'd already read in another book or else didn't fit appropriately with a magical ability, and I couldn't move forward. A horn (Game Of Thrones), A belt (? Really? A BELT? What magical powers could a damn belt have, make you not need to wee?), One of those strappy things that go around your chest and you can put a quiver or sword back there (Again - question mark?), and bow and arrow. (Robin Hoooood!)

This is been on the back-burner for quite some time, because it just requires to much thought, and my brain hurts when I think too much. I blame Specsavers for making my glasses too strong.

Neptune

As I said in my very very first blog post, this one is about vampires. Which fucking sucks, because I thought of the whole 'vampires with magic' thing first. Damn. I kind of don't want to touch this idea now, not until Twilight goes stale in about twenty years. Which, at this rate, is how long it will take me to write the damn thing. Damn. I need to stop starting sentences with 'which'. I bet I do that in my fiction as well; not a good writers trademark, by my standards.

So, to the point. In this idea, I thought of vampire being in clans, and each clan has a sort of 'speciality'. One clan are warriors with increased strength and speed, another clan are psychic outcasts, another clan have elemental abilities, my most unique clan are nocturnal and banshee-like; they use shrieking sound waves to communicate and get around; and the 'evil' clan feeds on all entities, including other vampires, kind of like vampire cannabalism but I haven't certified that yet. One character, who I'd like to call a Seeper until I find a better word, can travel large distances by travelling wherever there is a shadow or silhouette, which is a lot more interesting that it sounds, but I'm too lazy to doll it up right now. Another idea I had was for the traditional Bram Stoker 'Can't Go In Sunlight, Pale, Anti-Sparkle, Sleep In Coffin' type vampire, ie. Dracula, is another species of vampire completely, an ancient type. In which case, there would be 'old' and 'new' vampires, each with different traits. That's given me an idea, actually. I'd better write that down.

Ricochet

Ricochet follows the story of a teenage girl who, on realising she has magical abilities, sets out to find other 'witches', as she likes to call them; she doesn't know what she is, and her family show no magical talent. In the story, it occurred to me that magicians/ mages/ witches/ wizards are always trying to greater expand their abilities and powers, but what if it was simply the nature of magic to draw collectively together? My main character (lets call her Thistle) is drawn to three other girls with the ability to use magic during her high school years, but doesn't yet know that this is because it is a predictable habit of magic to grow and expand until it is released, and pulls magic practitioners together to become a stronger and more defined power.

However when Thistle finds these girls, she gets none of the answers she is looking before because they are just as lost as she is, and none of them are able to use magic in the same way; Thistle must draw runes in the air; another witch must use vocal incantations; another must use her hands; and another must fall into a meditative trance to access her powers, which she can't access while 100% conscious. I focussed on Thistle. But I immediately hit a brick wall when I realised that i don't know a damn thing about runes, and despite my research the runes I found would hardly be useful for a magical spell.

This is the rune for 'ride', or 'journey' :

This is the rune for 'need' :

This is the rune for 'giant':

And this one the rune for 'hail'.

Now; unless my character needs a ride to hail a giant, I don't see how any of this helps me. Which means this idea needs so much more thought put into it. If only I wasn't such a lazy girl.

I have over a hundred story ideas written down and over twenty have successfully made it to the development stage. But zero are even close to being fully explored to its full potential so I can sit down and write the shit. The moment I get stuck, I move to another story, and I keep doing this... so none of them are expanding. It's frustrating, because in a lot of cases, I know the plot and how its going to end. It's just filling it all out that's the greater task here. My characters and my plotlines are fairly solid in some, in others it'll be the characters and the setting. But in all, the realism struggles to take off. It's not that I can't do it... its just that I'm bloody lazy.

Miss Star. xx
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First Venture

Star's official first venture into blogging. This should be interesting.

This blog is for me more than anything (or anyone) else. There are two reasons for choosing to hog this tiny bit of cyberspace all to myself via this blog: the first being that I needed to find a way to break through horribly malicious writer's block, the second being that I suddenly realised how fast I'm running out of time.

When I say 'running out of time', what I really mean is - stupid people are snatching up all my ideas. Which sounds quite dumb when you consider that I've written a list of every story I've ever come up with, spanning well over sixty ideas. But despite my over-active imagination constantly giving me new story ideas and inspiration, I was horrified to find them suddenly no longer suitable for use, like they had a Use By date and I just wasn't able to write fast enough to beat it. For example.

Year 10, the start of my Japanese obsession. I'd read a manga called Vampire Knight. It had inspired me to write a story that I titled 'Neptune' in which vampire clans with special abilities exist among humans; a vampire boy and girl that belong to the largest warrior clan discover that vampire-girl has psychic abilities and elemental power that originated from an old and forgotten vampire clan. Twilight emerges. Neptune expires.

From a young age I've had a fascination with the elements; water, fire, earth and air. I started to weave a complex story between four gods and four different cultures of people gifted with one of the four elements. Not long after doing some internet research, I come across Avatar: The Legend Of Aang, was immediately hooked, and worked my way through all three series in a frenzy. When returning to my story, I realised that I could no longer write it without subconsciously pinching everything I'd seen.

Born Into The House Of Sin was a story one of my most anticipated ideas, full of potential. Discarding the vampire ideas - I was completely bored with them - I pulled out my Fantasy Reference book and found my new favourite night creature; the Incubus (male) and Succubus (female), beings of seduction. I wrote a great deal of the story before it began to stop making sense (as with most of my literature) so I left it for a couple of months. A 'couple of months' was all that was needed for Lost Girl to surface. BITHOS expired.

And finally, my latest frustration. With Twilight on the descent, The Hunger Games is eagerly awaited as the next teenage movie to fill seats. Which is great. Except, the very essence of it is parallel to Battlegame Forfeit, the only serious story I was able to write from start to finish without losing focus. This idea featured a selection of youths that are chosen to be part of a government program, trained for a year, and then put in a death match against each other with only three survivors. If it wasn't bad enough that it already sounded like the Japanese movie Battle Royale, what actually inspired this idea was a very old movie called Naked Weapon. 'Pissed' is not even the word.

So this is my attempt to break through frustration and inability to put pen to paper, to instead come up with something coherent. With a mind so over-active that ideas are constantly circulating, even in my dreams, it shouldn't be too hard. If I'm stuck, one of my alter egos should be able to come up with something. I'd introduce them all, but they have a habit of finding their way into my fiction and introducing themselves.

Peace && Love,

Star xx
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