Tag Archives: New Year’s Eve

Hello 2018!

01 Monday Jan 2018

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I’m writing this a few days early because I’m going to a music festival over New Years. If you’ve read my Reflections on 2017 you’ll know that I’ve had a pretty productive year.

There were some ups and downs, especially this last week around Christmas. It’s always a weird time when people go away, have family commitments and there’s sort of nothing to do. It sounds relaxing but I find it hard.

My family lunch was good, my grandmother was mostly inoffensive. I was given a hammock and stand which I’m taking to the festival – it’s books in the hammock in the morning and music in the afternoon.

What are my goals for this year then, I hear you asking. Well, here they are:

  1. Win NaNoWriMo 2018
  2. Enter 5 writing competitions
  3. Redraft ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ and publish it online (from 2017)
  4. ‘Fleur & Alexandra are Out of This World’ Melbourne Fringe Festival Show
  5. Edit ‘The Discovery of the Franklin’
  6. Submit ‘My Mothers Secret’ and ‘We Can’t Have Nice Things’ to publishers
  7. Perform with the new band regularly
  8. Two blogs per month

The big one in terms of time commitment is the Fringe Show. The show I did last year was a six-months-long intense project. We’ve already started work on the new show; we have a plot and we’re ready to start drafting the script. We’re already way ahead of where we were last time.

I’m also considering entering a self-published box set with a contemporary romance story of ~25k words. I think I could use the project I did for NaNoWriMo in 2017 for this, so that will be another job to put on the list if I commit to it.

I’m thinking of taking some evening acting classes. I’m a pretty confident performer and there is always room for learning and improvement.

On top of these goals I will do my best to make time for exercise, good eating, friends , live music and all that other normal stuff.

My blog activity over the last year has been a bit slack. I’m going to aim for two posts per month, but I also want to have good content. If I don’t have anything good to post, I won’t put anything up, but with all the projects I’m working on, I’m sure I’ll have material.

As always, 2017 had it’s highs and lows. It’s time to close that door, learn what I can and move into the next phase. I hope next year I’ll be in a more stable place and that stability enables me to create more consistently.

All the best for the new year. Bring it on 2018!!

 

Welcome to 2017

01 Sunday Jan 2017

Posted by in My Journey, Writing

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Firstly, can I just say that 2017 seems like an absurd number for a year. I finished school in 2002 and that felt quite strange but now I’m even older and it’s 2017. It’s not a real number, it’s not a real year. I feel very old.

But back to what I was really going to talk about. My new years post. I brought in the new year watching the fireworks over the city and got home after 5am from a lovely house party with a spa and lots of lovely people. As a result I’ve spent today alternately sleeping and binge-watching Sherlock. It’s been a good way to start 2017.

So what goals am I setting myself for this year? Well, to start with I’m getting rid of the vague goals from last year. ‘Eat Better’ and ‘Exercise More’ are so ill-defined that they really don’t allow me to succeed at them; so they’re out.

One of the new writing groups I’ve been attending recently is the Melbourne Romance Writers Guild, and the members are quite active in entering competitions and submitting pieces. I think it would help me to pitch got publication if I had won some competitions, so I’m going to add that to my specific goals for the year.

For my writing projects here is my list:

  1. Win NaNoWriMo 2017
  2. Enter 5 writing competitions
  3. Finish the first draft of ‘My Mother’s Secret’
  4. Redraft ‘You Brought this on Yourself’ for submission (this is a hangover from 2016)
  5. Redraft the Choose Your Own Adventure and publish it online.

That’s probably enough for the year, if I’m honest. I think I will need to rewrite the first two NaNoWriMo manuscripts I wrote for publication, they don’t quite sit in the genre of romance well enough to be commercial and they’re not literary fiction either. That’s probably too much to do this year, so they can go on the list for 2018 along with another fringe show. I did a fringe festival show last year, and it was a fantastic experience, but it took up a lot of my creative mind. I think I’d like to do it again, but perhaps every second year is more sustainable.

For my performance goals this year I’m going to focus on Hello Volume. We’ve had a couple of gigs this year and I’d love to be able to get one gig a month in 2017. We’ll need to do some work on networking as well as merchandising and social media presence and all of that jazz. But there’s four of us so that’s doable.

I need to take a bit better care of myself this year. By the time we got to the end of 2016 I was pretty stressed, exhausted and unhappy. I’d let friendships drop off and was anxious about a lot of things. Things that will help to make my 2017 awesome include cooking good food at home, keeping up with regular exercise, reading, and spending time with friends.

I wish you all a brilliant year in 2017. May it bring you adventures and love and happiness and just the right amount of challenge.

Wrapping up 2015

31 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by in My Journey

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For the last couple of years, I’ve written a little review of my year in reference to the goals I set at the start of the year. I don’t like New Year’s Resolutions, because they have such a bad reputation for not sticking. Instead I like to set a bunch of goals. Some are stretch goals, which means I’ll have to work pretty darn hard to achieve them, some are hangover goals, which didn’t get done but which are still on the to-do list, and some are more like lifestyle aims.

Here is my list of goals for 2015, taken from my post last year:

  1. Win NaNoWriMo
  2. Finish and submit We Can’t Have Nice Things (the novel I started for 2014’s NaNoWriMo)
  3. Redraft the Adventures in Mediocrity script
  4. Visit the Netherlands
  5. Finish my Bachelor of Letters
  6. Perform with the band I’m in
  7. Find/perform at new spoken word events
  8. Find a ‘good’/’real’ job
  9. Talk to strangers
  10. Exercise
  11. Read
  12. Explore
  13. Expand
  14. Eat well

Let’s go through them!

1. Win NaNoWriMo

Yep. Totally did it. Wrote a Choose Your Own Adventure novel with 50k or so words. Editing this will be on the list for 2016.

2. Finish and submit We Can’t Have Nice Things (2014’s NaNoWriMo manuscript)

Well, I finished the initial draft. It took me longer than I’d hoped to get done. I slogged away through January forcing myself to write it, and then ignored it totally until about June when I’d finished studying. The manuscript ended up being about 65k words.

I sent it to a couple of people for an initial read, and I had some really interesting structural feedback. I haven’t yet been able to redraft the manuscript, fill out some parts, and shuffle the focus a  bit. It seems super daunting but it’s on my list of things to get started on in January 2016.

So I guess this one was half done.

3. Redraft Adventures in Mediocrity script.

This one’s a bit tricky to say yes or no to. I’ve redrafted it a couple of times, I’ve broken it up into six half-hour long episodes, sit-com style, and then I’ve redrafted those. But it’s not really finished. It’s been through a few iterations, and I think it has a bit more work still to be done to it.

4. Visit the Netherlands

Totally did this one! I visited my dear, beautiful friends Simon and Katharine who have moved to the Netherlands. It’s gorgeous there and I had an amazing time hanging out with them and eating good food and playing board games and riding bicycles around canals.

I also spent two weeks at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival filling my brain with arty goodness, see also this post and this post. Now I have to think about where I’m going to next! Possibly Asia somewhere.

5. Finish my Bachelor of Letters

Yes. Completely finished it, and I even graduated like a mother-flipping grown up! Go me! It feels a bit weird not to be learning in a structured environment. I might look into online courses/communities and other ways of keeping the flow of good stuff coming into my brain for 2016.

6. Perform with the band I’m in.

This one is a big old no. But there’s a reason: the band broke up. I am, however, in a new band, which is looking really good for performing early this year, end of January or early February we hope. We have a set of about half an hour, which is a bit rough around the edges but what better way to polish it up than performing for people, right? So I’m actually counting this one as partially completed.

7. Find/perform at new spoken word events

This one is also a no, but I feel like it’s a purposeful one. I was invited to perform some of my work at an event in mid-September. It was listed as being an edgy event where boundaries would be pushed. I was a little wary of what that meant, I mean, there’s edgy and there’s edgy right? So I sent off some suggested pieces to the organiser and she came back and said they weren’t really in the tone of the night. I was going for dark/gritty, almost horror type edgy, she apparently wanted titillating with a hint of 50 Shades of Grey type edgy, so I actually declined to perform. I’m not really sure spoken word is my jam. I think I’ll take it off the list for 2016.

8. Find a ‘good’/’real’ job

This one is a bit more vague, but I think this is still a bit of a work in progress. I’ve got a reasonably steady income doing temp work and life modelling, and I’m pretty happy doing that for the moment.

I’m still looking for what I really want to be doing. I know HR is not a sustainable long-term career choice for me, but it’s what I’m qualified in, what I’m good at, and what I keep getting offered. So I’ll stick at it until something more suitable for the long-term shows up.

Now we get into the more esoteric, even less-well-defined goals.

9. Talk to strangers
10. Exercise
11. Read
12. Explore
13. Expand
14. Eat well

For these goals, overall, I feel like I’ve done pretty well. I’ve met new people, I’ve kept up a reasonably regular exercise regime, I’ve read a bunch of books, I’ve also discovered the freedom to not finish ones I don’t like. I’ve explored two new European cities as well as discovering more about Melbourne’s live music and theatre/performance scene.

I’ve expanded my mind, I’ve had singing lessons and have a piano keyboard now. I’ve made changes to the composition of my social world, I’ve brought in some new people, let go of some old people, and strengthened connections with some people on the peripheries.

The last one, however, Eat Well, I still have room to improve on. I’m not in the habit of cooking properly for myself, partly I blame the lack of solid routine, and partly I blame not feeling like I’m worth it. I am totally worth the effort required to make up a batch of food and keep it for left overs. I am totally worth going to the markets to buy good quality meat and veg. I am totally worth spending that extra $20 to buy good food. I’m learning all the time and I know I’ll be better over the next year.

In summary, I’ve done some of the things I wanted to do, and I haven’t done some of the things I wanted to do. I’ve done things that weren’t on the list. It’s been a year of ups and downs, and hopefully I’m working towards something that’s a bit more stable, without being less exciting. Tomorrow I’m going to be doing a New Year’s goals post for 2016, so keep an eye out for that!

New Year’s Eve – Experiments with night pictures

01 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by in Photo Essay

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Most of us would have been out celebrating New Years Eve in style last night. Myself I was at a friend of a friend’s apartment in Footscray (inner Western suburb of Melbourne) on the 8th floor. It was a fairly low key affair, there was a little drinking, a lot of eating, some movies and a FANTASTIC view.

We couldn’t see the city from the apartment because it was facing the wrong way, but when it came around to midnight there were fireworks displays all along the horizon, it was truly spectacular and something I had never seen before.

I took the new fancy camera along in case any good opportunities arose and I used the time to experiment with some of the setting for night photos. These were using the ‘creative auto’ settings.

This one was .8 sec exposure, F4.0, it was on a setting for no flash, with warm colours.

This was the same view, exposure 0.4sec, F4.0, no flash, set for vivid colours.

The same view again, exposure of 0.25sec, F4.0, no flash, set for intense colour.

It’s quite subtle but I think you can see the slightly different colourings – I guess the camera must change the white balance or something I’m not really sure. I’ll know more after I’ve done a beginners course in DSLRs on 20th Jan (excitement!)

This last one is slightly to the left of the views above, exposure of 0.4 sec, F4.0, no flash set to warm colour.

Once I have a better understanding of the settings and how to get the colours and the exposures to do what I want I will try to get some sunset pics, and maybe some more night pics. I really like the stuff Trey Ratcliff does, his colours are always amazing, but I will need more practice to get them under control – just as long as I have it for Burning Man I’ll be set.