Impending Separation...

As part of the Chinese Language scholarship I was awarded in August, I leave for China in a little under two weeks.
Such an event requires meticulous planning. Think about it: I'm going to be away from my iTunes for over a month!
I've downloaded a couple of full albums (Fall Out Boy and Nickelback) and some single tracks (Flyleaf, Escape the Fate, Story of the Year, Red Jumpsuit Apparatus). I've also put the best tracks from some of my favourite artists (Foo Fighters, 311, Weezer, Fun Lovin' Criminals) into playlists - call them my own 'greatest hits' collections, although usually the songs I like best are neither singles nor hits.
I hope it's enough to tide me over...
The new Fall Out Boy album, Folie a Deux is well worth a listen. I'm digging the riffing of America's Suitehearts and the retrospective outro of What a Catch, Donnie at the moment. There's an element of extra value in any Fall Out Boy album because half the tracks require you to guess what the heck their title means.

On the trip to Beijing I will be accompanied by the lovely Mrs Powley. Please check out our adventures at the following blog:
www.chicketychinathechinesechicken.blogspot.com
And pass it on to anyone else you know who might be keen to tune in and see if I survive. I won't make any bold promises about how frequently I'll update (this time!) but I'm only there for three weeks, so I'll have to be on the ball.
Merry Christmas to all. Yes, even you.

The Problem with Music Videos...

Back to music this time.
So I love music. No doubts there. But they don’t make it easy, do they?
I find it hard to watch music videos nowadays, because of two things that wind me up immensely. I think you’ll agree that both are an equally dangerous blight on the music industry. I have included links to all the videos so you can be similarly outraged, if that is your thing.

#1 – The Product Placement
Is it not enough that we have to contend with ad breaks every 8 minutes on TV? Now we have products shoved in our faces during music videos.
Instead of ‘Say (All I Need)’, I’m surprised OneRepublic didn’t name their single ‘LaCoste provide footwear for our whole band. Thanks, LaCoste!’ Who knew shoes were so essential for rocking!(Check the video at 1:34, 2:08, 2:43, 3:07, 3:14)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pye5Uh6XqZc

Katy Perry’s new song goes one better – she not so surreptitiously endorses two products in her latest video ‘Hot N Cold’. (Diesel sunnies at 1:49, 1:57, and a Nokia phone at 2:54, 2:56-58, 3:03-3:06)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-LhyAVzDBI

These are not bad songs. Is it really necessary to plug luxury items to make enough money to be a super-famous music star? These are not bad videos. But every time I see them I cringe at what is just blatant product placement. I’m a little embarrassed for these artists, you know? It’s like watching Big Bird tell you that “today’s show was brought to you by the letters B, I, and new Coke Zero! Same Coke flavour, no sugar!” It just isn’t right. The video should showcase these bands’ talent, not their marketing savvy.
Of course there’s no such thing as bad publicity, apparently. The mere fact that I’ve devoted about an hour of my life to writing this probably goes some way to proving that point. Oh dear, it’s probably time to move onto…

#2 – The Pussycat Dolls
Did you know if you take a lump of clay, form it into basic woman shapes and then ask Satan enough times, he will make you some Pussycat Dolls of your very own?
They’re like the punch line to a bad joke. “Hey, Bill, you’ll love this one. How many models does it take to sing a pretty average pop song?”
“Well, Ted, shouldn’t it take just one? Maybe two if they wanna do some harmonies or something. No more than three, surely.”
“Then what the hell are five sixths of the Pussycat Dolls for?”
“Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! You kill me, Ted.”
‘I Hate this Part’, their latest effort, has skyrocketed them to new levels of ridiculousness, as Nicole, the ‘band’s’ lead singer and possibly the only one who knows how to string a melody together, harmonises with herself. Five women in the video, but only one sings. She even has to play the piano at the same time. If I was her, I’d be pissed. And if the music industry is in as dire trouble as we are led to believe, then stop paying the four useless ones!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rN4f0J6oQA

As you know, every Pussycat Dolls video in their short history of mediocrity ends with them stripping off at least one layer of clothing. This video ends with an unexpected downpour of rain that soaks their remaining skimpy outfits. This is the visual equivalent of the one semitone key change in every Westlife song ever. You hope it won’t happen this time, but you’re really not surprised when it does. “Oh, now they’re wet,” you say. “Yawn.” It’s so completely expected that you can’t help but sigh when they meet your basement-level expectations.

We are on the brink of disaster here, people. Sooner or later the Pussycat Dolls will start endorsing their special brand of hooker-wear in their music videos. And that will be the end of the music industry as we know it. Nature abhors a vacuum, and it doesn’t get much more vacuous than that.

My Sky Shaped Box

I read a book the other week called Heart-Shaped Box. I was intrigued by the title, which I assumed was a reference to the Nirvana song. I was sort of right, but sort of wrong too. This is fine, because it was a fantastic story.
In this book, a man is pursued by a ghost that he purchased off the internet.
In one scene the protagonist notes that the ghost is visible and dangerously active while the sun is obscured by cloud. But it cannot stand the light, and when the sun breaks through the clouds the ghost is rendered intangible and ineffective by it.
To me, this rang true as a great metaphor for Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). While I am by no means one of those people who jumps on the internet to self-diagnose themselves the minute they have the sniffles I have wondered for some time how much the light of the sun affects my mood, my desire to hide myself away from the world.
There are days when I feel like I am lord of all I survey. There are other days when I feel like I am lord of all I survey so long as all I survey is the inside of my house with the curtains closed and the doors locked.
Bring on the summer sun!

Failure

It's been a while, but I'm busy so stick it.
As you should know, I am the author equivalent of the waiter/actor: the teacher/writer.
One thing I wanted to try with this blog - and I assume I can do this but I'm not sure - is to post some of my writing that is otherwise just gathering dust somewhere (well, intangible bit and byte dust, since it's all new-fangled computer writing. I like my friends to read my stuff, but damned if I don't get sick of e-mailing current versions all over the place. Hopefully this will be easier. If it works.
As an apt starting point, I thought I would try posting my story of failing as a writer that I failed to sell to the School Journal.

One Word at a Time: Behind the Scenes of Writing a Story

Do you want to be a writer? Have you ever had an idea and thought, ‘that would make a great story’? I have. So one day I wrote that idea down in a notebook. Two years later I had a complete story.

Here is my story about the journey of writing a story…

The idea for my story actually came on Christmas Day. I was watching a Christmas movie on television, and it wasn’t very good, to be honest. But it made me think about the hard work Santa has to put in on that one night of the year. ‘How does he do it?’ I wondered. I thought I could do a better job of telling that story. Thinking about that one little idea eventually led to a story called The Santa Problem. It’s about Antarctica, elf fights, secret agents, and all kinds of other crazy stuff!

Part of the fun of writing The Santa Problem was researching all those different things I wanted to put in the book. I researched all about the history of Santa, reindeers and elves. I did a lot of research about Antarctica, how to get there (usually in Air Force planes. Cool!), how people survive there, the weather conditions. Did you know that the sun goes down in Antarctica for about two months over winter? That’s right; imagine spending June and July in total darkness! Or did you know that the temperature gets so cold that the wind could freeze the skin off your face? Or that Antarctica has mounds of earth-covered snow or ice called Pingos, kind of like reverse volcanoes? These are all fascinating facts I found out while researching my story, and they all found their way into the story somewhere too.

From start to finish it took me two years to write The Santa Problem. I wrote in two ways: if I was at home I sat at my desk, with my cat on my lap, and typed straight onto my computer. The most important thing for me when I sat down to write out an idea or a chapter was that I was not interrupted. I listened to music so it wasn’t too quiet, but my friends knew that I wouldn’t answer the phone if I was in the middle of writing. If I was somewhere else, like on holiday, I would write into a little notebook and copy my work onto computer later. There were months at a time where I didn’t add a single word to the story – sometimes I was busy with my real life, or I just didn’t have any idea what was going to happen next – but I thought about my story every day. Sometimes I would hold an idea in my head for weeks, rolling it around and thinking about it from different angles. Writing the story wasn’t easy – there were many times I wanted to give up, when it seemed too hard. But I found that once I had started the story it wouldn’t go away. I had to know what was going to happen, I was so interested in where my story was going! It’s a great feeling.

When the story was finished I gave it to some of my friends to read. Because the story was intended for Intermediate age children I also gave it to some of the children in my Year 7 class to read. They actually went through and corrected quite a few spelling and punctuation mistakes! (See, teachers make them too) One girl even suggested an idea that I worked into my story. It’s definitely a good idea to talk to people you trust about your story, and really listen to their feedback.

Finishing the story doesn’t mean that the hard work is over. If you want to have your story made into a book, you need to find a company willing to publish your work. Publishers get hundreds or even thousands of people sending them stories every year, so they barely have time to read them all. They definitely don’t have time to tell you what they liked or didn’t like about your story. So the first step in this process is to post a copy of your manuscript to a manuscript assessor.

The job of the manuscript assessor is to read your story and give you professional advice on what publishers will like about your story, what you should change, whether there are parts of your story that are unclear, that sort of thing. They write all of this information into a big report that they send back to you. It is kind of like handing in an assignment to a teacher for marking. Like a good teacher, a good manuscript assessor will make you feel good about your work while pointing out honestly what needs to be improved upon. The manuscript assessor also provides you with a letter that you can send to publishers saying that you have had your book checked professionally.

Each publisher has a different set of rules for how you show them your work. Most publishers want a hard copy (printed on paper) and only between one or three chapters. They read those ‘sample’ chapters and decide based on that if they think they can sell your story. So picking those sample chapters is a big decision. Do you send the first few chapters? Usually there is a lot of setting up in those chapters for events that occur later, so they may not be the best choice. For The Santa Problem, I chose three chapters that introduced three of the main characters. I figured if the publisher likes those characters they will like the book as a whole.

One publisher liked my sample chapters enough to request the whole manuscript. That was really exciting.

I haven’t found a publisher for The Santa Problem yet. I’m going to keep trying. It’s a well known fact that J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, was rejected many times before having her work published. But even if The Santa Problem never gets published it was worth it. The experience of creating something from start to finish taught me a lot. If you ever have a great idea for a story, I hope you write that idea down and remember it. That idea could be the seed inside your mind that grows and flourishes into a story of your own.


Let me know what you think. I personally believe that the lesson of not succeeding has great merit for children, especially when they're - let's just admit it - spoiled.
And I'm out.

My Secret Shame - Deleted!

I had an epiphany. Life is too short to listen to shitty music.
For the last few years my packrat predilections have been telling me to hang onto some bad, bad music. Bad.
But I have broken free of the chains of my hoarder compulsion and have purged my hard drive of some poisonously horrid tracks. I am ashamed to tell you I had these 'musicians' on my playlist. Read, and weep.

Dido, Boyzone, Westlife, Ronan Keating, Enrique Iglesias.

It feels good to be free.
Of course this makes more room for me to download wicked new music.
At the moment I am loving (in no particular order):
Insomnia by Feeder
The Curse by Audioslave
That's Enough by Dark New Day
Drinking in LA by Bran Van 3000
Who Wants To Live Forever by Breaking Benjamin
Tribute by 311
All U Can Eat by Ben Folds

With all this good music I haven't been looking into the radio thing anymore. That sounds like it might have been one of those things... what do you call them? Oh yeah, an empty promise.

All we hear is...

I just found out that I can stream U.S radio stations through iTunes! Have a look, this is definitely an improvement in the world. 1600 stations mean you don't have to sit through ads! I'm gonna check this out and post a couple of station recommendations.

Reports are done now, so I plan to sleep for... about 27 hours.

The Best Song Title Ever

Through extensive research (okay, maybe just listening to a lot of music) I have determined the secret to having an awesome song.

Are you ready for this?

You need to have the words ‘home’ or ‘circle’ in the title.
That’s it.
I feel like the guy who discovered the 11 secret herbs and spices!

So, without further ado, I present to you…
The Top Twelve Songs with the words ‘Home’ or ‘Circle’ in the Title!

1. Home – Foo Fighters
2. Home – Breaking Benjamin
3. Home Again – Shihad
4. Circles – Josh Todd
5. Circles – The Salads
6. Home – Shihad (These guys have obviously cracked the code!)
7. Home – Great Northern
8. Circles – Incubus
9. Don’t Stay Home – 311
10. This Circle – Paramore
11. Own Way Home – Steriogram
12. New Way Home – Foo Fighters (Coincidence?! I think not!)

There you have it, irrefutable proof. Now watch as I abuse the formula I have discovered in the most Chad Kroeger way possible. And check out my new single, ‘My Home is a Circle’.

Honourable mentions go to the following words: ‘Love’, ‘Heart’ and ‘Angel’. Bit obvious, really. A hundred monkeys at a hundred typewriters could turn out hit songs using those words (I think that might be how Britney’s last album was made).

Dishonourable mention goes to any intentionally misspelled words. E.g. ‘shawtee’. I hate you.

What’s your Heart Song?

I’ve been wondering: is having a blog just another demand on precious time and energy? I haven’t even done a proper post yet, and I am feeling the stress, like I better write something! I make no promises like, “I will keep this updated regularly.” That would be a lie, and not even a good one. The idea is this is supposed to make me a better writer. I’ll write in it when I feel like I have something worthwhile to say.

That being said, I thought I’d start out with something I find pretty easy to talk about: Music.

I had to get the new Weezer album as soon as it was available (my first full album iTunes download, by the way). And I hope you get it too! It’s well worth a listen.

One track in particular really resonated with me. That track is called Heart Songs.

It’s a delightfully intimate tour through Rivers Cuomo’s musical conscience, a sweet mixture of We Didn’t Start the Fire and My Favourite Things. Each verse is like a puzzle, “Who sang that?” “Oh, yeah, I like their stuff too,” “I need to research that one.”

Heart Songs serves as a reminder of the power music has to profoundly affect us, ever more important in our high-stress existence. As someone who rates music as one of the greatest pleasures we get to experience on this miserable world I love that idea that we all carry around this special ‘playlist’, a bunch of songs that buoy our hearts, no matter what.

Thanks once again for a great album, Rivers. You’ve provided your share of heart songs to me, and many others I’m sure.

Bloggety blog blog blog

Hi.
I have started this blog as part of learning how to use a PC in the classroom.
Prepare for me to get less retarded as time goes by.