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Fleur Blüm

~ writer, performer, musician

Fleur Blüm

Tag Archives: Kill Your Darlings

Auckland Writers’ Festival

29 Wednesday Jan 2020

Posted by toearlyretirement in My Journey, Writing

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Auckland, Auckland Writers Festival, Bushfires, Competition, Inspiration, Kill Your Darlings, Netflix, New Zealand, Perth, Romance Writers of Australia, Travel, Western Australia, Writing, Writing Conference

awf I’m a subscriber of an online literary magazine, Kill You Darlings. They’ve been around since 2009 and I admit I don’t read as many articles as I probably should.

What I do pay attention to are the excellent competitions. One I recently entered was to win tickets to the Auckland Writers Festival 12-17 May 2020.

I recently found out I’d won! Two tickets to the festival, three nights accommodation, and a voucher for airfares! It is a surreal experience to win something that cool.

I immediately went to the webiste only to discover the program won’t be released until March! First world problem, I know, but I wanted to go through and choose my sessions and swoon over the gorgeous people I’ll meet or hear or see.

The added bonus is that one of my very best friends lives in New Zealand and I will joining me at the festival.

It’s looking like my travel for the year will be largely to attend writing conferences. I’m also planning to attend the Romance Writers of Australia annual conference, this year to be held in Fremantle. I’ve never been to Western Australia before, so I hope to spend a week or two taking in the different sights and landscapes of our beautiful west coast.

I had a nice, if short, break away from the day job, and have been somewhat less productive than I had hoped to be with my writing, but with this announcement I have something to work towards and be inspired by.

The period of Christmas and New Years has been hard and weird for many Australians. Although I haven’t been seriously affected by the bushfires ravaging our country I’ve all been dealing with the terrible air quality and constant blanket of smoke along with many other city dwellers. I have no mechanism to deal with the enormity of the lost of life, both human and animal and insect and plant, and the scope of the recovery phase that will be coming. I find myself overwhelmed by the whole thing and just watch comedy shows on Netflix and hide my head in the sand.

I hope you’re all doing what you need to do to take care of yourselves out there. I’ll keep you updated with my adventure across the Tasman.

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Baby Steps vs. Leaps of Faith

14 Wednesday Feb 2018

Posted by toearlyretirement in My Journey, Writing

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Abundant Artists, Award, Choose Your Own Adventure, Editing, editor, Feminism, Feminist, Inspiration, Kill Your Darlings, manuscript, Meet-up, Poetry, resilience, Self-publishing, Sticky Institute, Writing, zine

I’m not going to talk about the fact that today is Valetine’s Day and I am not seeing anyone.

I’ve recently started attending a Meet-Up group called Abundant Artists. The purpose is to get together with other local artists, predominantly working in visual art, but there are some performers too, and discuss what you’re struggling with and what you’re working toawrds. We talked about the ways in which we sabotage ourselves, procrastination is one of my big ones, and the things we fear.

So I’ve been thinking about the next steps for my writing. I could keep going with baby steps, learning about creative writing through various short courses and workshops and producing manuscripts, or I could take a leap of faith and dip my toe into self-publishing.

My leap of faith is to engage a professional editor to look over my Choose Your Own Adventure Novel. I think this is a good book to test out self-publishing with; it has a lot of nostaglic appeal to 90’s kids, and it’s probably a bit weird for a big publisher.

It’s expensive to have a manuscript professionally edited, but it’s an investment in my future career. If the experience is positive, and the feedback constructive, then I’ll look into having other manuscripts edited for self-publishing.

I’ve also entered by manuscript ‘My Mother’s Secret’ into the Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award. I entered last year and was not shortlisted, but this is a new story and a new year, so I’m hopeful!

Finally, I created a poetry chapbook – a small collection of my work – which I’m going to take to The Sticky Institute. Sticky specialises in zines, so it’s the right place to test out the market for angry feminist poetry.

IMG_20180210_184208_743

Poetry chapbook pic from my Instagram

I would like to thank everyone who has told me it’s worth investing time and money into my art/writing. Without you I would never get through those days when it all seems pointless. With you I have the confidence and resilience to keep on keeping on! Whether it’s one small step forward at a time or one giant leap into the unknown, I know you’ll all be there to catch me.

PS: I’m still accepting donations towards my Get Hairy February campaign.

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Radio Silence

17 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by toearlyretirement in My Journey, Writing

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bosses, Competition, Creativity, crisis, Easter, Hannah Kent, homelessness, Kill Your Darlings, manuscript, Moving house, New Opportunities, resilience, work stress, Writing, Writing goals

It’s been two months since I last posted. That sounds like what you’re supposed to say at confession: ‘It’s been two months since my last confession.’

I’ve had a pretty full on time since then, some of my own creation and some outside of my control.

I’ve managed to achieve two important creative goals that I set myself. On 14 February, Valentine’s Day, I got my latest genre romance manuscript to 80,000 words. I had planned to have the first draft finished by 80k, but the story was still going and I had to move on to the next goal. There is still some work to be done to tie up the end of the story, I’m back to working on this now, and then the editing process begins.

Then, on 31 March, I submitted a previously completed manuscript to an unpublished manuscript competition run by the Kill Your Darlings literary magazine. I spent six weeks thoroughly editing it. I feel like there might be more work to be done on that manuscript but if I win the competition I’ll have a mentor to do that with. The competition has prize money and the mentor is author Hannah Kent. The shortlist will be announced 1 June, and the winner on 3 July. I have my fingers crossed.

I’ve also had a couple of pretty intense things happen outside of my creative stuff. Firstly, I was evicted from my home with three days notice when the council declared the building unsafe to live in. I managed to find alternative short term accommodation within those three days and I have secured a new place to move into at the beginning of May.

All in all the whole thing went pretty well all things considered. I had to pack up my life, move it to my mum’s for storage, run around trying to find somewhere to sleep, and go through the search for a new share-house all in about a week. It was tough and draining and took up all of my brain space. I’m exhausted just thinking about having to move my stuff again – from Mum’s into the new place.

In addition to being evicted I had a particularly stressful couple of weeks at my job. I work in a not-for-profit organisation doing Quality Assurance and we had our annual external audit. It was my first audit and I didn’t know what to expect, or a have good idea of how to prepare. In addition to the audit my direct manager left the organisation suddenly, which left me, relatively inexperienced, and my boss one step up, the General Manager to manage it all. Everyone pulled together and we managed to get through without too much trouble, but it was incredibly stressful. Now we start planning how to get ready for the audit next year, which is an even bigger project.

I’ve spent the last week and the Easter break trying to regain my calm. I’m still recovering after so much stress. I’m tired and don’t feel at home in the temporary accommodation; more like a guest in a hotel.

The new house, once I’m settled in, will be an opportunity to build a space to create and socialise and live in. It wasn’t my choice to move, but now that it’s happened I think it will be good.

I like to have things planned out. I like to have things settled and stable and reasonably predictable. But the last few weeks have shown that I can cope with a lot. I can have a little cry, and then I knuckle down and do whatever needs to be done. It’s reassuring that even when everything is falling apart around me, I can keep putting one foot in front of the other. Yes, it’s hard, but it’s possible. And that’s very reassuring.

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Sometimes it just doesn’t work

10 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by toearlyretirement in My Journey, Writing

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Angst, Kill Your Darlings, Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Poetry, Teen

Last month I wrote a super angry poem for my poetry group. It was confused and ranty and not very good. I can look at it now and see that. I had massaged it so that I could keep a couple of lines I was really enamoured of, at the expense of content. The group was very supportive, they gave constructive feedback and were very kind in their framing, even though the poem was really bad.

Intellectually I know that there will be versions of things, or whole pieces that simply aren’t suitable for public consumption. Whether they’re built on flawed premises, or they don’t really make sense, or they’re just a bit crappy. I have to be better at letting them go.

Emotionally I get attached to things. I want things to be good. I want all my darlings to take glorious flight into the world and resonate with other people. But that’s not how life works. Some stuff is great, other stuff is okay, some stuff is terrible. That’s how things are. With practice, the proportions are more skewed to great, but nothing is guaranteed.

I think this is what killing your darlings is about. It’s about learning to see which work needs to be persevered with, and which should just serve as an exercise and be put away in a drawer. With a lock on it. Like all of my angsty teen poetry, which still exists on the internet unfortunately, but I’m certainly not giving any of you the link! 

In other news I’m gearing up for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. I hope to post a few little reviews here for the shows I get along to – I have four booked in so far!

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Watching Movies: Harry Potter is gay?!

07 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by toearlyretirement in Watching Movies

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Adventure, Allen Ginsberg, Austin Bunn, Beat Generation, Ben Foster, Cinema Nova, Dane DeHaan, Daniel Radcliffe, David Kammera, Jack Houston, Jack Kerouac, John Krokidas, Kill Your Darlings, Lucien Carr, Melbourne, Michael C. Hall, Movie review, Reed Murano, William S. Burroughs

One of the great things about Mondays is that it’s cheap movie day at the Cinema Nova in Carlton, Melbourne. To celebrate this fact I took myself to see ‘Kill Your Darlings’ yesterday. This film, directed by John Krokidas, is the story of the murder of David Kammera by Lucien Carr in New York in 1944 (or there abouts, it’s not clear exactly). Before I saw the movie I didn’t know who either David Kammera or Lucien Carr were, but their friends were Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, and I knew them. As well as being a story about murder, it’s a story about literature, about poetry, about rebelling against the system and about creating a new style – the founding of the Beat Generation.

Kill Your Darlings poster

Kill Your Darlings poster

But why did I title this blog ‘Harry Potter is gay?!’? Because a lot of the buzz around this film when it was released late last year what that it’s star, Daniel Radcliffe, was playing Allen Ginsberg who’s famously into dudes. There are a lot of people out there who insist on comparing everything Radcliffe does to his role as Harry Potter, and the same can be said about everything that J. K. Rowling has written since then too, but that’s for another time. In an interview, when asked what it was like to film man-on-man sex scenes (of which there is one, and it’s short) Radcliffe said he was astonished at the amount of time people have spent talking about this. His comment was that he got less flack for doing a show on Broadway in which he was completely nude and had a love affair with a horse than he did for this part. This, to me, says a lot about the way people think about same-sex relationships and shows a complete lack of understanding of the weirdness of filming any kind of sex scene with anyone ever (seriously, it must be really weird). I got chatting with a woman sitting next to me in the cinema about the mixed reviews the film has had, she said she’d seen both 1 star and 4 star reviews, and I suggested that perhaps people who didn’t like it were commenting on the content rather than looking at is as an  artform or entertainment.

So, let’s talk about about the acting. Firstly Radcliffe is very good. He has a convincing accent throughout the film, which is good, because sometimes American accents done by British actors are not so good. His portayal of Ginsberg’s self-destructive adoration of Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan) is poignant and vivid; it was all in the longing stares, the unspoken hurt, and the ridiculous things he was willing to do for Carr. Dane DeHaan is similarly convincing as the boy who both revels in and abhors the attention of the men around him. There is something of Dorian Grey in the character; beautiful and cruel, he inspires art around him but produces none himself. The relationship between Carr and David Kammera (Michael C. Hall) is tense throughout the film, and for a long time I was on Carr’s side, but by the end everything was much murkier. Michael C. Hall, who I know best from ‘Dexter’ fame, is clearly more versatile than I gave him credit for. His desperation, jealousy and hurt were palpable. There was nothing about his performance as the love-sick older man who cannot let Carr go that was comical. Even when he’s sitting on the balcony of Kerouac’s apartment knocking on the window, begging for forgiveness, all I felt for him was pity. Pity and a little bit of disgust for being so pathetically obsessed.

Still: Burroughs, Ginsberg and Carr in the Columbia University library

Still: Burroughs, Ginsberg and Carr in the Columbia University library

My favourite performance of the film would have to be Ben Foster’s William S. Burroughs. I have heard a number of recordings of Burroughs’ spoken word performances (for example) in which his languid, slurred, monotonous voice is as much a trademark as his fantastical, pornographic content. Foster has clearly spent a good amount of time studying how Burroughs speaks because the stoned flatness was obvious from his first appearance on the screen. I will be very disappointed if he isn’t nominated for some of the Supporting Actor awards in the upcoming season of statue giving (but then again there were lots of good films this last year, either way he’s one to watch in the future.)

Reed Murano’s cinematography of this film was used to great effect, in particular the use of focus and depth of field. There are scenes in which the screen is blurred, where the actors swim in and out of focus, and these scenes generally denote flashbacks or drug-altered states. Indeed the flashback scenes involved the film running in reverse, like trying to find the right spot on a VHS tape, before settling on a particular phrase or image. The film’s first scene is repeated towards the end of the film, almost shot for shot, and this has the effect of emphasising this as a defining moment between Ginsberg and Carr, paralleling the way repetition is used for emphasis in poetry.

The last thing I want to talk about is the ‘gayness’. Over the course of the two hour film there is one kiss between Ginsberg and Carr, and one sex scene between Ginsberg and a guy who’s name we don’t find out. If these scenes were between a man and a woman, they would barely even register. The sex scene is dingy, shot in sharp focus, and has a strong undertone of misery and raw hurt. These scenes are not in the film to be shocking or controversial, they are in the film because they are important to the development of the relationships and characters. If only straight sex scenes were given as much thought and had such clear reasons for being in films, (I could go on about the way sex is (mis)used in films, but I won’t).

In sum, ‘Kill Your Darlings’ is a poignant, thoughtful, genuinely curious look at the beginnings of the Beat Generation and at the relationships which allowed it to happen, this film was a joy to watch; I’m giving it 4 out of 5 stars.

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fleurblum@hotmail.com

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