neuroticteacherzeeb

[neuroticteacherzeeb]

Sleepover

It was so warm and comfortable, snuggled under my doona, the cat at my feet. I just wish Anna hadn’t decided to stay the night. I tried to make my breaths even, slow; a bit louder. I need to sound like I’m asleep.

 “Cara?”

If I don’t answer she’ll think I’m asleep.

“Cara? I know you’re awake. What happened tonight?”

 I groaned as I rolled onto my side, facing the wall. “I’m asleep!”

 “Cara, you have to tell me exactly what happened with Drew tonight.”

There was no way I was going to say a thing to her. I didn’t need her input – it’d just make me feel like crap. “In the morning. I’m so tired,” I grumbled, pulling my doona over my head. Maybe if I block out her voice I can pretend she isn’t there.

“You know he only hooked up with you to get back at Sarah.” There it was. Stab. Right in my back.

I wouldn’t let her know she’d gotten to me. Curling up into a tight, little ball I started to replay the events of the evening in my head. Of course Anna had ditched me as soon as we’d arrived at the party. She always did. I’m good enough to mooch off, but not good enough for her to be seen with in public. It generally doesn’t bother me. I have other friends. And tonight, I’d had Drew.

I had let things get a little out of hand, a little carried away. But I wasn’t going to tell Anna. She had a way of twisting things, making even the most innocent of my decisions make me appear to be a complete psycho bitch.

 I felt her get into bed beside me. I had wondered how long it would take her – whenever she stays over she always complains about sleeping on the floor.

 “Why are you mad at me? Cara?”

 Stay strong. Ignore her.

 “You know I’m just looking out for you.” And there it was – the mother of all clichés. All the judgement, condemnation, bitchiness, it’s all apparently because she is looking out for me. Whatever.

 “Nothing happened.”

 “You’re lying.”

 We lay there, not quite squished together in my saggy, single bed. She was being careful not to touch me. Anna always knows just where to draw the line, how far she can push me before I’ll snap. She knows that by not actually touching me I’ll just let her stay, even though it means I’ll spend the night pushed up against the wall.

 It’s so unnerving - she can always tell when I’m lying. She’s the one person I can’t lie to; the one person who knows every single one of my secrets.

 It’s not like I don’t have other friends. I do. And none of them can understand why I bother staying friends with her.

 “Don’t you realise primary school friends are supposed to stay in primary school?”

 “She’s a complete psycho – I really don’t get why you put up with her.”

 “Cara, she makes you so miserable, why do you put up with her?”

 “Why won’t have anything to do with any of us?”

 There was no real way to explain. Anna’s always been a bit strange around other people. Most of the time she refuses to go anywhere with me, anywhere where anyone will see us anyway. But she always seems to know absolutely everything about my life.

 And that’s why we’re friends. She just gets me. No one else does. I can’t really explain it.

 “You know everyone’s going to think you’re a total slut after tonight.”

I stiffened. She knew. But how? We had been so careful, made sure no one saw us together. I had crept out the side gate, he had gone through the house, five minutes before me. We’d entered the same way we’d come in… and no one would have seen us in his car, it was parked streets away. No one else had given even the slightest hint that they knew what had happened. No one else would have cared… well, other than Sarah, but she had been in the spa all night, prancing around in a bikini that was too revealing to be considered hot.

 And Anna couldn’t have seen us – she’d pulled her usual disappearing act.

 “Where were you anyway?” I changed the subject. “I spent over an hour looking for you. I thought you must have ditched me.”

 “Why are you so needy? God, Cara.”

 Heat rose in my face, and I was thankful that it was so dark in my room. I bit down hard on my lip and squeezed my eyes shut. I couldn’t let her know she was getting to me.

 “You realise you’re going to end up with no friends at all if you keep acting like this.”

 I was struggling to hold in the sobs I could feel clawing up my throat. I couldn’t give her the satisfaction.

 “You’ve become such a loser since you started high school. Seriously, I’m glad we’ve ended up in different places.”

 My whole body started to shake. My heart was pounding, quicker, quicker. More quickly still.

 “What, you going to have a panic attack or something? You do know how lame you’re being right now, don’t you?”

 I started to take deep breaths through my nose. Calm down, you know she doesn’t mean it. Calm. Breathe. Slow down the heartbeat.

 I made an effort to stop my fingers, whose tips had frantically started rubbing against each other as my heartbeat had increased. Control. It was returning.

 Once my heartbeat had slowed, I peeled open my eyes, the room now a gloomy grey. The sun was coming up.

 I rolled over, and saw Anna was gone.

 Thank god.

 I reached over to my dresser to my pill packet, pressed the small white oval through the foil and gulped it down. I needed to say goodbye to Anna, and this was the only way I could keep her away.

[neuroticteacherzeeb]

Rewriting the ending of my NANOWRIMO novel. This song is pretty much on repeat. Bittersweet.

[neuroticteacherzeeb]

Best advice I've received today....

Launch with the sad ending. Keep the happy ending for Hollywood and the ambiguous ending for the director's cut.

Mr Tully is a genius.

[neuroticteacherzeeb]

Mash up time! Detective vs Romance

The following was written for a university course, where two genres had to be selected, then a short piece (only 500 words) using the tropes be written. Oh, and it had to somehow be inspired by the nursery rhyme Jack and Jill.

Inspector Tyson was fighting to appear calm. A perimeter was being set up around the two bodies, the small crowd of students being pushed back towards the lit path. He had to leave the paramedics to work on the girl. Things would fall apart if he didn't keep his focus.

Tyson crouched beside the body, a dark lump at the bottom of the hill. If his suspicions were correct, he knew exactly who this was. Pulling on his latex gloves, he rolled the body slightly and removed a wallet from the pocket of Jack's jeans. Rifling through the contents, he found a university ID card. he was right. It was Jack.

"Inspector! Jill is waking up!"The call was not loud, intended only for him. Taking one last look at the blood-matted, scruffy hair of the victim, he got to his feet and closed the gap between the bodies in six large strides. Two paramedics were strapping a pretty, conservatively dressed young lady onto a stretcher. 

Jill opened her eyes, and immediately squeezed them shut again. Then she remembered, and smiled. Things had changed. The creep was gone.

"Jill? Please, you need to open your eyes," that familiar voice filled her ears and she felt calm wash over her. Good. He was the one who had been sent to investigate. The risk was gone. He would make sure of it.

Forcing her eyelids up, his green eyes were the first thing she saw. She searched for a hint. She needed to know what he was thinking. Surely he had figured it out, knew what she had done. Would make sure she wouldn't get the blame.

He gave her a slight nod. He would need to clean things up, and quickly. It would look like a mugging gone wrong. No one would make any other connection, as long as he made sure there was no evidence. He hated seeing her being taken away on the stretcher, but he needed to fix things here.

He slowly walked back to the body of the young man. Jack. He should have known it would come to this. He only wished it had been him to finish things off, not Jill.

But he could fix things for her now. He scanned the surrounding area. Where was it? Surely Jill would have been smart enough to... yes. There it was. There was the wrench. He crouched, shielding his actions from the crowd. The cold, sticky metal made him shiver. Slipping it into the inside pocket of his overcoat, he walked over to his partner. Case closed.

Rationale

Jack and Jill as a detective romance saw the nursery rhyme become a corrupt murder investigation.

The major detective story trope, having the focus of the story on the protagonist who is an investigator as opposed to focusing on the crime perpetrated resulted in a new character, Inspector Tyson (Baldick, 2008, p.86). The focus on the Inspector was created by writing in third person from a very close point of view. Only in one section does this point of view change to that of Jill, and this was to provide the reader with her motive (Schmid, 2000, p.75). Inspector Tyson is shown gathering evidence as this genre requires the plot to be driven by an investigation.

Romance too has tropes to be observed. Through the close point of view, Jill is shown trying to decipher if her hero will behave in a predictable manner (McCracken, 1998, p.86). There is focus on her eyes, to emphasise her femininity (McCracken, 1998, p.85). Included is a (typically heterosexual) couple who encounter a challenge to their love but have a happy ending (Fletcher, 2008, p.17). By ending with the inspector concealing the evidence of Jill's crime against Jack, his love and their happy ending is suggested. 

Bibliography

C Baldick, 2008, The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

L Fletcher, 2008, Historical Romance Fiction

L Landrum, 1999, American Mystery and Detective Novels: A Reference Guide

S McCracken, 1998, Pulp, Reading Popular Fiction

D Schmid, 2000, in Chernaik, Swales and Vilain, Art of Detective Fiction

[neuroticteacherzeeb]

The influence of literature

To what extent can literature have an influence on or affect people's lives? Discuss and explore.

In my little world, people fall into two distinct camps - readers and read-nots. I suspect only people that fall into the reader's camp realise that these two camps even exist. However, a reader I certainly am. I average a book a week. My career is all about forcing teenagers to read. Literature literally is my life. 

As such, people frequently assail me, "I just read the most amazing, life-changing book. You HAVE to read it right now!"

The non-jaded version of me would respond with an interested, "Really? How did it change your life? How will it change my life?"

I would then be met with a blank, glazed expression. And apparently my experience is not all that uncommon. Jaded-me now refrains from asking how, reducing my response to a simple smile and nod. There are books that people love, books that people will read again and again, but how often do people read a book that actually alters their life in some way, however insignificant? Being a voracious reader, I thought this question would be easy to tackle. Oh, how wrong I was. 

First task - define literature. Do I only consider the traditional definition of literature as stories that are "considered [to be] of superior or lasting artistic merit," as defined by the ever-reliable Google? After all, this definition is incredibly subjective - to the university literature professor, texts considered 'literature' would be very different to the books considered literature by a fourteen year old boy. For the sake of simplicity, I am taking quite a broad definition of 'literature' and allowing pretty much any text that could find a home on a high school reading list... even a wide reading list. I'm being pretty generous.

With 'literature' now defined, the next point to tackle is looking at actual works of literature. I figured my own reading history should be the starting point for tackling the question. What books have had some sort of impact on my own life? I drew a blank. I looked over the books in the shelves lining my walls, but nothing jumped out at me screaming, 'Look at me! Me! I changed your life!' It's not like I have a dearth of books to choose from. According to my trusty GoodReads profile I have read 475 books since May 2009. But how many of them have ever had an impact, an effect, an influence? 

When I still couldn't think of anything to write, I thought that maybe the problem was I was simply reading too much into what 'influence' or 'effect' was. I mean, is it just that feeling of 'wow, that was an awesome read' or is it when you shut the book then go crazy trying to find out everything you can about the author and the story? Is it delving into the (sometimes scary and horrifying) online world of fan fiction? Or is it more than all of that? Is it when you actually change your behaviour, thoughts and actions in some significant way based on what you have read? 

To answer this question, I turned to Facebook. I asked the question of what book has influenced your life and how to my 'friends'. There were only 17 replies, which tells me that either

a) Not many of my friends read; or

b) The majority of my friends have me blocked from their newsfeed and didn't see my post. It was doubly amusing that not one of the 18 English teachers I have as 'friends' responded - perhaps they didn't want to risk their reputations with a daggy / risqué / non-'literary' answer? Anyway, the range of responses I received was eye-opening. A few listed the typical titles you would expect, such as To Kill a Mockingbird, Eat Pray Love, The Secret and Vonnegut. The more surprising responses were children's books such as The Babysitters Club, Sweet Valley High and Goosebumps children's series from the 90s. These were all explained in a somewhat coy way as the start of reading obsessions. But does obsession equate to having an effect on your life, beyond spending hours at a time curled up on the couch reading? 

At this point, I was beginning to think that while lots of people enjoy reading and spend a fair bit of their time doing it, maybe it doesn't have an actual impact or influence on their lives. I needed to look beyond my circle of friends. My next line of research was what sort of literature writers considered life-changing.

There are countless lists online with people tackling this question, such as 32 Books That Will Actually Change Your Life or The Book That Changed My Life. However, the most useful source was an impulse buy, the originally titled The Book that Changed My Life (Coady & Johannessen, 2006). I picked through the 71 essays, reading those of authors I had actually heard of. It was then I realised that yes, literature DOES impact on peoples' lives. The best explanation I found was from Graeme Base of Animalia fame:

The book that changed my life? What had changed in me? Simply put, I finally got it: a book could do more than help you pass an exam, it could lift you up and sweep you away. And I liked that feeling. (Base, 2006, p.19)

But even still, I wasn't entirely happy with that definition. I wanted to find a book that actually changed the course of my life, pushed me to take that leap from my day to day life to where I wanted to be (without becoming a devotee of The Secret.)

So it is with some discomfiture that I admit to you, dear reader, that the only book that has made me change the course of my life is Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. I know, I know. Right now you are judging me, slowly shaking your head in disbelief that I have named one of the most openly mocked books of recent times. Judge away! This book had a huge influence on my life, but not in the way that you probably suspect. I didn't dream of finding a vampire lover. I didn't start lusting after mysterious, arrogant teenage boys with messy hair. What it did was make me realise that I could be a writer. As I read, drawn into the story, hiding it beneath my desk at work while my boss was locked away in his office, I realised I could actually, maybe do this. With practice, effort and dedication, I could tell a story like Meyer had done.

So, what has this exercise shown me? Does literature have an influence on people's lives? Yes, for those strongly situated in the readers' camp, it clearly does. For the read-nots... well, I don't really care. I'd rather remain oblivious of them and happy over my side of the line!

[neuroticteacherzeeb]

Break up songs

I'm going to need a few of these for the story I'm writing. I'm trying to get a mix of totally depressing and empowering 'fuck you, I don't care' songs. Plus, I need to reward myself for hitting my day 2 word goal so quickly.

Good Riddance - Green Day

This song was actually our end of year 12 song, but it can be used as a break up song, where it's a bittersweet ending. The relationship needed to change, both are going on their way with no hard feelings, it just wasn't working out.

[neuroticteacherzeeb]

The answer is connected to textual analysis, which also finds a frequent use of 'unwilling' in the Twilight trilogy.

[neuroticteacherzeeb]

On language...

[neuroticteacherzeeb]

[neuroticteacherzeeb]

[neuroticteacherzeeb]

[neuroticteacherzeeb]

Writing prompt

Edit this setlist | More Garbage setlists

[neuroticteacherzeeb]

Today's writing prompt - I'm going to attempt to write from a third person's pov, a person who can see how much my protag is being screwed over.

[neuroticteacherzeeb]

Phew!

After a couple of work days that completely wiped me out, I have finally gotten my NANOWRIMO word count back to where it should be. Damn having to work for a living!

[neuroticteacherzeeb]

And this is why I haven't missed derby during my hiatus.

hahah amazing! this blog is hysterical because it's actually the true face of roller derby. popularity contests and hugely over inflated egos and people who take their shitty fringe "sport" too seriously.

You’re welcome.

[neuroticteacherzeeb]

Prompt 2: carnival / show / fair!!

I have been staring at a blank screen all day. Two prompts were needed!!!

[neuroticteacherzeeb]

Writing prompt part 1: I Would Do Anything For You by Foster the People.