Island Time: The time vacuum created by the ocean’s presence. Similar to stoner’s time, everything moves nice and slow.

Yup, that’s me. Ssslllooooowwww.

Merry *belated* Christmas! Hope you had a great one, and built some kickarse sandcastles on the big day… or kickass snowmen, depending on your hemisphere. Or even just enjoyed some non-denominational time off. Peace! 

I’ve been sooo busy. Busy thinking about writing, eating turkey, making notes, drinking grownup drinks, visiting family, taking shitloads of photos, editing shitloads of photos, doing a clearout, reading, gardening, cursing myself for my lack of discipline in not writing, and writing. Not blog posts though, obviously.

What I have been writing is a spot of fiction! As in a proper story, not just the usual bullshit creative and humorous exaggeration that I do here. It’s my first creative writing since… well, primary school. I made a fan fiction! For kids’ TV show Mako: Island of Secrets. I’ve written before about my affection for it and it makes sense as I already know the characters, it’s filmed in my backyard so I don’t need to research locations, it’s Aussie so I know the language, I’m interested in the subject matter of the ocean and aquatic life, and of course love fantasy. I discovered FanFiction.net only two weeks ago – considering I’m supposed to be a geek it’s pretty slack of me to have remained ignorant of this facet of fandom for so long. I knew it wasn’t all poorly-written wish fulfillment crap – Simon Pegg included his Star Wars Episode III fan fic in his autobiography and it was bloody hilarious; he wrote it to vent his frustration with the pieces of shit rather disappointing new Star Wars movies. I enjoyed it loads more than I enjoyed the film.

My inspiration for doing this has been twofold: Firstly, I have started to listen to the advice I’ve been giving to Finn for the past year of Prep about writing; you won’t improve if you don’t keep practising. He was tentative at first.

But sometime during last term he suddenly “got” it and wrote like a boy possessed. He wrote his classmates’ names, letters to his cousins, lyrics he heard on the radio, captions for his drawings…

…cute notes to his old man…

… um, stuff he heard…

**GRANDPARENTAL LANGUAGE WARNING**

Could have a budding reporter in the family. His teachers noticed too, and he was proud as punch to receive his first ever merit certificate, “for trying hard to form his letters carefully when writing.”

Dang straight! His writing is neater than mine!!

My second source of inspiration was – again – Erica, my Hallowe’en muse, who was in turn inspired in her own writing by working with an actual published author, Suzanne Palmieri! OMG what a deadset legend. She wrote a post about the experience and many of her doubts and reservations sounded familiar.

I was inspired. I’ve always said I want to be a writer someday and that day started on my 40th birthday when I became serious. And then I ran into ten thousand and one stumbling blocks, many of my own creation (I can edit the hell out of a paragraph over and over and then forget to write the rest of the story) so to see an actual manuscript, one that would be sent over to an actual editor and would eventually be made into an actual book made me realize that I can probably do that, too. I recognized that manuscript as something that looked very similar to things I’ve written. It was not formal, it did not have secret codes that only REAL authors know, there were mistakes, it was a work in progress JUST LIKE MINE!

While I’m nowhere near the stage of writing a novel, I’m now open to the possibility that I can write stories, an idea I have flatly rejected for most of my life.

SO…

My first ever published work of fiction… behold.

The Humpback of Notre Stradbroke.

It’s funny, but all these years I’ve told myself (and anyone else who’d listen) I can’t ‘do’ fiction, but now that I’m actually having a go it’s just like the writing I’ve done for years, except instead of writing about what happened, I write what happens.

There are some action sequences I’d love to see – and intend to make happen – that are highly unlikely to appear in a kids show… like a shark attack for instance. Er, a nice shark?

Or a Category 5 cyclone or a cool old shipwreck or an underwater volcano or whales migrating or a major flood or something because that would be so cool; some real drama not just ‘I’ve got to get to Mako’ or ‘ah shit I got wet again’. A half hour kids show, even a quality one, does have its limitations.

As with my blog I feel good about how it’s going and have had readers fave and follow, and it’s also nice to be writing something the boys can also enjoy. I’m hoping for my stories to be fun, add to the ‘Makoverse’ AND put in a bit of environmental awareness for the kiddies too. Wish me luck!

– Michelle