Okay, as I stated before I thought I’d try something new and start reviewing movies, music and whatnot. Tonight’s first movie review is about Ponyo.

Now the creator of Ponyo is one of the most interesting animators out there. He’s done some of my favourites which include Kiki’s Delivery Service and Spirited Away. Ponyo is an interesting tale that was inspired by The Little Mermaid.

We first meet Ponyo when she’s swimming around her half-human father’s sub. Now, I fell in love with the father immediately. He’s a bit eccentric, but cares for the ocean and constantly mutters about the ‘disgusting humans’, and is generally a really sweet guy. It also helps that Liam Neeson does the voice acting for his role. Ponyo is seen swimming around with her littler tiny sisters. Her sisters are so cute and make cute ‘oooooyyoooo’ noises.

We find out that Ponyo, along with her sisters, are goldfish.

I won’t give the story away as I really urge people to watch it (that and I detest telling the entire story instead of people being able to enjoy it by watching it). The movie was deliciously cute for me, and I really enjoyed all the interactions each character had. I will also say that I adored the father when the mother appeared. Ponyo was adorable as a goldfish, but even more so when she was in human form.

I definitely recommend this movie to people who collect Disney movies, enjoy anime, and just like a good movie if they’re a child at heart. It really is a child friendly movie, and the animation in the opening credits were something I found very interesting and original.

HAM!!!!

Every piece of a written work tells a story. What that story is to us is entertainment. Whether it be a satire, a romance, a comedy, or even a tragedy. To have a novel that is good there are key elements.

First you need a build up. You need to have a beginning, a starting point where your beautiful little characters can run around and do stuff. You need to keep having stuff happen to them, bad things, good things, whatever things.

You can create a climax by keeping the main players involved. If you’ve crafted your work carefully, it will be exciting and unexpected yet still reasonable. The climax is what you’re characters have been striving for all along.

Then comes the third and final installment which is the denouement. The denouement is what happens after the climax. At this part you should be wrapping up any loose ends you have and tie it all up neatly.

Without these key parts, usually you would not have a proper story.

Also, I think it’s kind of neat that I just learned about denouement today

Also, I haven’t pushed myself lately to work on Push the Limits, which leaves me feeling a bit…. guilty. I know I keep telling myself that I need to do it, and keep telling myself I will do it…

How do you deal with such issues?

I went swimming last night.

It was a big event. I hadn’t been swimming for over three months. I had laser eye surgery and had to wait the appropriate time to go swimming again.

I was a bit nervous upon getting there. What if I splashed too much? What if I was too slow? What if I didn’t remember how to breath correctly? What if’s plagued me and soon I was more anxious about it.

However, once entering the water and I pushed off from the edge of the wall… I was very impressed with how easy it was. For one, I could see where I was going. (Yay for not needing glasses!!!) For another, the strokes that I had worked so hard to improve before the surgery came back. Yes, they were stiff and jerky, and my joints screamed at me while my muscles cramped up. I slowed down. Finding that I was going far to fast, I realized I’d been pushing myself too fast. I wasn’t used to it.

I need to relearn some of the strokes. I needed to concentrate on what my hands and feet were doing, and move them accordingly so I could glide through the water easily then just going hog willy and not really moving but making a lot of waves and maybe punch the cute guy with the really nice eyes and kick the pretty woman while she’s doing her aqua sizing.

After a few laps, I was still a bit rusty. I knew that I would need to keep coming back and practice the strokes in order to pick up again where I had left of several months ago.

In the middle of a wicked lap where I was doing a fine job of side stroking, I realized the same could be applied to writing. I almost swam into the wall, my realization was so profound. I stood up and grinned to myself, salt water dripping into my eyes.

Writing is exercising the mind. If you don’t do it all the time, your mind can’t hold it’s shape. I’m not saying your mind will turn to jelly, and you’ll have jelly for brains. (Okay, maybe I am.) But the similarities are there. When you swim, you build muscle. You body knows what to do. If you don’t go for months at a time and then you try to do a few laps, you’re out of breath, your body hurts, and you just can’t get very far.

It’s the same thing with writing. You need to write everyday to build up your muscle (your brain). After awhile, it’ll come easier to you. You won’t need to work at it as much, and you find yourself getting into the rhythm. It becomes fun, and you end up looking forward to it.

I went swimming last night.

Tonight, I’m going to write.

I came home from vacation Sunday, and yesterday was the day my computer went all wonky. Greg got fried. There was a really bad malware infestation yesterday so I had to wipe everything out. I did make sure to save my resume, my NaNo novel and Push the Limits. Everything else, as much as I hated to, I wiped out. It was to the point where phantom messages were popping up every five seconds, and I could barely do anything. Certain windows weren’t closing, and it just was a hassle. All my icons, my photo shopping and everything else went bye bye.

I should know better by now then to go without anti virus protection. So, I can only blame myself. I really can’t even be upset about it. Yes, it’s disappointing. I’m just glad that we were able to revive the computer, and he’s now known as Zombie!Greg. With a bit more attitude than before.

Always back up your work, kiddies. You really don’t know when something bad will happen. Don’t let what happened to me happen to you.

I’m in the middle of vacation.

It’s not really vacation per say, as I am only asked for two days off work. (Well, really, four in a row, but big whoopdi do. I get two days off in a week anyway.) I’m at my parents place in Winnipeg, and had a crazy time this afternoon doing some amazing photography at a place of ruins, buying clothes, buying toys and books for my two nephews to spoil them like crazy when they come tomorrow, and just having a good time being spoiled by my parents.

Yesterday was my birthday. I had pizza with my family and then cake and then we proceeded to watch the women’s Canadian hockey team win the gold! That was awesome. I cried a bit when they all jumped on the goalie in a big pile up.

Vacation is nice to ‘get away’. Even if you’re not focusing on writing and not feeling guilty about it. It helps rejuvenate and refresh you and your creativity. Everybody needs to take a ‘break from it all’. And that’s exactly what I’m doing.

In the last post ‘In The Words Of…’ I tried my hand at something I’ve never really done before.

I know a lot of people do podcasting. And those people have guests that they talk with and interview so that listeners can listen to. I thought that it was neat. And wanted to come up with something similar. Now, knowing that I do not have the equipment for it, I needed to figure out a way to have guests ‘appear’ on my blog via writing.

I think I have come up with a solution that is interesting, hence the last post. Depending on the comfortability of my ‘guest’ they’ll write whatever they are interested in and I’ll post it, or I’ll just take quotes from them and add to it myself (akin to the last post that I did with Aaron’s essay he did in 2007.)

We’ll see how this goes.

I’m also thinking of branching out into reviews with music, movies and books. Maybe even knitting, handmade jewelry, whatever floats my goat! That way I can cover all sorts of creativity. Who knows what may come, but either way I’m rather excited.

If you’d like to become a guest, contact me either in the comments or email me at huushiita@gmail.com. Please be sure to put ‘Guest Star on Blog’ or something similiar so I don’t confuse it with spam and delete it. Thanks for reading!

Not everyone can be Stephen King, or even necessarily should be. Can you imagine if that were to happen? All children’s books would have warning labels and therapy referrals attached to them, and four-year-olds would be learning how to read with such sentences as “See Cujo run! See Cujo chase the boy! See Cujo rake his tender calves with his razor-sharp claws, as he bares his salivating fangs and…”

– Aaron Kite

I’ve always believed that in order to be the best, you can imitate your favourite author. Do not duplicate them, or try to ‘channel’ them. It won’t work. After awhile, you’ll find yourself falling into your own style of writing. And this is good.

Once you start getting really into it, you begin to be more confidant. You start getting excited about your current project, and when you’re at work you find yourself mildly annoyed that this job thing is in the way and taking up your much valuable writing time. And then you come to a cross roads, where you find yourself asking ‘who am I writing for?’

I have to agree with Aaron when he says

“As much as you may be trying to suppress the idea, you are writing for someone.

Oh, don’t try to kid yourself…you are.

You are writing a story, not only for yourself, but for others as well. You’re doing it to entertain people, getting your thoughts and opinions out there, using your story as a lesson, or just doing it for money. Regardless, you are writing for someone.

Choose your audience. What are you writing about? How can your audience relate to it? Again, to quote Aaron

Let’s take a ‘for instance’. You’re writing a book that will appeal to fourth-graders, and you introduce a character to the story…let’s say he’s a drama instructor. In order to give him the appearance of dramatic snobbishness, you occasionally have him spout lines from Richard the 3rd, only because he’s not very good he tends to mix them up with lines from Macbeth and Hamlet. You write these lines of intermixed dialogue and you laugh your fool head off, while fourth-graders read the text, look confused, shake their head slightly, and continue reading to see if there’s anything in the context that will explain what they’ve just read.

It’s all simple and pretty straight forward. Also, you really need to write what you know. If you’re into romance and have been writing romance novels since the dawn of time, but decide to try your hand at a Western? Chances are you won’t be able to pull it off very well.

I remember having a conversation where I was discussing with somebody that people have a tendency to need validation. They don’t even realize that they seem to crave people’s opinions. But, for the most part, people do.

Take me for instance. For the longest time, whenever I wrote a story, or a scene that I thought was particularly cool, I had to post it and have people tell me what they thought of it. If they didn’t, I would panic. I would think that it sucked, that it was absolutely hideous, and why should I bother continue writing if nobody is going to like it? I thought that I would never make it.

It has taken quite a long time for me to realize that I don’t just write for other people. I write for myself. Writing allows me to escape into the world that I create, and by doing that, makes me continue wanting to write. Which then helps me improve my writing, thus helping me lessen the need for validation and when the praises do happen, I’m actually pretty modest about it.

I am in the middle of changing the layout of my blog. The current layout was always supposed to be temporary. Now, I realize that butterflies really do not suit me. I’ve been making some huge personal changes (almost akin to jumping off a cliff and hoping I sprout wings so I can fly) in my life and some of the realizations have left me stood gaping like a mad fool. This is a good thing, I can assure you.
But it also left me with the need to change other areas of my life, and this includes my online presence as well. I have felt that for the longest time, I wasn’t really portraying myself the way I wanted too. So, I’ll start by redoing this layout. It took awhile, but I was able to find a good nature scene template. Now, I’m needing Aaron Kite’s ninja photo shopping skills so that I can change it to how I want it to look. I’m anxious to do this and get it live.

The thing is… I need to wait a few more days. I work as a cashier at the local Wal Mart. I decided it would be fun to hurt my wrist where I wouldn’t be able to use it, because I didn’t think my life was complicated enough. So, now that I can use only my left hand for a few days… that makes photo shopping a wee bit difficult. I’m right handed.

Please expect the new layout change within the next two weeks. My hours are really wonky lately for work, and we’ll be leaving for the parentals next week to celebrate my birthday with them.

I find it extremely hard, almost to the point where it is impossible, to write without music. I grew up with music. My first memories with music is my Ma putting on Cher, Laura Brannigan, Kenny Rogers, or Dolly Porton. My Da would usually listen to The Police.

I listen to NIN, Vitas, Loreena McKennit, Tool, Manson, new age, techno, celtic music. And most recently, New Moon soundtrack.

And I can write to all of these. And different music allows me to write differently. Loreena McKennit relaxes me so therefore I write relaxing scenes. Manson, Tool and NIN gets me rearing to go, so songs by them are very handy for action or suspenseful scenes.

Though, some songs by the above mentioned artists can also weave a spell over me, where I start having exotic emotions. I then can write sexual undertones, even overt sex scene. Or, I feel I can write them.

What matters is that I feel music helps me with my writing. It helps me move forward so that I may continue on with the novel.

What music do you listen to? Does music help you write as well? What else helps you write?