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Where We Create – A Space for Writing
Happy Easter Monday everyone!! I realise that I was a tad slack last week: sometimes blogging falls by the wayside… Mostly because last week I didn’t have anything ready, and I felt a bit wiped out just at the thought of having to put something together. So here I am again, back and loud and proud! Thanks to uni, I recently watched a youtube video of John Cleese presenting a lecture about creativity. It was excellent. Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I’m a big John Cleese fan (thanks for that Dad!). I think he’s hilarious, and as someone for whom humour is not a creative forte, I’m always intrigued…
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Finding Ourselves
For those who don’t know, I used to write on another blog. I started it in 2014 post-Afghanistan, when I was ensconced in a new city, in a new world, in a new self defined by confusion and pain and loss; I started it as a way to try and heal myself through a medium that I instinctively knew I belonged to, and that belonged to me. But the truths I found that year, that I fought and bled for in the depths of my soul, are no less true for the passage of time and the healing of those wounds. They still resonate with the parts of me that…
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Social Media Constructions: Figuring Out What Works for You
So, it’s time for a heavy Monday post. Rather than becoming self-explanatory, it seems to me like the subject of this post is one that is only becoming more pertinent to us all as time goes by, and our world is increasingly digitised. So buckle in, I’m about to get kinda deep here. It seems sometimes that the universe (read: social media) is full of information on what we should and shouldn’t be doing: personally and professionally, physically and mentally… There’s a never-ending list of how we should be, and therefore ways in which we fall short, or don’t conform, or aren’t good enough. Maybe that’s a little cynical, but…
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The Joy of Self-Revision
Hellllooooooo from Lawton, Oklahoma everybody! Since nothing of much interest has happened this week, I decided not to bore anyone with an update post (though, if you’re dying of curiosity to know allll about Derrida, deconstruction and other post-structuralist literary theory—hint, you’re not, I promise you—please let me know). Instead, I’m going to write about the seemingly endless journey that is writing, and bore someone with that instead. For anyone who missed the memo, I entered the Mogford Short Story Prize back in December, and I couldn’t help myself (I never really can) from getting my hopes up about it. C’est la vie, honestly: I’m always simultaneously despairing at the…
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Aussie Expats Update – Road Trip? COMPLETE!
Happy Monday everyone! I decided late last week that since we’d be getting home over the weekend (and I had a 2000 word essay to write) I would delay the final road trip blog post until after we finished. And thus, we arrived back into Lawton yesterday afternoon with 9100 miles total on the car (14,560 km: a third of the way around the earth!), a crack in our damn windscreen (more on that later) and a huge sense of relief because there’ll be no more driving for a while. On to the recap then, and a quick warning that we’ve crammed a lot into the past 10 days: be prepared…
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The Lost
The paper was late again. He peered out the window onto his front lawn, and frowned, then strode onto the porch. The empty wicker chair stood at attention beneath his scrutiny, but the man ignored it, and was rewarded with the sight of the paperboy flying around the corner on a black Avanti. “Going damn fast, too,” he said to himself as the teenager skidded to a halt and pegged the rolled up newspaper towards the front door. It wouldn’t take much for him to hit someone and knock them flying, the fool. “About time,” he said, more loudly, but the boy only laughed. “You’re welcome, Grim!” The kid yelled,…
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Aussie Expats Update – Five Weeks Into the Roadtrip!
Happy St Patrick’s Day everybody! I’m finding it a bit challenging to write a blog post right now, because my whole head feels as though it’s filled with rocks… Wading my way through neck-deep Structuralism in my Literary Theory subject at uni has put me firmly in struggletown, and I have some mild regret about choosing this particular subject. Regardless, we are currently motoring our way down the interstate and leaving Utah behind as we head towards Bryce Canyon to see some rocks! I hope everyone enjoyed James’s excellent post last week: I don’t think it was until after he had finished the long slog that he realised just how…
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Cognitive Dissonance: Our Brains and Our Beliefs
So, this blog post has been on my ‘to write’ list for some serious time now… As James and I are currently making our way through the southern US states, I thought I might as well chuck it in the post line-up (since I finally got myself sorted out and actually wrote it!). It’s a concept that I learnt about last year in my introductory psychology courses, and it just struck me as such a common and inherently human problem that I had to put some thoughts down about it. Cognitive Dissonance is defined by Merriam Webster (online) as: psychological conflict resulting from incongruous beliefs and attitudes held simultaneously. Basically,…
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Aussie Expats Update – Our Roadtrip, Part 4 – Guest update: The other half (James because Ana said you wouldn’t be sure who it was if I left it at that)
Unfortunately, the beautiful woman who normally regales you with weekly tales of adventure currently has her head buried in Kate Chopin’s ‘The Awakening’ so for this weeks update you get the other, sometimes better sometimes worse, half. I give you prior warning, it is unlikely that I will provide an overview to match those prior, but nevertheless I shall do my very best and make no apologies for any tangents experienced. And so we begin this weeks episode on the road to Knoxville, TN. Proud to tick another state of the list we passed into Tennessee uneventfully. That is until we realised we were passing through Chattanooga and had the…
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Creative Writing Courses
It’s Monday again! I mean, I can be happy about this because I’m currently road-tripping my way through ye olde U-S-of-A (and knowing me, probably drowning in a pile of uni work), but I hope you’re all happy about it too. Especially since you’re reading this post. Yay! Hurray! Read on, brave visitor! So then, enough joviality. To business. The other day, I was scrolling mindlessly through Facebook (as one does when one should be reading, or writing, or studying… or really anything except scrolling mindlessly through Facebook) and stumbled upon a bit of a sales pitch for a writing course. I actually really love the literary page that was…
