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And the boys from the NYPD choir were singing Galway Bay, and the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day. So a merry Santa Day to the blogosphere - I hope you're feeling as fatty as I am after my Christmas dinner (and that was two days ago). FOUR. Just in case you took a spin around in the TARDIS and lost track of time, a couple days ago the world celebrated Christmas. It began at 6 AM for me - I took out my mouthguard, drank a cup of tea, and then went back to bed. I then reattempted Christmas morning at 8:45 AM precisely, for my brother's alarm clock woke me up. It was a fair haul - Fujifilm camera, Doctor Who 1-5 Seasons, DVDs ( Inception, Se7en, Iron Man 2, Supernatural , etc), a dozen or so books (DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, BEHEMOTH, LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA, etc), art supplies, money for Thailand...It goes on. Like I said: fair haul . Thereby, I give you a few shots from my Christmas with my brand spanking new camera. 1: my little cousin Jimmy in the Batman getup I bought him....

Adam Christopher over at io9.com has just posted about his thoughts on how the next Big Thing could be superhero prose. Now some of you might be opposed to this idea, and I for one should be whole-heartedly embracing this concept - given the topic of my novel. Soon I Will Become Invincible was released in 2007, and has always been something I've wanted to peruse. Apparently, it was pretty huge at the time when it came out - but recently the author, Arthur Grossman, updated his blog with the announcement that he had further books coming, sequels. Christopher's post makes the comment that that's pretty well four years after his first book was released; he then mentions Minister Faust's From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain , which has a cult following, but may have been released too early. Next year's overwhelming wave of superhero film adaptations ( Green Lantern, The Avengers, Captain America, Iron Man 3, The Dark Knight Rises, Thor ...etc), Christopher predicts, may w...

Like many, there are times where I get disgruntled over my genre - YA, or more specifically, YA Fantasy. Who wouldn't where septuplet-plots are popping up with crisp "'Ellos!", with shells for protagonists and with blurbs that include: "enmeshed in a forbidden romance", "they fear she will not be strong enough to save anyone - especially herself", "he looks like an angel and acts like a jerk" or "she has to find out what he's so desperate to keep secret...even if it kills her", or even "when it comes to choosing sides, the wrong choice will cost her life". Le sigh . Surely, I must be missing something . One of my friends, when she found out about my writing, asked: "So, it's like Twilight?" Every fibre of my body was screaming "NO" and restraining myself from pulling a Barney Stinson "Friendship over!" But looking back, I'm realising that of late, the pull in the market toward ...

This is a pretty sad photoblog, but whatever. Deal with it. I had to use Photobooth to take these pictures - I couldn't find my camera. A couple posts back, I posted in my Friday Five (which I discovered actually takes place on a Thursday for the Americans - given that my blog clock is set to some non-Australian time zone) that I might do a photoblog to accompany my revisions complaining and moaning. Meet Beastie. I should probably be calling him RETURN, but Beastie seems more fitting. There are approximately 45K words in that, 250-ish double-spaced pages and then revisions added on to it. The post-its are mainly notes that I've shoved into parts that I haven't gotten up to, or on pages that I need a new word or to research something. You can't see any of the paper clips, only that bull dog clip, but they're the same thing: If I rewrite a scene or a chapter, I do it either on a separate sheet or on my laptop and print it, depending on how long it is. I strikethrough...

I couldn't decide on something to talk about today, so I thought: why not do a Friday Five? Good idea, conscience. A Friday Five. Now, I don't know if anyone's ever outlined what exactly goes in a Friday Five...If they have, I'm disregarding it. FIVE . I've been slugging through Cassandra Clare's CITY OF GLASS, which was difficult to get into, difficult to put down through the middle, and hard to finish toward the end. I don't know what's wrong with me, whenever I get to just before the final conflict, I lose interest - I mean come on , I've been waiting for this for 300+ pages, why don't I want to know the outcome? I've got to get through it tonight once I get back from seeing Love and Other Drugs because Saturdays are now to be my review days. CITY OF GLASS is pretty good. Better than the earlier ones, I think. The series is a guilty pleasure of mine - you know, I should be reading something classy and taxing on the brain, but while I...

This morning I read a post over at Debbie Maxwell Allen's Writing While the Rice Boils which carried me through cyberspace to an old 2009 Kidlit.com post about the Four Horsemen of the Prose-ocalypse. Basically, emotional cliches or the four areas of the body that are well-known hit sites for emotional bombing in novels. Mary at Kidlit.com said that these areas are the: Eyes Heart Lungs Stomach She then goes on to list a number of cliched phrases about each of these areas of the body which I personally have seen far too many times. i.e. He cast his eyes to the ground . And I shall dismount my high, white horse; I am incredibly guilty of implementing and encouraging these four horsemen. I struggle to come up with new phrases and cool, fresh spins on things as simple as that knotting in your stomach, that ache in your lungs, or the teary sparking in the back of your retinas. And though these four horsemen are lovely , I think they have a couple kid-brothers that we see somewhat bu...

This morning I read a post by lit agent Sarah LaPolla, in which she responded to Leah McLaren's post on how e-readers take the fun out of giving books . If this were a playground conflict at my school (where you must always side) I think I'd be wearing the words Team LaPolla in pen ink on the canvas of my Dunlop Volleys, despite the fact that I'm not going to invest in an e-Reader anytime soon, nor am I exactly pro " Oh-Em-Gee, e-readers are taking over the universe!" . First paragraph of McLaren's post and I'm rolling my eyes. Point One - most percentages are made up on the spot. Point Two - she says that 10% of adults in the US are giving e-readers as Christmas presents. I'm guessing that's around 2 million e-readers. What of it? If any of them are like my Dad, they're only giving them because they look nifty and besides the token debauched humour card they give to my Uncle, they cannot think of anything else besides John Howard's aut...

This is a post in response to an article that I stumbled across written by another Australian teen, author Steph Bowe, which can be read at her blog and here , where she wrote about the do's and don't's of crafting teen voice. I, like Steph, am a teen and it wouldn't be presumptuous to assume that I know a thing or two about teen voice. Once you get two or three years behind or beyond my age, however, things should and will get a bit off. For example, I have a younger brother whose circle has begun to howl with cries of "Yeaaaaaaah boys!" in response to anything good happening - something I've never said, personally. He's two years younger than me. Now, very rarely do adults, writing YA, get the teen voice correct - sometimes, the odd parent with teenage kids will be able to pick up on the likes and the vocalised LOLs , but very rarely does this happen. They either pick something very outdated, or a couple years out of date - such as dope *facepalm*...

A brand-spanking new blog requires a primary post of all levels of blabberdom. In this case, I shall be describing to my small-to-near-nothing audience of a broad-shouldered, yet skinny mail-delivery guy who waltzed up my driveway this morning. I, in fact, did not speak to this man. My Dad did, and was promptly handed a medium-sizedpackage. My Dad walked into the house and told me it had been sent from the North Pole - haha. Upon inspection, I deduced that the BBC had sent this to my Dad, and I was then given it to wrap. I'd forgotten about this purchase I made on BBCShop.com , and was then allowed to wrap one of my Christmas gifts: Doctor Who Seasons 1 to 4 in a boxset. Hel- lo David Tennant. In other news, I've had a lazy-day all day due to the fact that my family took pity on me as I worked an eight-hour shift at work yesterday, without any breaks and without sitting down once. I'd been on the grill nearly the entire time, and my arms were shaking as a result. I have di...

I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You   Author : Ally Carter Series: Gallagher Girls #1 Release Date:  April 2007 Publisher: Hyperion Pages: 288 Source: Personal copy Rating:   Buy it: Amazon | BookDepository | Barnes&Noble The Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women is a fairly typical all-girls school—that is, if every school teaches advanced martial arts in PE, chemistry always consists of the latest in chemical warfare, and everyone breaks CIA codes for extra credit in computer class. So in truth, while the Gallagher Academy might say it's a school for geniuses what they really mean is spies. But what happens when a Gallagher Girl falls for a boy who doesn't have a code name? Cammie Morgan may be fluent in fourteen languages and capable of killing a man in seven different ways (three of which involve a piece of uncooked spaghetti), but the Gallagher Academy hasn't prepared her for what to do when she meets an ordinary...