OUUROBOROS

Publishing this one now because I'm profoundly off-pissed by pretty much everything.

 Unless you've been living under a bit of a rock, you'll know who Edward Snowden is and what he's done, so I won't rehash it in great detail. He effectively blew the whistle on the NSA and the GCHQ, who have been merrily spying on everyone's online activity. NSA is American, and GCHQ is British.
That's my country, yo.

What these charming institutions have been doing is, of course, mass-monitoring global transmissions. The NSA were using the Prism scheme to spy on people - in Hong Kong, China, their own country, and who knows where else. The GCHQ has been accused of being involved with Prism too, and circumventing UK law to spy on people including the Germans, and God knows who else. If America wasn't spying on us, GCHQ probably was.

The thing that makes me laugh is that the US expected Hong Kong to hand Snowden back to them, after its spying activities on the people of Hong Kong were revealed.
You're not used to having people say no to you, are you, America? If I'd found out someone was spying me, no way would I ever hand the person who warned me about it back to them! Now America is accusing Hong Kong of supporting a fugitive when actually, it acted in accordance to international law. What do you mean, America isn't the world?

And I'm so, so angry that Britain's been getting its fingers in the pie too. Why do we always do this? Our country is a goddamn lapdog. I think this just about sums up our Government's relationship with the US.

USA: IRAQ HAS OIL. WANT TO GO TO WAR?
UK: Oh, such fun! Jolly good, tally-ho! America's doing it so we definitely ought to! Leeroy Jenkins!!!
USA: HAND OVER THIS UK CITIZEN TO US IMMEDIATELY.
UK: Sure, have this one on us. It's not like the supposed crime they've committed isn't a crime in the UK, and this person has never set foot in the US before! Take the plebian away!
USA: WE'VE JUST DEVELOPED A SPY SYSTEM THAT MEANS WE CAN SPY ON ANYONE EVER!
UK: Oh, do please let us join in! It's not like this is 100% unethical and will backfire badly as soon as anyone finds out! We're the good guys, everyone! Boo, hiss, China and Russia and everyone else the US doesn't like and accuses of doing exactly the same thing!
(To be fair, they probably do.)

But that's why I cannot stand this country. We're wet blankets. We're pansies. When we aren't happily going along with what America says, we're whinging about how stupid their Government and foreign policy is. Hate to break it to you, fellow Brits, but WE DO EXACTLY THE SAME AS THEM. We are just as bad, and I actually think we're worse because from the amount of people complaining about 'stupid America' we clearly think we know better, but we don't do better.

We even have drones now, which is something I staunchly stand against. I was disgusted by the Obama administration continuing to use them, and I'm even more disgusted that the UK has decided to start using them on Pakistan too.
And yet the poor old Pakistanis are the terrorists. Want to tell that to the innocent civilians and their children who keep getting blown sky-high by drone strikes that they cannot control, predict and don't have the chance to escape, just because they happen to live sort-of-near someone who's cross with the USA? Oh, I forgot, they're collateral damage. They don't count because they aren't American.
It disgusts me that our country adopts the same attitude.

Then, we complain about a rise in insurgency in these countries we attack. I don't know about you, but if someone had drones primed to kill hovering above my country and kept blowing up hundreds of random civilians 'by mistake', just to get to a handful of meanies, I'd start feeling pretty sympathetic to those meanies. I'd probably start feeling pretty fanatical about things myself.

But, I digress. Edward Snowden. Prism.

NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT TO INVADE INNOCENT PEOPLE'S PRIVACY.  America & Britain, you don't get the right to spy on the populace of other countries while complaining that they might be spying on you. You also do not get to spy on the activities of your OWN countries' populace. Big brother is watching us, and we were stupid enough to vote him in. George Orwell saw the future, and he was basically right. Every day I find new articles about truly horrible things that are being created - adverts for in cities that lock onto you and follow you and track where you're going. A TV box with a camera in it that watches what you are doing (the official spiel is that this is so that ads can be tailored to what you're doing - say, a romance ad if you're cuddling with someone, toy ads if children are playing, but anyone with a brain can see how bad an idea that is and how easily it could go wrong.)
 Even the good old XBoner was going to have a camera in the kinect that couldn't be turned off or disconnected from the internet - because if you didn't connect to the internet once per 24 hours you could no longer play games. I think that's been changed now though, which is good. Thought it was some horrific joke.

Do none of these people read? Do they not read anything at all?

1984 was NOT an instruction manual. 
Run, Snowden, run.

I personally feel as though there's only one thing to do to make them stop watching us. It's been rumoured for a long while that governments filter through everyone's emails, search for keywords such as bombs and terrorists and allahu akbar and when they find them, put these people on a nifty little to-watch list so they can see if they're terrorists. This practice is definitely not islamophobic, what are you saying??
They want to watch us, put us on lists? Fine. I say that everyone in this country - no, everyone in the world - should send a bunch of emails to themselves and everyone they know containing nothing but buzzwords in them - guns ak-47 attack terrorists fanaticism al-qaeda how2makebombs hi David Cameron! They wanted to spy on us, under the guise of protecting us? They can have their cake, and eat it too. Good luck sorting through the rubbish to get to the good stuff. That'll learn ya.

Oh, and for the record, Snowden's not a traitor. He's a hero, and he'll be remembered as standing on the right side of history. I said this blog would get political. 

Reckon they watch blogger, too? Am I on their list? Hi in advance, NSA. Pinky-promise that I'm not a terrorist. 
This is why I write the genre I do. Because it's true.

Okay, so! I've successfully got my head around the formatting of my ebook, and I'm really proud of what I have so far! I'm actually going to do one last-minute edit of the stories before I post it, but right now I'm waiting on the ISBN number to come through. It's all very exciting! I've got it working on my Kindle, and it all looked great -
Except for the cover.
Puddlenuts.

I already posted the old cover I made for the ebook. Unfortunately, I hadn't really considered how it would look on the Kindle, and it was just too dark. The text was too thin and didn't show up, and it was so dark that the designs couldn't be seen. So, it was back to the drawing board! Eurgh.

I worked on it for some time, and then came up with this.

The resolution of it isn't that great uploaded to this blog, it's a little blurry, but in real life it's huge, and all the lines are crisp. I swear! And it now actually looks rather good on a Kindle!

I made this ebook cover in GIMP, and it took me about an hour of messing around. The background is a soft grey, and a free paper texture from bashcorpo on deviantart gives it a bit more life at full-res especially. I pasted this in as another layer over the base, and turned the opacity down extremely low.

The fonts are the same as last time; Infinity and Jura. If you look at most books, you'll find that they have two fonts on them from different font families, and that's what I've tried to replicate. The cogs are free brushes, obtained from coolestbrushes. The spider image is from a photo on freerangestock, by Danilo, and I cut it out from the background and turned it into a silhouette. Everything I've used is free for personal and commercial use, and has been really useful to me. You always gotta check the terms of use e____e It's quite a chore to find good resources for free. Either of these sites, I can recommend.

Let this be a lesson to all wannabe-ebook-cover designers! If it doesn't display well on an ebook reader, you haven't done your job.

Next post will be an actual tutorial of how to format an ebook the way I did, because it was so profoundly stupid and took so long and turned me into this:

Seriously, there was no decent guide as to how to do it with a word document anywhere on the internet! My heyday as a master of google-fu seems to be over. It will be explained.


In other (hopefully more interesting) news; the rewrite of number 5 is going well. I'm actually quite enjoying it now! The Ministers get to be their creepy, diabolical selves in it, and it's all fabulously disturbing. Here's to a life of crime for Carina! And hopefully a less boring post next time.

On an unrelated note my little brother just set off the fire alarm frying sausages. He offered to make me some too, and put them in some toast. The toast is sliced bigger than a doorstop and the house is full of smoke, but it's the thought that counts. The last time he tried to make food for us both he brought me back two bowls - one of plain pasta, and the other of plain rice (?). This is definitely an improvement.

Hello! It's been a while, but I've been rather busier than expected. All my friends are back from university now, so we've gone hard - and not always gone home -  for the last few weeks. As I write this, I'm trying to format the first set of shorts into an ebook, but it's taking a while. And two days ago, I got home from my work experience at the Houses of Parliament, in London!
It was so cool.

I stayed with my uncle, who has a flat in the city, and that was really fun too. Ate Vietnamese cuisine for the first time with him, which I can 100% recommend to anyone. It's a little like Chinese food, but much spicier, and I actually prefer it! Unfortunately I have no photos of the food because I ate it before I could remember to take any. Also it turns out that I am absolutely abysmal at using chopsticks.
But, I digress.

I had to catch the bus to the Houses of Parliament each day (and get it back!) and as someone without a sense of direction to speak of who is used to a small city only, this was pretty daunting. However, my bus route took me past most of the big sights (St Paul's Cathedral, Trafalgar Square etc) so it was still pretty cool. I had to keep asking for directions, and you can say what you like about Londoners being grumpy - everyone who I asked was really kind, especially two policemen who offered to actually show me the way themselves.
I'm such a tourist.

Maybe I'd get better at things if I actually lived in London - who knows? But I sort of want to live there now, at some point in the future. Also, London buses get the weirdest people on them. First day I was going back to my uncle's, I was treated to an hour-long, full-on sing-and-clap-along-to-Jesus-songs session, from a man who I suspect was profoundly drunk at this point. Unfortunately I could hear him through my iPod at max volume; and when Nine Inch Nails is being drowned out by something else there's a problem.

The first thing that I did was go on a tour of the houses, which was great - but unfortunately, you aren't allowed to photograph anything. The House of Commons is absolutely tiny, way smaller than you think it is from TV. The House of Lords is blinged up to the absolute max with gold. There's all kinds of funny, interesting and largely pointless traditions. And the architecture and artwork is awesome. Someone had to build all that. It's crazy!

After this, I went off to meet my MP. Then I was able to go into the public gallery at the Houses of Commons and watch some of the debates. It was about the EU Common Agriculture policy, which was pretty interesting. The one Labour MP got up and delivered an ever-so-pretty, extremely flowery speech that included comparisons to the 'charge of the Light Brigade' and speaking in French, but by the end of it he hadn't really said much at all. When pressed for an actual opinion he didn't give one, so effectively he thought the same thing as the Conservatives but couldn't possibly say this. This is always what frustrates me about our politicians - at the end of the day most of them are very much the same, and they'll u-turn as soon as they get into power and people just don't see it. People forget.

I also had to do some admin work, like going through my MP's post and filing things. I also had to sign something saying I wouldn't talk about it, so I won't in case I get arrested. What I can divulge is that MPs have some rather interesting people writing to them  - and that's probably about the kindest way I can put it.

The next day was the best, however, because I got to see Prime Minister's Questions. I saw Dave! Well, first of all I saw Ed Miliband (ugh), then Nick Clegg (UGH), a handful of other big names and then David Cameron (still mostly ugh.) The first part of PMQ's was effectively Ed and Dave getting bitchy at each other, which was quite funny - some of their comments just made me think meow! Politicians behaving badly. In the end the speaker told Dave off a bit, because I think he got a bit too personal. Shame, really.

The other thing I got to sit in on was a meeting of the Scottish Independence committee, which got rather dry towards the end but was still pretty interesting.


The view from the office window!~
At the end of the day, I'm not sure I could be a politician. High Overlord maybe, but first you have to be a politician. But London's an awesome city, and I could see myself living there in the future. As a lawyer, maybe - or, preferably, as a successful author. :v

London also has Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Does Cambridge have Krispy Kreme? I think not.

Finished editing the stories on paper this morning ♥‿♥ Huge relief. Now they just need to be typed up, but I have encountered a bit of a problem.
I absolutely hate the fifth story, We've Lost Our Moral Compass. Absolutely, unequivocally hate it. I've never liked it much, even when I wrote it (it took a month, and I had pretty bad writer's block on it.) And when I read the stories in order, I found that to me, it kind of ruins the whole set. It feels out of place and even when I edit it it doesn't work.
There is only one solution - a complete re-write. Different plot, different everything. I already have ideas, and it shouldn't take a huge amount of time. It's a bit annoying, though - especially considering that I thought I could have a break from writing things for a while! (Also, I can't wait to move on from this project as a whole, it's starting to get wearing after however many months I've spent on it. I want to start my proper novel!)

Incidentally, I've been working extensively on the plot of this series in my spare time and it's expanded into four books instead of three. It's something I've been putting of doing for ages, but it's also something that really needed to be done. The story is cut up far more neatly, now, and I'm quite satisfied with how it's working out!

Back to the shorts, on a positive note, I am very happy with the edits I have done to the other stories. The older ones needed a lot of work, and it's either testament to some improvement over the year or that I wrote them too recently to see mistakes that the newer ones didn't need so much. I'm choosing to believe the first, because it makes me quite proud. :v

On the thirteenth April I went to see the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at the Warner Bros. Studios  ♥‿♥ And the reason I haven't posted about it yet was that I couldn't find my camera cable and I have tons of pictures. Harry Potter has and always will hold a really special place in my heart, seeing as I grew up with it and it was what first inspired me to be an author. I first started reading them when the fourth Harry Potter book came out in 2000, when I was six, as my parents already had the first three books and hadn't let me read them in case they were too scary. They bought the fourth book and I remember racing through the first three as fast as I could, in order to read the fourth (partially because the cover had a dragon on it, but also because that thing was huge. I'd never read a book as fat as that one, and was determined to do so. I've always had a thing for nice, fat books that took me a good while to finish.)

Needless to say, I loved Harry Potter. I read those books again, and again, and again. I got them on audiotape, my mum read them out to the family after tea. When the fifth book came out we went to buy it from Waitrose at 7am, the shop's opening time, and when we asked for it the manager said we were his first customers and gave it to us for free! Excellent marketing strategy, as then everyone we met in town we told about it. We later bought a second copy for my mum, which we then did ever since as me, her and dad would fight over who got to read them first.

I read Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix in a day, and every release after that we went at 5am to ASDA to buy the books. I would get so excited for the release days, I wouldn't even sleep! And then I wouldn't put them down until I finished reading them. They were the only days  I was allowed to read at the table, although little-kid-me always tried it. I miss those days so much! They were some of the happiest of my life. We even got a system going - I was the fastest reader and would finish within the day, then passing it on to my dad. My mum would finish her copy in two days, and then give it back to me to read again. ♥‿♥

The films were never as good as the books to me, but they were Harry Potter and so I loved them anyway. Thus, I was really excited when I heard about the studios tour, and desperate to visit from the offset. But the tickets are kind of pricey, so we had to put it off for a year. Finally we came across some vouchers to go (we are so cheap) and jumped at the chance ♥

These are the photos of the day! Be warned, this will probably be a stupidly long post. This isn't even half the stuff we saw that day, and the pictures don't do it justice at all! So if you are a fan of the Harry Potter series and you haven't been, go. It's absolutely fabulous, and I got quite emotional about it afterwards! It really was the end of my childhood, and I may just have teared in the car on the way home. Honestly, I think nothing will ever replace Harry Potter. Nothing will be quite the same, touch people quite the same. I can't imagine it, and that makes me really quite sad - but also happy, because I got to grow up with Harry.

 

The ice sculpture from the Yule Ball ♥‿♥ so much prettier in real life than in the picture!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I finished it! The final short in my collection. City of the Damned is finally completed.  ♥‿♥
It's actually sort of a weird feeling, because as I've said before - I didn't really expect to finish. I'm terrible for starting a ton of projects and not finishing them, and when I set out to do this the ending was something really far off to me. Sure, maybe I'll write those stories... but ages away. It's not happening for ages.
And now it's happened, and I guess I'm really proud. There have been a hell of a lot of half-finished stories since I was little - this is the first thing I've actually completed. That sounds terrible, but it's true. So in a way this gap year was to prove to myself (and everyone who said I couldn't do it) that I can finish things, and therefore can maybe be an author. ✖‿✖

Now I just have to edit everything. I guess it'll take a while, but for the first time I'll be able to read all the stories in order and see how it all flows. And then, figure out how to get it onto an ebook. I have some ideas for the typeface and the way I want it laid out, it's just formatting/coding it all to do that. And then everyone can read it, which is slightly terrifying.
I'm at once concerned about people hating it and it being completely ignored. Really, I'm not sure which is worse! I mean, I'd really rather not be responsible for more horrible literature hitting the market, but it sucks to have your work ignored.
Toss a coin.

At least while it is unpublished I can imagine that people will actually like it. :> I'm so lame.

Next, I'll get around to posting those Harry Potter photos. While I'm editing I might also post a couple of things I've been considering - namely my opinions on certain topics/why I include them in my stories, maybe some politics thrown in for good measure, and also how exactly I wound up wanting to be an author. My work with the birds came to an end (I only had eight months) and it's really sad; I miss them a lot! But I will still visit and see them, and meet up with everyone for drinks, so it's not as though I don't have plenty of time on my hands.
I really need to find a job. But I've been putting it off because Mum, Dad, can't you see I'm a writer??

And with that sentence I became the laziest gap year student in existence.

A continuation of my previous post. Have some more interesting words! I enjoy all of these, and recommend using them with unadulterated abandon.

♥Avarice - greed.
♥Bellicose - aggressive, hostile. Currently being chucked around by the media in relation to North Korea.
♥Bleb - learned this one in Biology! It's a little bubble.
♥Cirrous - resembling slender tentacles or filaments.
♥Fescennine - extremely rude. Therefore, a stronger version of agrestic.
♥Finnimbrun - a trifle, a trinket.
♥Harbinger - a herald, a forewarning.
♥Jejune - childish.
♥Masticate - no, nothing like that! It means 'to chew'.
♥Mesonoxian - related to midnight.
♥Nacreous - relating to mother-of-pearl, pearlescent.
♥Otiose - without a practical purpose.
♥Pejorist - someone who reckons the world is going down the drain. Me, then. 
♥Perspicacious - being very perceptive.
♥Requiem - a mourning song, a funeral song.
♥Sidereal - relating to stars.

I will get around to uploading all the Harry Potter photos soon! It's just there are a lot of them and effort, but! What I really wanted to say (and should have said before) was that Quantum Entanglement is completely finished and now I'm on the final short! It's been renamed 'Spidermusings', which is at once apt and a casual abuse of the english language.
It's also so nearly done. It's been a lot of fun too - it's from the point of view of a particularly nasty and unreliable narrator; and getting into his head has been pretty interesting. However there is now about one more thought-track to write and I cannot find the motivation to do so. Never mind that this is the last story in the collection that I have left to write, it's the culmination of almost a year's work.
I'm so damn useless.

However; my next update will probably be that I've finished the collection! Which is really rather exciting - I'll have to edit/copyedit, and I'll finally be able to read the whole thing in the order it was intended. Then, I can somehow learn how to make it an ebook and publish it.
Which is a really scary thought.

I also drew this picture of Lilia, because gas masks are awesome.
For those who are interested, the lines by this were originally drawn by hand. Then I scanned it into Photoshop and utilised the 'multiply' setting on the layer, so that I could colour below it. Then, I continued detailing over the top. I'm quite proud of this one! ♥‿♥