How I Feel Right Now, Anxiety, Friendship, etc.

I never used to think of myself as an anxious person. I always spent a lot of time thinking about things – or over thinking things, but I didn’t really connect it with anxiety until recently, probably around the time I started school.

I’ve always been anxious about any kind of interaction with other people. When I was younger, I was painfully shy. Then when I was about thirteen, I became a bit more…outgoing, if that’s the right word. I was less shy, but still just as anxious. The difference was that I became more eloquent, and I became more able to express my opinions. This resulted in people actually seeing my personality, seeing the real me, and being a bit…daunted by me.

The decision to go to school was perhaps the hardest decision I have ever made. But the key point is that I made it. Nobody told me to make that decision; I made it completely on my own. And I’m glad I did, I honestly am, but it was terrifying. I had thrown myself in at the deep end, without knowing how to swim. For the first week I sort of floated, and then I rapidly began to sink. I don’t think it was really till about January that I began to feel like I was finding my feet.

But even now that I’ve been there for more than eight months, I still feel like an outsider, like an alien. I don’t belong, I don’t fit in.

 I’ve always felt like people didn’t really want to be around me, and that affects how I interact with people. There are girls at school who I would consider myself to be friends with, but I’m always worried that they might not consider themselves to be friends with me.

Every time I go to sit with my friends in the lunch hall I worry that perhaps they don’t want me to sit with them, every time I stand with my friends at break time, I worry perhaps they don’t want to talk to me. And I’m sure that my worries are unfounded, but that doesn’t make them any less of a reality for me. When you believe that you are annoyance to people, it doesn’t matter whether or not you actually are.

I’m sure that if I told my friends that I feel like this, they’d be horrified. But I don’t tell them because I don’t want to seem like I’m complaining, and I know that if I’m miserable all the time no one will be around me. I often feel that when I am myself, people don’t want to be around me, too. I feel that I’m too outspoken, too passionate about obscure things, that I inhabit a world so vividly my own that nobody quite knows how to respond to me.

The reason I was thinking about anxiety today is because my exams started on Friday. My first exam was History, which is the subject that I really want to get a good grade in. History is my second best subject (English is my best) and I want to get an A in it (I’m currently at a B) but I was panicking because a) it’s my first exam, b) I felt like I hadn’t revised enough, and c) who doesn’t stress about exams?

The night before the exam I was practically having panic attacks and whispering repeatedly ‘Oh my god, I’m going to fail, I’m going to fail, I’m going to fail.’ I wanted to talk to someone about it, I wanted someone to reassure me, but I felt that I was imposing upon people by complaining to them about how I felt. In the end I texted my friend, because I couldn’t just keep it all inside, I couldn’t just panic on my own. In the two or so minutes it took her to reply, I felt like “Oh my god, why did I text her? Why would she want to talk to me?” and then she replied and she said she was feeling nervous about the exam too, and that made me feel a bit better.

As luck would have it, the questions on the exam were about things I had revised for, and so I think I did alright (though my History teacher believes that the grade boundaries get higher each year because they don’t want too many people getting good grades, so I might not have done as well as I think I did).

This morning I had my first English exam, and I panicked a bit, but not as much. When I got into the exam hall, I sneaked a look at the questions (which we’re not meant to do until we’re told “You may start”) and I just sighed with relief, because they were the best questions I could have hoped for. The question on The Crucible was about the changes in the character of John Proctor, and given that two of my coursework essays were on him, I know his character inside out, and there were a multitude of things I could write about him. For Of Mice and Men (a book which I absolutely loathe) the question was something I had done in class two weeks ago, and so I knew what to write. Therefore, I have hopefully not failed (though whether or not I fail English Lit also depends on the Analysing Poetry exam on Thursday, which is my Achilles heel in terms of English – okay, I’m not that bad at it, but I’m on an A for everything else in English, but probably a B/C for this).

The lesson I have learnt in terms of anxiety and exams is that they’re not going to be half as bad as I think they are (though I have another History exam on Friday that I could still screw up) and that wasting my time worrying isn’t going to do anything but make me feel worse.

However when it comes to anxiety about people, I think that it runs too deep for me to just get over. No matter how many times I find reassurance that people think I’m an okay person, I still don’t believe people truly want to be friends with me. I then feel like I’m being a drama-queen attention seeker just because I feel that way, and that my entire existence is an annoyance to people.

And because of my anxiety, I find myself deliberately making myself lonelier than I would be, because I remove myself from situations where there is a chance other people might not want me.

And then there are times like today, where I make a big deal out of something that is nothing. So in Biology today, I found out that we have to decide which tables we’re all sitting at at prom – as in, who we’re sitting with. And this made me panic, because what if no one wants to sit with me? What if my friends would rather I wasn’t there? And this thought spiralled in the way such thoughts always do, and I ended up feeling very miserable.

I guess the reason I’m writing a blog about this is because I need to vent. I feel anxious about these things I’ve mentioned, practically every day. There are times when I don’t feel as anxious – half way through my exam this morning I had this moment of complete peace and clarity. Then I realized it wasn’t half way through the exam, it was three quarters of the way through, and I’d barely written anything about Of Mice and Even More Mice (the title I think would suit it so much better) – and there are times when I feel even more exceptionally anxious, and I just dissolve into misery.

There is only one person who can stop me from feeling this way, and that person is myself. Otherwise, I – like John Proctor – will become the instigator of my own demise. (I mean, obviously I’m not going to hang for witchcraft because my name is more precious to me than my life, but you get what I mean. I will bring about my own downfall because I can’t overcome my fatal flaws. I will end up a tragic hero rather than just a hero. Not that I am a hero, but…well, I’m going to stop this line of thought before I compare anything else to The Crucible).

The only way I can fight my anxiety is to take risks, to push myself so far away from my comfort zone that I won’t look behind me, I won’t look back to safety. Because our comfort zones don’t comfort us, they just make us miserable. So I’m going to follow in the footsteps of another tragic hero – Tris Prior – and I’m going to be brave. And to me, bravery isn’t doing something heroic, something that beats the odds and saves the day. To me, bravery isn’t even speaking my mind, because I can do that just fine, even if my heart is in my throat when I do so. It’s the tiny things that are bravery for me, things that are just insignificant nothings to most people, things they wouldn’t even think were scary. To me, bravery is asking my friend if she wants to meet up outside of school, because asking her that means I am going far away from my comfort zone. Even though I know she won’t say no, I’m scared every time, scared that perhaps she’s changed her mind about wanting to be friends with me.

And perhaps it’s our fears that define us; perhaps it’s our nightmares that make us who we are. And maybe that is morbid, maybe it is terrible, that our lives are dictated by that which we fear. But what is fear other than extreme vulnerability? Vulnerability is what makes us human, it’s what makes us who we are, and vulnerability teaches us our greatest lessons. But we can not learn unless we take risks, and ultimately, we must pick our battles. Real life isn’t like Divergent; we can’t put all our fears into a simulation and face them all at once. We have to find the thing that means the most to us, and we have to fight for it wholeheartedly, because some things are worth fighting for. And for me, the thing I am prepared to fight for is friendship, because I’ve read enough books to know that even the bravest among us can’t face life alone.

But we can’t just focus on the things that terrify us; we must also focus on what makes us happy. Sadly, in my case, the things that make me happy are also the things that make me sad; my greatest desire is my greatest fear. All I want is to have strong, solid friendships, because I am at my happiest when surrounded by other people, but that is also where I am at my most vulnerable.

I sometimes find it hard to think of even a moment when I was truly happy without feeling out of my depth. However, I have found a picture of one of those times. This is me with Boris, one of the guinea pigs that my school’s Science Department owns. I think you can see by my face just how happy I am. Animals are so much easier than humans...

And lastly: to my friends, if you are reading this (which I’m 98% sure you’re not). All this…school, friendship, everything…it’s new to me. I don’t know what I’m doing; I don’t know where I begin. It’s like I’ve left the world I know and been dropped onto another planet. I’m scared out of my mind because I feel like I’m going to screw everything up. And I can’t do this on my own, I just can’t. I don’t know how to be anyone else, so the only person I can be is myself. And I feel inadequate a lot of the time, and I feel like I’m not really worth anything, and that you’ve all been best friends since you were eleven and that I’m just this imposter that doesn’t fit in anywhere. And perhaps I don’t. But if I do, and if you do genuinely want me around, let me know. Because it’s horrible to feel so out of place all the time. People always ask me why I’m sad even when I’m happy, as if I look sad all the time, and perhaps I do. But see past that, please. See past my façade, past all the walls I’ve built up around myself. Because I’m okay sometimes, I’m an okay person, and I’m not half as weird as I sometimes act. And the only reason I seem like I’m holding back is because I don’t want to impose on you. 

The Choices We Made, Katerina Kamanev (My Latest Main Character), And A Description Of A Book I Haven't Even Finished Writing Yet.

In August last year, I started writing a book called The Choices We Made. It is now May, and it has been nine months and I still haven’t finished writing it. I could have written three books in that time, had I not been in school. But alas, preparing for GCSEs is time-consuming (as is spending hours on Facebook).

Normally, when I begin writing a book, I have no idea where the story will go; I just write and hope for the best. This approach worked with CONSEQUENCE. I started writing, and the characters and storylines followed. When I began writing, all I had was Persephone, Greece, pomegranates, and some kind of depiction of Hades. Yeah, it’s rather miraculous that CONSEQUENCE actually ended up as something even vaguely resembling a novel.

With AMEND, it was different because it ran on from CONSQUENCE (with a thirteen-year gap). The same storylines were there, giving me the foundations I needed, so all I really had to do was form the character of Melinoe.

TRANSCEND was rather interesting in terms of method, because my ideas changed a lot from what they originally were. You see, by this point, I was beginning to run out of interesting storylines. Then I had this dream that gave me an idea so insane that I had to use it. Then I got another really insane idea. And suddenly I had solved my problems.

It was different with The Choices We Made, because I actually planned before I started writing (shocking, right?). I got this notebook, and wrote this long list of everything to think about when creating a world, and then I created the world of my book. I had designed most of the world by the time I started writing The Choices We Made, and this made the setting a lot stronger, and left me free to just write.

Writing The Choices We Made is a different experience to writing CONSEQUENCE or any other of my books. In my trilogy, a lot of my characters are impulsive, a fuse just waiting to be lit… But Katerina, the main character in The Choices We Made, is entirely different. There’s this complexity to her emotions that I haven’t really written before, and I think it makes this book far more mature than my previous works.

Katerina is in control of her emotions in a way that would be impossible for, say, Phoenix, but this is damaging for those around her. Katerina isn’t heading in a good direction… she has so many issues around control, and around the lack of control she has over herself. A lot of her personality has stemmed from her history of eating disorders, depression, and self-harm. As a result of this, she is constantly in fear of not being able to take command of herself, not being able to take responsibility for her own life.

A recurring theme in the 27,900ish words I’ve written so far is Katerina’s fear of ‘the emptiness’, and her feeling of ‘standing on the edge of an abyss’. Throughout the book, she is subconsciously searching for something that can fill that emptiness, but when she does find it – or, to be more accurate, him – she soon discovers that even that isn’t enough, and constantly denies herself the chance to heal.

Katerina falls in love with Ansel, who is the supposedly-dead son of the Kamea (king) who was executed seventeen years before the book begins. But when Katerina finds herself working for the Djator (president/dictator) who plans to have Ansel killed, she must make the choice of where her loyalties lie.

Katerina is deeply in love with Ansel, but she does not believe that it is love; she will not even admit to herself how she feels. At one point, it says ‘I never loved him, but the feelings I felt were much stronger than love.’ And at another point she believes that the two of them have been possessed by the Gods, and that her feelings are ethereal, otherworldly, and not something as simple as love. By thinking of him like this, she turns him into an addiction, a drug, a thing she can’t allow herself to have.

Even at this point, Katerina is still on Ansel’s side, still fighting for his safety, but as the book goes on, her humanity and compassion slowly begins to ebb away, replaced by coldness and selfishness. When Katerina finds out a shocking family secret, her fear and anxiety boils over, and she can’t cope any more, her last remnants of strength are gone, and she has been cut down to the very core.

Katerina ends up on a rooftop, ready to jump, and it’s the Djator who talks her out of it, the Djator who saves her from herself, and consequently, she switches sides. Her feelings for Ansel don’t change, but her loyalties do. The Djator can give something Katerina has never had: power. And as a result of this, she becomes the worst version of herself, eventually becoming a dictator and alienating herself from the people she cares about.

In The Choices We Made, I have used religion and politics and culture to create a world for my characters that is more true to reality than, say, the world of CONSEQUENCE. As humans, we are made up of more than just ourselves – we are made up of the world we live in, too, and this is a fact that I sometimes overlook when creating “realistic” characters. Using means such as religion, I can put Katerina in a position that is a closer mirror to reality than the lives of characters in my other books.

Katerina has religious beliefs, she has political beliefs, she has been influenced by the culture she grew up in, and she has her own opinions as well as this. Katerina has a conscience, she knows the difference between good and bad, and she makes her decisions in spite of this, because at the end of the day, she is a person, and people often make the wrong choices.

I think that perhaps the reason I have taken so long to write this book – other than school getting in the way – is that The Choices We Made and I are both maturing, and we grow together. The older and wiser I get, the better the book gets. When I started writing this book, I was not in a good space, and it was my therapy. But then I felt like I could only write it when I was really miserable – which made the first chapters really dark and powerful – and so when I was happy again I didn’t really write much.

But I started writing again, and I began to see that the bleak nature of the book wasn’t really all that interconnected with my own feelings of bleakness, and that the two had just happened to compliment each other. The truth is, the reason I love The Choices We Made so much is because it is bleak, and it is desolate and dark and somewhat hopeless, but overall, it is just like all my other books: a story about the things that make us human, and things that eventually come to break us. And perhaps the overall message is not so bleak after all…perhaps the overall message is that no matter how broken we are, there is something in the world that will make us care enough that we can put ourselves back together.

Random Procrastinations, Persephone, Some Cool Links To Some Cool Things, And The Random Excuses For Why I Haven't Written In A While.

I have been meaning to write a blog for ages. I especially meant to write one on April 14^th or 15^th because they were the two year anniversaries of when I got the idea for CONSEQUENCE, and when I started writing CONSEQUENCE, respectively.

There are various excuses for why I didn’t write: I have to revise for my GCSEs which are two weeks away, I had homework to do, I needed to watch season one of Game of Thrones for the fifth time, I had to catch up on reading. The reality is this: *thinking* Ooooh look at this pretty picture of Ansel Elgort*! Facebook! Tumblr! Twitter! Travel blogs! Game of Thrones! John Green books! Shailene Woodley and Theo James should get together*! Emilia Clarke is pretty! I should reread Divergent! Game of Thrones memes! (And the list goes on).

In other words, I am an expert in the art of Extreme Procrastination. However (Oooh, I’m using connectives! My English teachers should be so proud!) I told myself I would write today, because it’s Persephone’s birthday. Or, at least, in 292 years it shall be. Tomorrow it’s 309 years till she marries the Tsar. It’s sad that I took the time to work that out. I did it in Biology this morning and wrote the number on my hand to remember it. The other things written on my hand right now are “Blog about Persephone”, “Egypt zombies” (book idea, don’t ask), “S. exam F change to H.” (Science exam Foundation, change to Higher), and, my personal favourite “Hide body in sewer”.

Yet when I went on the computer, I didn’t instantly start writing this. I didn’t even sign in to blogger (or click on blogger; I never bother signing out.) Instead, I started looking at all these interesting websites (http://www.readjunk.com/articles/pickuplines/game-of-thrones-pick-up-lines/ http://news.distractify.com/people/complex-humans/?v=1  http://onthenews.net/article/29-of-the-most-awkward-family-photos-ever/13), and then I went on twitter, and on my school’s twitter page I saw the link for these video things. My school has this TV show thing called Sounds of the Beacon that is shown on screens around school, and I have a book review show on there. I hadn’t really watched it properly at school, so when I saw the link I got distracted by watching them. ( http://vimeo.com/93615306 I come into it after about 12 seconds)

And I’m getting distracted by writing about stuff that distracted me. Typical Eliza moment…

I can’t actually remember the last time I wrote a blog, but I believe it was in February or March. I procrastinate too much, that is why I haven’t written, but I think I’m just going to blame it on my GCSEs. School makes it difficult to find time to read, let alone write, so my books and blogs have been neglected lately. However, I only have six weeks left till my exams are over, and then the 2.5 months of boredom before Sixth Form begin. 2.5 MONTHS! I get bored during a weekend, how am I going to go that long without school? I’ll go insane.

To be fair, school drives me almost as insane as Not Being at School does, but at school I have loads of teachers who adore me, so that stops me being insane. (Even my maths teacher, who wasn’t very keen on me at first, now thinks I’m brilliant, because I’ve gone from an F grade to a B grade in less than eight months. I think I have superpowers.) In terms of the whole Liking School thing, I think that just proves that I am as much of a weirdo as people say I am. (The downside of school: there are a large number of people who think that I am a total freak, and they love pointing it out to me. I’ve reported nine people for bullying in the last few months, but that’s a subject for another blog).

I should probably write about Persephone now, given the fact that she was what I had intended to write this blog about, because it’s 292 years before her birthday. (Implying she would actually be “born”, because, robot, ya know? Not to mention the whole She’s Fictional thing…)

My problem is that, as a result of 7.5 months of English lessons, I can no longer write anything about books without turning it into an English Lit essay. If you see the words “simile”, “Metaphor” “vivid imagery” “onomatopoeia” or “sibilance” in the rest of this blog, you will know that my soul has been taken over by exam practice. If you just see “metaphor” my soul will only have been taken over by The Fault in Our Stars.

So Persephone was the first character I came up with for CONSEQUENCE. She was tall and skinny, with green eyes and long, mousy-brown hair. Then my sister said that I should have a redhead main character because no books seem to have any these days, and suddenly Persephone changed appearance, and current Persephone formed. She now is meant to look like Molly Quinn (she plays Alexis in Castle).

Persephone’s personality changed when her appearance changed. Original Persephone was kind of feisty, whereas current Persephone is more…laid back (or kind of dazed, to be honest.) My greatest regret about Persephone (other than, you know, killing her and all that) is that I never recognized her true potential as a character until it was too late. I only saw the surface of her, I never went deep enough, I never saw the core of who she is. Looking back retrospectively at my books, I don’t know if I understood any of my characters until about half way through TRANSCEND.

The character I came closest to understanding was Phoenix, because she shares many personality traits with me, and so it was easier to get into the Phoenix mindset. However, Phoenix and I are not totally alike (I’m less violent, for example), and there were still elements of her that eluded me.

The error in my understanding of Persephone was that I viewed her as basic, and never considered that she went deeper than the surface. Phoenix is like a tornado, and Persephone is a spring breeze; it’s only natural that I saw Phoenix as the complex one…

It was only when writing TRANSCEND that I began to explore the true motivations of all my characters. Persephone’s main motivation is to protect the people she loves. This is a pretty basic goal, but Persephone is basic, but not, however, because she has no depth.

Persephone’s main goals and emotions are simple because she, despite appearance, is not human. She looks like a human, and she is pretty much a human in every sense, and this makes it easy to forget that, in Phoenix’s words, she is ‘Basically, a robot.’

Persephone is designed; she is the Tsar’s experiment. Let’s not forget to mention that the Tsar was a child prodigy who created a fully functioning “human” when he was eight years old. (My storylines aren’t exactly credible, are they?)

Persephone is the person Haden wanted her to be, and then some. *Exclusive information not previously revealed on my blog or in my books* A few months prior to the Tsar’s creation of Persephone, his mother died. Haden’s siblings were much older than he was, and his father was generally absent, so the only person who really cared for him was his mother. Haden created Persephone to fill the emptiness in his life, but he soon realized that a small baby was worthless to him because she was way too young to fill his mother’s place, so he sent her to live with his brother and sister at the vineyard in Greece, hence Persephone’s place of residence at the beginning of the novel.

When creating Persephone, Haden gave her some of the personality traits he associated with his mother – who’s called Rhea, by the way, as in mother of Hades, Zeus, and Poseidon in Greek mythology – and these traits were loyalty, stubbornness, trust, and a deep caring for family. The connection to his mother is one of the reasons why Haden is so obsessed with Persephone (not in a Freudian way, just in a He Misses His Dead Mother way), however this changed once he actually married Persephone. Before their wedding, Haden’s view of Persephone is *mostly* platonic. But when she kisses him on their wedding night, his view of her changes, and he sees her in a different light.

There are three main reasons why he changes his opinion of her – a) he now sees her in a more sexual light, which is a contrast to the extreme innocence that Persephone exhibits at the beginning of the book, b) I can’t go into details for spoiler reasons to do with the epilogue of TRANSCEND, but the Tsar isn’t really into the idea of marrying Persephone/being married to Persephone, because he’s kind of torn between two very different things, and he hasn’t quite twigged that he isn’t one or the other, but rather both, and c) by kissing him, Persephone is breaking away from the skeleton of traits that her personality is built upon. She is becoming bolder, braver, more than just this robot that he created. By kissing Haden, Persephone is showing how truly human she has become, and this terrifies the Tsar, and it surprises him, but also it excites him, because he has created a freaking miracle of nature and oh my gosh it’s kissing him without him designing it to. Hence the fact that he pushes her away – he’s totally freaked out by the whole thing.

I’m kind of fascinated by the dynamic between Persephone and Haden at the beginning of CONSEQUENCE, and I really wish I had written more about it, because it’s so forming for both of their characters, and I think it has a significant effect on the way the books ends.

On a completely different subject, happy birthday to the beautiful amazing gorgeous Emilia Clarke, who plays Daenerys Targaryen on Game of Thrones; she is 27 years old today. Isn’t she pretty? I spent ten minutes scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed trying to find a picture of her before I remembered I had loads of them saved on my laptop. (Speaking of Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Amend/448189008611171?ref=hl  https://www.facebook.com/pages/Consequence/280153012094930?ref=hl https://www.facebook.com/pages/Eliza-Serena-Robinson-Author/455752114469506?ref=hl)

(Facial expressions I can actually relate to ^)

Speaking of birthdays, my beautiful cat William turns eight tomorrow. I searched all over my computer for a picture of him, but I couldn’t find one, so I looked through my old Facebook pictures for one. These are some of the beauties I found during this search: 

 (How I feel at school ^)

 (Me when I was six, in Italy, holding a baby goat that was about 2 hours old)

 (You really should. It's generally inappropriate ^)

 (I once had navy blue hair, one of the many things I am unable to live down)

This is me and William when we were fourteen and six: 

Me And My Weird Writings

I’m not sure if I've ever actually said this, but I love writing novels. I also hate writing novels, but even then I still love it.

The last time I wrote a blog, I was feeling rather discontent with the book I am currently writing. But given the fact that the last time I wrote a blog was February 9^th, I have had a lot of time to change my mind.

Recently I have fallen in love with this book all over again. It is very rare for me to find characters that I am passionate enough about write a book about them. There are even cases where I have written an entire book and not been passionate about the characters.

I haven’t had characters I truly loved since CONSEQUENCE, not until now (or until August, when I started writing my current book). The other day I realized something bittersweet: I had barely thought about the characters from my trilogy in about six months, not since I started school.

I remember the night before my first day of school, and when I was halfway between dreaming and waking, I had this image in my head. All my characters were gathered around me, and they were telling me that it was okay, that I had to move forward, not just stay trapped in a time capsule of my own creating. Then all the characters disappeared, save for Phoenix and her offspring. She gathered her daughters around her protectively, and hissed ‘They’re mine now. You can’t hurt them any more.’ Of course she would stay true to her personality even in a dream…

Since then I have hardly thought about my characters. The only times they’re entered my mind have been when I've seen things that remind me of them. I can’t see the actress Isabelle Fuhrman without thinking of my book, because she is how I pictured Phoenix to look right from the beginning, and the actress Molly Quinn looks a lot like how I pictured Persephone. And for some bizarre reason, Herr Flick from ‘Allo ‘Allo reminds me of the Tsar. I don’t even know why that is…it must be the blonde hair or something.

In August I began writing a book called The Choices We Made. Before I started writing, I created a framework for the world it was set in, and did a lot of planning, which I generally don’t do. Because of school, I have not had the time to write much (the book now sits at 25,020 words, and I've been writing it for nearly eight months.) But I don’t think lack of time is the only reason I have written so little.

Some books need time to mature. TRANSCEND was one of these books. In November it was one year since I finished the first draft of TRANSCEND, and it is still not quite ready for publication.

The Choices We Made is perhaps more mature than I am. One of my worries with this book is that it will be dismissed as a book for teenagers because I was fifteen when I started writing it, and if I get my act together it will be completed whilst I am still sixteen. Despite my age, this book is not solely for teenagers. I’m not writing this book for a particular audience – to be honest, I haven’t even decided if I want people to read it – but if it were directed at a particular age group, it would be adults, not teenagers.

The book has this maturity, this adult depth to it that I am not even sure how I wrote. This book has a power I didn't believe I was capable. There are times when I read my own writing and think how did I write this?

There are also times when I think why did I write this? An example of this was in my English Language mock exam in October. There was this mundane question of ‘What is the best thing you have eaten?’ and I didn't want to write an essay about something boring like that, so I made a risky decision: I wrote that the best thing I had ever eaten was the heart of a cheating ex husband. I even gave a description of murdering him and removing his heart and frying it. The only lines I remember are: ‘so I decided to confront him: with a meat cleaver.’ And: ‘as I swallowed the last mouthful, I glanced down at my stomach, and whispered: “Eat your heart out, Joe.”’ I think I really freaked out my English teacher.

The worst part is that I did it again. I mean, I didn't write about eating hearts again, but I did push the boundaries of what one should write on an exam paper. Last week at school we were doing mock exams (again), and on the English Language one there was this really mundane question of ‘What is your favourite place?’ and I wrote that my favourite place was an abandoned exam hall that zombies had invaded when they were looking for brains to eat, but that they only found one brain in the entire hall. This somehow turned into a morbid poem about how the zombies are lurking inside the walls and if you have a brain they will kill you.

My English teacher hasn't finished marking the exams yet, so I don’t think she’s read it. Though the other day, when she was looking through my coursework, she said that I have a “gothic” imagination. I quite like that description – it sounds far more elegant than “warped” or “twisted” or any of the other terms I use to describe myself.

I don’t know what it is that possesses me to write all that warped stuff. Perhaps it’s because I like to write things that are different, and it’s a bonus if I can freak people out.

With The Choices We Made, my “let’s scare everybody!” technique of writing hasn't come into play (Thankfully!). There are no robots, no crazy scientists, no all-powerful Tsars trying to take over the world. Granted, it’s set in a different world and the main character is going to become a dictator, but the book is about human nature.

CONSEQUENCE was also about human nature, but The Choices We Made doesn't have all the science-fantasy props. The story and the characters speak for themselves.

That’s one of the reasons I love writing this book: it’s about humans, and about what drives a person to betray those that they care for. I think, ultimately The Choices We Made is about loyalty and sacrifice, and about how one determines where one’s loyalties lie.

My main character is generally very good in terms of following the storylines I set out for her, but one area where she has not done this is currently having adverse effects on my plot. How can she choose to practically lead the dude to his own execution if she’s falling in love with him? I currently have a rule where I won’t let my characters say ‘I love you’ because it will cause too many complications further down the line. The only problem with this is that, in spite of my sinister, morbid, gothic imagination, I am still a complete romantic, and all I want is for my characters to live happily ever after in a castle in the clouds. And when that gets boring, the castle will fall back down to earth because it has no foundations, and my characters can go back to the position they started in.

The truth is that I do not write things because they’re mental or because it’s fun to freak people out or make people question my sanity… I write the story that I need to write, that is all.

This Post Was NOT Inspired By Valentine's Day.

So today I am writing about love. This has nothing to do with the fact that it is Valentine’s Day on Friday. It actually has more to do with Game of Thrones than it does with the 14^th of February.

In August, I read the first book of the A Song of Ice and Fire series (A Game of Thrones), and in September, I read half of the second book (A Clash of Kings.) On January 28^th, it was my sixteenth birthday, and I got season one of the TV show Game of Thrones as a birthday present. On Saturday last week, I started watching said TV show, and yesterday, I watched season 2. All of season 2, might I add.

If you have never experienced a ten-hour TV marathon, let me inform you of this: it is painful. Your back will hurt, your head will hurt, and your eyes will hurt, but it will all be worth it. (Implying said TV show is good. But if you watch it for 10 hours, it will be good, because nobody would be stupid enough to watch something they hate for ten hours.)

So yesterday, I was about midway through my Game of Thrones marathon, and, what I think of as Writer’s Brain started to kick in. Writer’s Brain is where I can’t just watch a TV show or movie or read a book without thinking about it on a deeper level, thinking about plot and characterization, rather than just “Oh my gosh this thing is so awesome!”

The things that Writer’s Brain was fixated on yesterday were the relationships between characters, specifically the “romantic” relationships. I mean, Game of Thrones has a lot of characters, and most of them are either married, betrothed, or sleeping with someone. The relationship that really triggered this line of thought was that of Robb Stark and Talisa. If I had had to make a choice between Ned Stark’s sons, I’d have chosen Jon Snow any day, perhaps because the books (or what I’d read of them) showed more from his perspective than they did from Robb’s.

But the romance between Robb and Talisa changed the way I saw him. Watching them fall for each other…I could really see the love between them, and this made me think about my own stories. When was the last time I had written a love story that wasn’t completely toxic. I think it must have been that of Persephone and Drew in CONSEQUENCE. Given the fact that it’s been about a year and a half since CONSEQUENCE was completed, I began to wonder what the hell I’d been writing since then.

Basically, the “love” stories I wrote, weren’t all that loving. There were Melinoe and Blake, who basically tried to destroy each other, there were some people in TRANSCEND who I can’t talk about because it’s not published yet, there were some other characters in other books I attempted to write. And then there was Katerina Kamanev, my current main character. She is probably the most toxic of them all. I’ve only written about 21,000 words of that book, so it’s nowhere near done, which means I can’t really start writing anything new.

But when I do write something new, I don’t want to write another toxic love story. I want to write something that’s actually about love, not jealousy and schemes and treachery (it’s rather ironic that Game of Thrones made me realize this, given the fact that “jealousy, schemes and treachery” are what that series is about).

I want to write love like Persephone and Drew’s again, love where the characters don’t have these hidden dark sides or deep commitment issues, or whatever other problems I create for my characters. I also want to have a main character that isn’t semi-evil, because I’m getting tired of writing characters like that.

I feel like it’s been a very long time since I wrote characters that were actually redeemable, rather than just plain evil like the ones I write now. What is it inside my mind that is preventing me from writing something good, rather than something that makes me wonder if I’m going insane?

Once my current book is finished (so, in a very long time), I want to write something different to my current stuff. No apocalypses, no wars, no dictators, no robots (okay, you can write a decent love story with robots. That is, if CONSEQUENCE is decent, which I’m still not sure of.) I want to write something that doesn’t make me think I’m a female version of Ben from Outnumbered (the fact that he mentioned Game of Thrones in last week’s episode is even more proof that I am like him.)

So that’s my mission: write something…*searches for word to describe what I mean*. The only word that really comes to mind is “pure”, and that has connotations of….basically everything I don’t write about. I don’t mean pure in the sense of milkmaids and virgin brides. What I mean is a love story that actually makes you believe in love. I remember when I read Allegiant, and the thing that I couldn’t stop thinking about (other than that ending that made me sob for a week) was the love between Tris and Tobias, and how strong and beautiful it was. There was this indescribable quality about it, and that’s what I want to write. I want to write at least one book that is beautiful, that makes people believe in good, rather than believe in the bad in the world.

The other day I was thinking about the end of TRANSCEND, and I considered changing it. You see, the ending is currently in the vague realm of “and they all lived happily ever after, but here’s a fun flashback to show what an evil bastard this character used to be”. What I wanted to do was change the ending, because I’d had second thoughts on some of the pairings. There are some characters that belong together, yet really don’t belong together, and no matter who they end up with I will have regrets. But I’m glad I’ve kept the ending the same. If I made those characters get together, I would have completely changed the message of the entire series.

When it comes to the end of TRANSCEND, all I can really do to explain my feelings is quote The Book Thief: ‘I have hated the words, and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.’

*****I Googled Talisa from Game of Thrones to check I'd spelled her name right, and WHAT THE HELL? I'm not sure if I'm brave enough to watch season 3, HOW CAN SUCH THINGS HAPPEN? I think I need to go and cry for a bit now.

Books, My Emotions After Reading A Really Awesome Book Called Allegiant, Evil Character-Murdering Authors, And A Bunch Of Random Book-Related Thoughts.

I spent most of this morning crying over a book. Eighteen months ago, I read this totally amazing book called Divergent. Reading it shifted something in me, altered my outlook on life, on humanity, on myself. I have always questioned things, analysed things, and Divergent made me analyse myself, question myself. It helped me discover more of who I am. Each time I reread it, I get something more out of it. And each time I reread, I find myself relating more and more to the main character.

Yesterday, I bought Allegiant, the final book in the Divergent trilogy. I planned to have a “Sleep is for the weak” attitude and stay up all night reading, but at about quarter to three, I put the book down and decided to finish it in the morning.

So when I woke up this morning, I read the final 116 pages of Allegiant. And I spent the last 50ish pages completely sobbing. I found the ending beautiful, in a tragic way. It was so human, so heartbreaking, and so honest.

I always thought that The Hunger Games was the book that changed me the most, but now I think it was Divergent. That book taught me so much about basic human personality traits such as selflessness and bravery. But the thing I love most about that book is the characters.

I think Tris, the main character, is one of my all-time favourite fictional characters. I love her because she’s not perfect, and she doesn’t always make the right decisions. But she is brave, she is selfless, she is a hero. And she is amazing. She is so human, yet she is so much more than human.

The characters of Tris and Tobias seem so real, and when I read those books, I feel like I am reading about real people, not just fictional characters. Tris and Tobias’s relationship is flawed, it is imperfect, because they are imperfect, but there is something pure about it, something beautiful. They belong together not just because they love each other, but because they make each other better people.

When I read books like Divergent, Insurgent, and Allegiant, I am reminded of why I want to be a writer. Some books can affect people so deeply, and I want to write like that. I want to create characters that become so real that they carve their way into people’s hearts. I want to create characters that make a mark.

When I finish reading book series’s that I love, I always have this feeling of what will I do with my life now? And for some reason I don’t have that with Allegiant. Perhaps this is because the ending felt so…final, I guess. It was a conclusion to a chapter in those characters lives, and it was a conclusion to a chapter in the readers’ lives.

When I am obsessed with a book, I always think the obsession will never fade. When I read The Hunger Games, my sister said: “You won’t still be obsessed with this in a year from now.” I was, by the way, but in a different way. Some obsessions fade, they give way to something else. I guess the obsession is like having a crush on the book, and then the crush turns to love, and what you feel for the book is a lot deeper.

I am not crazy obsessed with The Hunger Games any more. I love it; it is one of my top two favourite books (oh my gosh, I actually managed to narrow it down to two!), and it means a lot to me. The Hunger Games showed me a whole genre of books I never would have read; it introduced me to dystopia, to post-apocalyptic novels. If I hadn’t have read THG, I wouldn’t have written CONSEQUENCE.

With Divergent, I love it differently to how I love/loved THG. There is a part of me which is still in the Book Crush stage. And there is a part of me that has moved on to the In Love With The Book stage. Normally, after a year and a half, I would have started to move on from a book, no matter how much I loved it, but I haven’t done that with the Divergent trilogy.

Those books have been there for me whenever I needed them. They were the books I read when I was upset and needed to feel better, the books I read when I needed to restore my faith in humanity (which is ironic, given the genre), they were like a friend, I guess.

Some of the boys at school seem to find it entertaining to tell me that books are a waste of paper. I am always tempted to reply with “You’re a waste of oxygen”, but I don’t think that’s a very nice thing to say, so instead I just start defending books, and my voice gets higher and higher pitched, and they tend to respond with a particular word that starts with F. (Why do teenage boys swear so much?)

The reason I get so defensive when they insult books, is that for a long time books have been my everything. Books have made me who I am; they have shaped my personality, moulded me into this person who I could never have been were it not for fiction. And yes, that sometimes means that I act a bit crazy because I would fit better in a fictional world than in the real one, but I don’t care.

Books rest on the line between the magic and the ordinary. To some people they are mundane and ordinary, and to some people they are a whole world. How many things are there that are like books? One of the annoying boys at school who told me that books were a waste of paper said that books were pointless because you can just watch TV instead. If I hadn’t had to go into a chemistry lesson at that exact moment, I would have gone into full rant mode (which is always scary) and explained about how television is NOTHING compared to books.

When you watch TV, it’s all there, it’s already made. When you read a book, you have to use the writer’s words to weave a world inside your head. You have to create something based on another person’s creation. A book is a body that has no blood. It has flesh, organs, but there is a vital part missing. The reader’s imagination is the blood. It flows through the book, makes it work, makes it a living thing.

As a writer, it is sometimes hard to think about the fact that when someone reads my books, they don’t read the book in my head. They don’t get my thoughts, my imagination; they only get my words, and they have to make of them what they will. The book I write is not the book they read. There is a part of me that wants to scream “You will read this my way! I made this! I wrote this! You have to see it how I see it!” And there is another part of me that marvels at the beauty of the whole book arrangement. My words, my silly little thoughts that I write down, become something more than me when other people read them. They change, they take on their own lives, and they constantly shift and alter. They will never be my words again, because I have given them to other people. And I’m okay with that.

As a writer, I sometimes forget that I am a reader, too. I forget that what it’s like to read a book, because I’m too lost in the process of creating books. When I read books like Allegiant, The Fault in Our Stars, or The Book Thief, I am suddenly hit with the realization that I am a complete hypocrite. What do those books have in common? They all made me cry. BECAUSE THE EVIL AUTHORS MURDERED MY FAVOURITE CHARACTERS!

It’s only a few hours since I finished reading Allegiant, so the pain is still pretty raw. I knew how it ended before I read it; I knew I would cry at the end. But there’s a difference between knowing something’s going to happen, and reading about it happening.

And then I remember that I am one of those evil authors who murder characters. I mean, the main feedback I get about CONSEQUENCE is “Why did you kill Persephone?” The answer to that, by the way, is that I was killing Drew, and I wanted to spare Persephone the pain of living without him. I’m nice like that, see. Or maybe I killed her because I thought she was kind of one-dimensional. (I’ve changed my mind about that now.)

I regretted killing Persephone the moment I started writing AMEND. I regret killing my characters. I regret being an evil character-murderer. And no, that does not mean I am suddenly going to change my mind about killing the love interest at the end of the book I’m currently working on.

I think sometimes characters do have to die. Not because the authors are sadists who want to brutally murder the readers’ feelings, but because it would be unrealistic if all the minor or horrible characters died, and the heroes were left unscathed.

I, personally, like to kill off my favourites, because I can really get into the pain of their deaths. In the second novel I ever wrote, there was this character called Maeve. She was a little bit like Phoenix in some ways (troubled past, hated lots of people, had a best friend who was kind of naïve). Maeve was my favourite character. Naturally, I had her throat slit. That was the first time I killed one of my favourite characters. I loved it. Can I just reiterate that I am not evil, not a sadist, and not some weird twisted monster? I just like to write dramatic books.

Yet when I read books where characters die… Well, I think the fact that I have spent half the day crying over Allegiant is a clue as to how I react. I am broken; Allegiant shattered my heart into a thousand tiny pieces. But it was worth it. I think if a book/book series has an important message, or has a lasting effect on people, it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t end happily. It’s the story which makes a book, and the ending is only part of that. It’s not the ending that makes the reader fall in love with the story; it’s the characters, the words, the plot. Judging a book by its ending is like judging a person by how they die. Judging a book by the story is like judging a person by how they live.

^ Me with Allegiant, before it broke my heart.

The Hero.

So I haven’t written a blog in about two months. That is one of the many joys of writer’s block. Other than writer’s block, the main reason I haven’t written any blogs is because I have been busy. (This is a very shocking fact. Normally I just sit around thinking about books.)

And the reason I’ve been busy? I have started going to school. For somebody who likes to write about human nature, I haven’t really had much experience of being around lots of people. Well, until last week.

Naturally, all this exposure to human nature makes me think about my writing, and about my characters. What I have realized is that humans are absolutely nothing like fictional characters. I mean, I knew this already, but not to the same extent. For example: the character of Kai. He just wouldn’t exist in the real world. As someone who has spent the last week-and-a-half around fifteen-year-old boys, I can say with 100 per cent certainty that they are nothing like they are in books. Specifically, nothing like they are in my books.

And that started me thinking about the concept of The Hero. The Hero is the good guy; examples of his personality traits include “getting the girl” and “defeating evil”. The Hero isn’t always a guy, sometimes he’s a girl, but today I’m talking about male versions of The Hero.

Girls who read a lot of books often find themselves frustrated by the lack of perfect males in the world. Don’t get me wrong, there are some nice guys in the world. But is nice enough? Nice doesn’t slay dragons and carry you away to castles in the clouds. Yes, booknerds want their guy to be sweet and kind, but they also want him to be heroic and brave, to be dark and mysterious. And in real life, most of those qualities don’t mix.

So where does the idea of The Hero come from? How do you get from the average real guy to Mr Perfect? How did this archetype come about when most human beings are so…depressingly average? One of my theories is that it came about in the age of knights and chivalry, when the act of going off to kill people over a bit of land became glorified. A guy would go off to fight in the 100 Years War, and before he left he would be all like “I love you. Promise to marry me so that if I die I know that you loved me”. And then he went off and killed a load of French guys in the name of “I have protected you from the French, my love. I am a hero.”

Yeah, that’s one theory. The other theory is that people romanticize real life in their heads to make it more interesting. I spend at least fifty per cent of my time doing this. The fact is: things are more interesting when you add some imagination. The problem with this is when you start adding imagination to people. These people are never going to live up to how they are in your head, and you’ll be sorely disappointed, and they’ll be wondering what they did wrong.

The people you meet, the people you see every day, they are almost certainly not going to be The Hero. They’re not going to sweep you off your feet and risk their lives to defend your honour. But The Hero does exist, I am sure of that. His good qualities are just more subtle. I believe in The Hero, I believe that he is out there somewhere. I also believe that any one of us can be The Hero, if we make the right choices. Sometimes the dragons that need slaying are only words, and sometimes the people who need defending aren’t damsels in distress, but just people who need to know they’ve got someone on their side. And as for castles in the clouds, I’m with Henry David Thoreau on that one. He said “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

And now, a round of applause for me because I managed to write a whole blog without using Phoenix as an example of something.