Celebrate the Small Things 30-8-24

It's the end of the week, so it's time to Celebrate the Small Things...

What am I celebrating this week?

It's the weekend!

Unfortunately it's looking like it's going to be a pretty busy one, but I'm hoping to get a little time to write.  Maybe... 

My bestie is here for the weekend, so I'm hoping to get some time with her.  It's been too long since we had any real time to spend together.  Living is separate cities makes it difficult.  But that's definitely something to celebrate.

I've had a great week of theatre-going this week.  I went to a musical on Wednesday night and a locally-written play last night and enjoyed both.  I did feel a little like the musical should have been performed in a bigger space - the songs were big and the women performing them had amazingly big voices and the whole thing was a bit overwhelming in such a small theatre.

What are you celebrating this week?

Books I've Read: The Arc

 

This was a fun, quick read and exactly what I needed this weekend.  Sometimes you just need a dash of romance to lift your spirits and this one did just that.

Based around the idea that scientific and psychological analysis of individuals can create perfect matches between partners, the book follows Ursula and Gabe, two people heading into middle age without having married yet.  They have both had relationships, but nothing that's stuck, and both find using dating apps to try and find love frustrating.

So the Arc.  An top of the line (and at $50,000 it should be) matchmaking service that guarantees you will find the perfect partner after subjecting yourself to a week of testing and meditation in their exclusive, luxury headquarters.

When Ursula and Gabe are matched, the relationship feels right from the moment they first lay eyes on each other. And the connection just gets deeper as they get to know each other.  It seems like the Arc is exactly as good as it promised to be.

But when a single argument becomes something the Arc focuses on in one of their regular check-ins, the certainty both partners felt about their relationship falters. Are they truly destined to be together forever, or was the happiness they initially felt merely the flush of excitement that comes with first love?

There were so many things about this book I enjoyed despite them all being faintly ridiculous - I feel like a lot of this book was poking fun at the worlds inhabited by wealthy people who haven't really done much to deserve that wealth.  From the silly ad campaigns Ursula is responsible for at her agency, to the ludicrously over the top women only gym/spa/wellness centre she and her best friend frequent, there was a lot to laugh at in Ursula's world.

But at the same time, the book has a lot to say about feminism, the gender pay gap and the way women get treated in worlds that traditionally belong to men.

So I'd recommend this one.  It's a little silly, but sometimes you need something a little OTT to make you smile.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

35-year-old Ursula Byrne, VP of Strategic Audacity at a branding agency in Manhattan, is successful, witty, whip-smart, and single. She's tried all the dating apps, and let's just say: she's underwhelmed by her options. You'd think that by now someone would have come up with something more bespoke; a way for users to be more tailored about who and what they want in a life partner--how hard could that be?

Enter The Arc: a highly secretive, super-sophisticated matchmaking service that uses a complex series of emotional, psychological and physiological assessments to architect partnerships that will go the distance. The price tag is high, the promise ambitious--a level of lifelong compatibility that would otherwise be unattainable. In other words, The Arc will find your ideal mate.

Ursula is paired with 42-year-old lawyer Rafael Banks. From moment one, this feels like the electric, lasting love they've each been seeking their whole adult lives. But as their relationship unfolds in unanticipated ways, the two begin to realize that true love is never a sure thing. And the arc of a relationship is never predictable...even when it's fully optimized.

Weekly Goals 26-8-24

 I have to confess to not actually doing any writing over the weekend....  Somehow I just ran out of time.  I did do some reading though, and the weather was so nice on Saturday, I even sat outside on my deck in the sun to read for a bit.  It was delightful!

So my goal this week is to ACTUALLY get some writing done.  I have a lot on, but I'm sure I can scrape a few hours over the weekend to try and get back into it.  I was on such a roll with it, it's a huge pain to have lost the momentum.

What are your goals this week? 

Celebrate the Small Things 23-8-24

It's the end of the week, so it's time to Celebrate the Small Things...

What am I celebrating this week?

It's the weekend!

And I have virtually nothing on, which is a miracle!  Looking forward to getting some writing done and maybe even reading a book!  Unheard of!  It's been a busy week at work, so some downtime will be very welcomed.  I might even get a sleep in!

I don't have anything in particular to celebrate this week. I'm so ready for winter to be over...  The weather is really starting to get me down and I'm looking forward to spring.

What are you celebrating this week?

Books I've read: Not Like Other Girls

 

Part mystery and part survivor story, I really enjoyed this book.  I never quite knew where it was going, and I like that in a book.  The protagonist's voice was also very authentic and I enjoyed spending the length of the book with her.

Jo-Lynn is a bad girl.  Everyone tells her so, from her mother to the boys she's best friends (and sometimes more) with.  She expects trouble and is not surprised when it comes her way.  

When her former best friend reaches out to her, it's so out of character that Jo-Lynn actually goes to meet her in the designated place.  But Maddie never shows up.  And by the next day, it becomes clear that Maddie is missing.

While evidence points to her having run away, Jo-Lynn doesn't believe it.  Even though they haven't been close since their friendship blew apart in middle school, Jo-Lynn still knows Maddie as well as anyone.

So she decides to dig a bit deeper and the only person who can help is Hudson, an old fling who has his own reasons for wanting to know what happened to Maddie.  They agree to fake a new relationship to get Jo-Lynn back into the clique she was dumped from after a photo scandal.

But being back in the clique means being close to the toxic people Jo-Lynn has tried to escape, and facing up to memories she's long tried to suppress.  As she and Hudson grow closer to the truth about Maddie, Jo-Lynn has to face some difficult truths of her own.

I enjoyed this one.  The lead characters are distinct and layered and act in wholly realistic ways.  Despite her bolshie exterior, Jo-Lynn is a likable protagonist with a snarky voice that only highlights the intelligence and emotional depth beneath it.  And most importantly, mystery of what happened to Maddie is not easily solved and keeps you guessing right up until the end.

So I'd recommend this one.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

A girl risks everything to find her former best friend in this powerful debut mystery about trauma, girlhood, and what we deserve.

When Jo-Lynn Kirby's former best friend—pretty, nice Maddie Price—comes to her claiming to be in trouble, Jo assumes it's some kind of joke. After all, Jo has been an outcast ever since her nude photos were leaked—and since everyone decided she deserved it. There’s no way Maddie would actually come to her for help.

But then Maddie is gone.

Everyone is quick to write off Maddie as a runaway, but Jo can’t shake the feeling there's more to the story. To find out the truth, Jo needs to get back in with the people who left her behind—and the only way back in is through Hudson Harper-Moore. An old fling of Jo’s with his own reasons for wanting to find Maddie, Hudson hatches a fake dating scheme to get Jo back into their clique. But being back on the inside means Jo must confront everything she’d rather forget: the boys who betrayed her, the whispers that she had it coming, and the secrets that tore her and Maddie apart. As Jo digs deeper into Maddie’s disappearance, she’s left to wonder who she’s really searching for: Maddie, or the girl she used to be.

Not Like Other Girls is a stunning debut that takes a hard look at how we treat young women and their trauma, through the lens of a missing girl and a girl trying to find herself again.

Weekly goals 19-8-24

 I didn't manage to get any writing done over the weekend after all, which is annoying.  I just ran out of time and energy.

So my goal this week is to definitely get back into that book.  I may even take a day off to ensure I do.  I'll see how my workload is looking as we head into the end of the week.

I also start my formal training to be a spin instructor this week, so my goal is to be awesome at that.  I've learned one class, but I wouldn't be 100% confident in actually teaching it yet.  At least not to any strangers.   My friends might be more forgiving...

And that's about it for goals this week.  Trying to stay dry seems like an important one too.  We've had super heavy rain since around midday yesterday and it doesn't look like it's letting up any time soon.

What are your goals this week?

Celebrate the Small Things 16-8-24

It's the end of the week, so it's time to Celebrate the Small Things...

What am I celebrating this week?

It's the weekend!

I have a few things on, but not too much, so I'm hoping to dive back into A Stranger to Kindness.  At least for a few hours.

It's been a busy week.  On Monday I went to the 30th anniversary screening of Heavenly Creatures.  I was at the premiere at the Embassy in 1994 (I worked for the Film Festival then and it was the opening night film) so it was fun to be back there, 30 years later, to see it again.  Peter Jackson was there and spoke before the film, then ended up sitting right in front of me.  It was almost as much fun watching him watch the film as it was watching the film!

One of my colleagues in in a local production of We Will Rock You, so a bunch of us went to see the preview on Wednesday night.  Seriously, what a dumb show!  Great music, but the story makes no sense.  But I guess it's hard to make sense when you're writing a story to fit a bunch of well known songs into.  The performers were great and it was awesome to see Hannah in all her different wigs and costumes, singing and dancing her heart out.  It didn;t emotionally move me at all, but I did laugh a few times and it was super high energy.

And last night I went to the orchestra to hear a Russian violinist play one of Sibelus' violin concertos.  Quite wonderful.

So it has been a busy week!  We also went on sale with the Jazz Festival and farewelled two colleagues at work.  Our team is getting very small again....

I got one more rejection for Guide Us this week.  I really don't know what is up with this one.  I haven't had a single request, yet I've had the queryand opening pages critiqued by professional editors and agents three times now, and they all assure me they are great.  But... crickets.  I've never had such a terrible response rate from queries.  I mean, I know it's been a few years since I last queried, but this is seriously worrying.

My younger son is in a play this weekend and I'm going to get to go and see him act for the first time.  He's been doing drama all the way through high school, but none of his productions have been open to the public before because of COVID restrictions.  So finally, in his last year, we're going to get to see him.

I start my official training to be a spin instructor next week, so I'm going to need to spend a bit of time this weekend learning the last couple of tracks so I can run through a whole class (if needed - I think I'm probably only going to need to do the first two or three in my training session).

And that's about me... I've had a busy week - been out almost every night, so looking forward to having a bit of downtime.

What are you celebrating this week?

Books I've Read: Invisible Boys

 

Set in Western Australia in a small town out of Perth, this book follows three very different boys who all share a secret: they're gay.  And being gay in this particular town, and especially at the Catholic school they all go to, is definitely not something you want people to know.

But somehow, over the course of the school year, all three are outed in different ways and have to deal with the fallout of this.

Charlie is a rocker and knows he's gay.  He doesn't advertise it, but wears his outsider status like a badge of pride.  Zeke, on the other hand, prefers to hide, always in the shadow of his popular, outgoing older brother.  And Hammer, the school footy star wears his masculinity as proudly as Charlie wears his difference.  He's certain his homosexuality is a phase he'll outgrow.  But is it?

This is a heavy book that confronts the bigotry of small town life, the ways boys are brought up to think about themselves as men and many other important topics.  The characters are so well drawn it's easy to understand them and the way they act and react in the different situations they find themselves in/

The world they live in is equally well drawn.  I can practically feel the heat rising from the pavement as the boys move through town on summer days, smell the melting tar on the road, the scent of barbecued sausages lingering in the air.

So I'd recommend this one.  It's not an easy read in some ways - it deals with suicide among other heavy topics - but I can't help thinking that if a book like this had existed when I was growing up, it would have helped a whole lot of boys I knew.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

In a small town, everyone thinks they know you: Charlie is a hardcore rocker, who's not as tough as he looks. Hammer is a footy jock with big AFL dreams, and an even bigger ego. Zeke is a shy over-achiever, never macho enough for his family. But all three boys hide who they really are. When the truth is revealed, will it set them free or blow them apart?

Invisible Boys is a raw, confronting YA novel, tackling homosexuality, masculinity, anger and suicide with a nuanced and unique perspective. Set in regional Western Australia, the novel follows three sixteen-year-old boys in the throes of coming to terms with their homosexuality in a town where it is invisible – and so are they. Invisible Boys depicts the complexities and trauma of rural gay identity with painful honesty, devastating consequence and, ultimately, hope.

Weekly Goals 12-8-24

 As predicted, I didn't get any writing done this weekend.  I did see five films though...

Kneecap, a fast-paced, very creatively put together documentary about an Irish hip-hop group called Kneecap.  They sing in Irish, which I learned from the film, was not officially recognized as an official language in Northern Ireland until 2022.  Very political, but also a huge amount of fun, I enjoyed this one very much.

Armand is a Norwegian film and wins the prize for being the most confounding film of the Festival for me.  I'm still not sure I liked it or not.  It's about the parents of two kids being called into school to discuss something that happened between them at school.  As the meeting unfolds, more and more about the characters and their relationship is revealed and the more we know, the less certain we can be about what actually happened.  I loved this slow unfolding and the way the mother of the accused child's metal instability was revealed.  But toward the end of the film, the filmmaker took things in a new direction that was jarring because it was so unlike the rest of the storytelling.  I wish they'd either introduced this slightly fantastical element earlier, or not done it at all.

The Sweet East is one young girl's journey through the Eastern States after running away from a class trip.  She meets a bunch of different people along the way, all of whom want something from her because of the way she looks.  Part coming of age story and part social commentary/critique, this one features a star studded cast of hot young things including Talia Ryder, Earl Cave, Jacob Elordi and the woman who plays Sydney in The Bear.  I enjoyed this one, particularly Simon Rex playing a white supremacist.  Dude sure can play a sexual predator...

Janet Planet sees the adult world through the eyes of a lonely, slightly odd, 11-year-old.  After begging to come home from camp, Lacey spends the summer with her mother, Janet, watching her relationships with the people around her as they blaze and fade.  Janet is still her entire world at this point in Lacey's life, the sun around which she orbits, but you can sense that this stage is coming close to ending.  I thought this one was kind of beautiful and really captures that end-of-childhood vibe.

And finally, The Substance.  Another social commentary about the way women look and are looked at, but far less subtle than The Sweet East.  Demi Moore plays a once-hot actress called Elisabeth Sparkle who is now fronting a morning exercise program.  When the studio executive (a career-best Dennis Quaid) ditches her for being too old, she is desperate enough to try this mysterious thing called The Substance.  A new, younger, better you is created through taking this, but the catch is, each of you only gets 7 days at a time.  And if this is not adhered to, the consequences are... not pretty.  This one wins the award for out-bloodying Peter Jackson and Quentin Tarantino in the final scenes and for making several people in the audience faint.  Body horror at it s finest!

And that was the official end to the Festival.  There is one more film tonight - an anniversary screening of Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures - which I'm going to..  I was at the original premiere way back in the 1990s because in those days, I worked for the Film Festival so it feels like I should be there.

This week is another busy one with a show on Wednesday, the orchestra on Thursday and tickets going on sale for the Jazz Festival at work.  But I hope to get at least a little writing done this weekend.

What are your goals this week?

Celebrate the Small Things 9-8-24

It's the end of the week, so it's time to Celebrate the Small Things...

What am I celebrating this week?

It's the weekend!

I have a busy one ahead with several films in the Festival.  I've also picked up a new gig and will soon be teaching spin classes at my gym, so I need to learn the choreo for the first one I've been given to learn.  I think I'm on top of the first two tracks, but need to learn the rest.  Luckily the class I've been given is one that was on rotation recently, so I pretty much remember doing it.  It's the brand new ones that I think will be more of a challenge for me.  But we'll see....

Now, films I've seen this week?  Not so many, actually.  Just two.

Didi, which was a surprisingly funny and poignant story about a teenage skater kid in (I think) California and his experience growing up in an Asian immigrant family in the early 2000s.  It really illustrated the challenges that come with not only growing up and dealing with puberty, but the added challenge of navigating two very different cultures and sets of expectations at the same time.

Then I saw Head South, which is a local film I read the script for a number of times while working at the Film Commission.  It's about the punk music scene in Christchurch in the late '70s and felt so, so familiar in a lot of ways even though I didn't grow up in Christchurch and was a little too young for punk in the '70s (my punk years were in the mid '80s).  There were so many beautiful moments of Kiwiness in there that anyone who grew up here in that period would recognise.  And some really great music too!  Enjoyed it very much.

I have another 6 films to see in the next few days, and then the Festival is over for another year.  It's a short one this year.  But I'm not going to get a lot of time back.  I've somehow managed to get myself booked up every night next week too...  Not sure when I'm going to get any writing done.  Maybe the week after...

What are you celebrating this week?

Insecure Writers Support Group - August

It's the first Wednesday of the month so it's time for the Insecure Writers Support Group!

The awesome co-hosts for the August 7 posting of the IWSG are Feather Stone, Kim Lajevardi, Diedre Knight, C. Lee McKenzie, and Sarah - The Faux Fountain Pen!

And here's this month's question:

Do you use AI in your writing and if so how? Do you use it for your posts? Incorporate it into your stories? Use it for research? Audio?

For me, the answer is no.  I have dabbled a bit with AI but ultimately have not found it at all useful in terms of creative writing.  From my perspective, it seems to be useful for things that can be templated, like business letters, job descriptions or health and safety plans, not anything that requires creativity.  And even then, I find a lot of what gets spat out needs a lot of work to get it to a point where it's useable.

I did play around with trying to get it to write a story using the daily writing prompt from the writing website I use, but the story it came up with was incomplete, badly written and very uninteresting.  I didn't even feel like adding to it or re-writing it would make it into something that I'd be happy putting my name on.  And doing that would probably have taken me longer than writing a 1,000 word story from scratch.  I generally give myself half an hour a day to write these prompt-based 1,000 word stories and I feel like it would take me way longer to fix an AI-generated one.  And where's the fun in that, anyway?

Writing is something I do for pleasure.  It's my creative outlet.  Why would I let a computer do it for me?  It would take all the joy out of the writing process for me.

If there is a good way to use AI for writing-related stuff, I'd be interested in knowing what it is.  So if you are successfully using it in some way, I'd like to know what it is...

Weekly Goals 5-8-24

 As I expected, I didn't get any writing done over the weekend.  I worked all day Saturday and Sunday I went to the four-hour doco which took up most of the day.  It was good though.  About a three-Michelin star restaurant in rural France.  it really showed the thought that goes into designing every dish, the precision of the chef's in the kitchen (and there were so many of them!) and the way the FOH staff take care of the customers.

The wine cellar was awe-inspiring and when they were talking about buying single bottles of specific vintages and bandying about prices like 20,000 euro per bottle, my mind was blown!  I mean, imagine having that kind of money!

There was also some amazing cheese in this film.  So many different kinds of cheese.... 

So goals for this week...

I'd like to get another two chapters written this week.  I'm heading into the climactic part of the story, so I'm hoping I can get through one of the big events.

I have a bunch more films to see, so hoping to enjoy them.

I have a bit of a cold, so hoping to be able to kick that out quickly.

What are your goals this week?

Celebrate the Small Things 2-8-24

It's the end of the week, so it's time to Celebrate the Small Things...

What am I celebrating this week?

It's the weekend!

Well, not exactly...  I'm working about 16 hours tomorrow, so it's not really a weekend.  But on Sunday I have tickets to a 4-hour Frederick Wiseman documentary which I'm very much looking forward to.  Not for everyone, I'm sure, but for me, it's the most must-see film of the Festival.  I don't think I've ever missed a Wiseman doco.  Lucky the Film Festival tends to programme them because they don't tend to get a general theatrical release.

I kicked off my 2024 Film Festival yesterday afternoon with Humanist Vampire Seeks Consenting Suicidal Person, a dryly funny French Canadian film about a vampire with too much empathy to kill and her friendship with a morose young man who was picked on by all the town's bullies.  Very enjoyable!  I do love a vampire movie, especially ones that have new twists to the mythology.

I haven't got a heavy load of films booked this year, but I am going to 10, so I will report back on them as I go.

I don't expect to get any writing done this weekend, but I may take a day off during the week to make up for working the last two weekends, so that would make up for it.

What are you celebrating this week?