A funny and sweet story

In order to beat my crippling Pure O O.C.D, (yeah I didn't think my mind could get any worse but yeah, apparently I had a sort of mini-breakdown due to stress and my o.c.d emerged out of this) I've been thinking up another story inspired by a city in FF XII (strange I know...), usually I wouldn't do this and try to fight to keep my intrest in 'Hazards' but if you know what Pure O, O.C.D is and what it's like to have it, then you'd understand (seriously, type it in to google) and I started reading fanfiction, I usually would abstain from fanfiction but I don't mind now if it distracts me and found this quite funny piece here

Me Reviews: The Path

I had heard about the game many years ago when it was still in production and back then I was very intrigued in the premise.

The idea of the game revolves around the Red Riding Hood story, when you first start the game you are greeted by five girls, you as the mother send each one off to visit grandma with some wine and bread. The game starts out with said girl on "the path" with the words of her mother echoing in her mind "don't stray off the path" however the aim of the game is to stray off the path and enter a wood filled with psychologically imagery, if you just follow the path you receive the failure ending.

Each girl's travels through the forest is different, each will come across different items in the forest and depending on the girl can interact with them. These items including a rusty car, a television that plays nothing but static, a well, a treasure chest, a wheelchair and others, they invoke the girl to muse in her own way about the item therefore you learn more about her the more items you find.

As you travel through the forest you will encounter each girl's "wolf", in only one of the girls travels is the wolf an actual wolf, in others they are men or a mist creature or a young girl dressed in red. The wolf represents something traumatic that happened to the girl and after a cut scene with the wolf, the girls are returned to the path, lying there broken in the rain, each girl gets up and enters grandma's house where they are faced with a horrific journey through Grandma's house which reflects the traumatic experience.

I give this game a B+ because it is one of the best i've played but it also falls flat in several places.

First of all, I was a little put off by the fact that the girls were so broken by their experiences, and some of the girls for arbitrary reasons. Although each travel is vague and can be interpreted in different ways, the general consensus for one of the travels of Ginger was that it was about the trauma of menstruation and growing up, umm... I don't know why people have this idea that menstruation is "traumatic" it didn't bother me much, I just was a bit pissed that I would have to do this every month. I watched a cartoon on a site once about a girl going through menstruation who wakes up and starts rocking backwards and forwards in her bed because she's menstruated with the words "you're a woman now" eerily sung over it, I was just like... whaaat? it's not that bad... really!!

The travel I most liked was Carmen, which deals with a traumatic first time, as yes I can imagine how that would be traumatic and her rooms in grandmother's house reflect her confusion and trauma, however the others were a lot more vague in a sense that I couldn't really understand them at all. In Rose's her ending is that she gets in a boat and meets a torso dressed in a cloud, that's it... I felt as through the creators had run out of ideas and just threw this together. Also Scarlet's (which is my favourite but only because her wolf is the most handsome XD) which is where she plays the piano and the curtain closes on her. What's that about? I could only understand it as her becoming a failed musician.

I believed that though this was an amazing game with beautiful enviroments and eerie imagery, it failed on a human level. The gameplay is amazing especially the grandmother houses, which you walk through clicking to move with the shadows of the girls superimposing, but that it didn't really talk about proper traumatic issues.

The idea of the game is, that if you leave the path (i.e. conformity) and do the wrong things, like having sex with an older man, being involved in a drunk-driving crash, and failing as a muscian, then you have lived and experienced (which is mirrored by the forest girl at the end, whose white dress is smeared with the blood of experience) unlike just following all the rules.

However I wish that it had gone further, there are so many traumatic experiences that they could have done but didn't and the ones they did do, weren't really done well, such as Robin's (it was supposed to be about a young girl discovering her own mortality but I didn't get that at all), Scarlet's and Rose's. Carmen's and Ruby's were very good but they weren't the best. Themes they could have done: Death of a parent, unwanted pregnancy (which could also be about a miscarriage), being gay or lesbian or transgendered, loss of faith, sickness or illness, loneliness etc. etc.

All in all, I say play it, it's an experience which you won't regret but don't expect this to be any sort of real psychological look into the mind of a girl (just the fact that most of the wolves are male is one indicator, the girls didn't seem to have any problem with women which I find hard to believe).

Also it does get tedious after a while, since the forest is endless you can go for whole stretches without seeing anything, the girl's can also only run for a short time without getting out of breath. You can follow the white squiggles at the edge of the screen to find items but the squiggles don't dissapear once you've found the items, sometimes leading you back to the same damn bathtub every time!!

My Manga/Manhua/Manwha Keepers

Inspired by this post over at Smart Bitches, I thought i'd share with you the books that mean so much to me. I don't know why they are comics, I'm not an Otaku and fell into manga just by chance. I think it's because I love art and so comics give me just what I adore, beautiful art and beautiful story telling:

1) Tale of the Moon (Japanese)

My favourite, the odd couple of Usagi and Hanzo is my favourite pairing! Love the artists artwork as well. The story is the tale of a young girl Usagi, who falls in love with Hanzo the head of some ninja clan. Though born a ninja herself, she is very bad at it! Usagi is told to marry Hanzo after he is jilted by Princess Sarah but he refuses to marry her due to her inability, how she wins him over is so sweet and endearing :D. It's also one of the funniest comics i've read!

2) The Queen's Knight (Korean)
Oh I love this comic!!! It's the tale of Yuna, who while visiting a fairytale castle in Germany (the Swan castle) falls down a cliff and ends up in a fantasy world named Phantasma. Phantasma is a world of perpetual winter until the a "Queen" is chosen, the love of the Queen then brings spring to Phantasma. However the person who picks the Queen is the dark Knight Rieno whom all the Queen's fall in love with, because of his cold heart however he always rejects them, once she loses her love, winter once again comes to Phantasma and the Queen is dragged into the forest to die. Yuna attempts to break this circle but finds herself drawn to Rieno, will she also fail?. (Tokyopop stopped licensing this series :(, so I guess i'll never know)

3) Operation Liberate Men (Korean)

Another great comic. Suha is a girl who looks like a boy, one day she meets a strange man who kidnaps her and brings her to a world where the gender roles have been reversed and women rule over men. Thinking she is a boy he begs her to help them achieve gender equality in their world because of the type of world she comes from. This mysterious stranger turns out to be Ganesha, the concubine of the Queen, what follows is an amazing piece of work about how the world would be like is the genders were flipped. (Unfortunately also, the writer stopped writing this series due to illness but she may resume it)

4) Bara no Tameni (Japanese)

I read this online as it hasn't yet been licensed and is out of print in japan. The main character (I forget her name) is a young woman who is rather fat and ugly, when the comic starts she's just been dumped by her boyfriend who used her to appear kind. Her grandmother who looked after her since she was a child, dies and she is forced to find out what happened to her birth mother. Turns out her birth mother is a famous actress, who already has three other children from her various marriages living with her, one a famous actor whom the main character has loved since she was a young girl! This is a book that should have been a sitcom, it's just about how the main character deals with living in a house of insane selfish people and when it turns out that she may not been the daughter of the woman after all, weird incestous UST between Sumire (the guy she adores) and the very girly looking Aoi (who also may be in love with Sumire!) Haha!
(I also never found out what happened in this one, she gets married but... to who??)

So there you go my favourites!

Child Ballads

(no, not Children's ballads, the guy who composed them, his last name was child)

A list of some of my favourites:

The Outlandish Knight (Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight)

The Cruel Sister

Twa Corbies

Tam Lin

Sir Patrick Spence

Matty Groves

King Henry

I wish I could have seen them live! I may still... but it's not the same :(. Ah why wasn't I born in the folk hey-day!

I love this ballad! This is up there with my favourites, the eerie violin and the haunting chanting. I love the story of this, a hideous female ghost demands that the King do whatever she commands, including killing all his animals and lying down to sleep with her. The opening stanza:

Let never a man a wooing/ that lacketh these things three/ a store of gold/ An open heart/ and full of charity

So true :P. This is how all relationships should be haha, the man doing everything the woman wants!

Haha I kid, Chivalry is it's own reward.

Sex!!

Yes, it's what i'm going to talk about today.

I've never written a sex scene before, Sei and Cerys from my second unfinished novel, almost got there but Sei backed off because of his feelings for Heloise. However when thinking up 'Hazards' I knew instinctively that I was ready... ready to write a sex scene! However there were problems with this... mainly the fact that I myself am inexperienced, am I ashamed, no, why should I, as a Christian I only believe with sex with love (as for marriage... I'm unsure, I would have to think about that when I got a boyfriend) as for others, why judge?

Angelique and Rana are the two who I chose to do the dirty deed! In fact it was one of the reasons I wanted to write Hazards and I also wanted to write a sex scene that was filled with love and not lust (don't worry it won't be cheesy) and I did my research, I would like to thank Erotica romance :P

For Angelique it's not her first time (she is a concubine after all) but her first time was traumatic, I was reading this article and found this very interesting:

Call it the age of coyness, at least ideally. John Polidori, the first to mingle vampires and noblemen, wrote that his vampire, Lord Ruthven, in the story “The Vampyre: A Tale,” seduced women so that they were “hurled from the pinnacle of unsullied virtue, down to the lowest abyss of infamy and degradation.” In fact, so sullied were they, that they became wantons who cared nothing for their reputations or those of their families.

This is what St. Grieve percieved happened to Angelique and why he lusts after her, after losing her virginity and her power, she is forced to become Guy's concubine, she goes from the pinncile of "percieved" virtue (the sort of artemis type) to the sultry and disgraced concubine who turns away no one.

However for Angelique it is different, as a virgin and with the sacred spear that Reynadine gave her for preserving her virginity, it gave her power over men, she believed herself untouched. When she is seduced and then betrayed by her lover, she falls into seeking sexual gratification to soothe her pain and ends up being betrayed so much by her lovers that she ends up a broken bird and rejects Rana's pure if naive love.

In the end she is neither virtous, nor disgraced. She just loves and is loved and has sex because she loves. ^^

Neoromance

Phew...

Anyway, I am not someone who is constrained by their intrests to what is available in my country, as you can see from my posts about Angel Myth. If there's something that I love but it's in another language that won't stop me, I have books that I bought in German even though I don't know German and books in Chinese (which cost me a lot to ship from Taiwan XD) even though I don't know Chinese. I know google Translate like the back of my hand, and used it before they even had a lot of languages to use!

I love otome games from Japan and even though they don't sell them here, I manage to get a little dose from these two places: Neoromance and NeoRomance Love, oh and Harvest moon of course :D.

I usually refrain from playing Otome in a contemporary setting, but that creeps me out a little, why play when I can just go out in real life and do it? But I set that aside when a found a very good english Otome that someone had made called Re:Alistair. It follows the story of a young girl who plays online games, when after defeating a difficult boss her loot is stolen by a rude player, intent on getting back her prize, she tells him that she can figure out who he is in real life in less than a month as by a fluke of loss of internet connection she realises they go to the same school. It's up to you then to figure it out while finding love on the way :D.

This game was really well orchestrated, not to mention, the graphics and the mystery which pulls you in. I went for Travis by the way :P.

I need a hamster wheel

First before I ramble on, I'm not really crazy as that last post may imply, but let me put some ground work down for you. Imagine that for two and a half years you have done nothing, everyday you got up and you did... nothing... you saw, no-one, you life revolved around a tiny dark damp room and you only got to leave that room only for six hours every week in which you sat in a big room where no-one talked to each other, (unless, thank goodness for them, they were doing history or english). Oh, and what can you do in your spare time? MIND-NUMBINGLY BORING ESSAYS AND READING.

No I'm not in prison, this is what is called University... I am suffering from stir-crazy, usually i'm as normal a person as you or me, but right now... guh. I wish I could just drop out and get a friggin job, I feel like one of those mothers who have to spend all day with their kids! Or Bertha Mason from Jane Eyre, she wasn't mad! she was just crazy because all she could do was sit at home all day!

Man I don't know what those women did in the past, but I think I might die, can you die? from not doing anything?

The problem is my degree course has about five, friggin people on it... everyone else is best friends with each other because they have language classes together, we don't! We Eas students call them merely by whatever clique they are in. Man, I should have done a better degree -_- but no, I had to be special!

(Yeah Yeah Yeah, i'm sure you're university days were filled with booze filled bliss and joy -_-)

I Spam You

With a meme!! Sorry but... I had to do it, also I'm a university student I have 24 hours off a day, I have to fill it somehow.

What’s the last thing you wrote?

Before 'Hazards' it was a novel called 'The Queen of the World's End'

Was it any good?

I stopped writing it because my writing skill had changed and the beginning no longer matched up with the end. Therefore it wasn't very well written but it still has the best plot I have ever come up with.

What’s the first thing you ever wrote that you still have?

'The Line of Peace' I wrote it just before I went to High school, it detailed the first adventure of a character who had been with me from childhood, my sort of alter-ego, Anika.

She was a portal shifter, someone who travelled from earth to distant worlds to help them out, she had a locket which was given to her by her sort of "guardian angel" whose name kept changing overtime but I know now him as Celestin. In the 'Line of Peace' she had a line on her wrist that when it dissapeared completely, the world she was trying to save would be destroyed.

I only managed like 5 pages, but Anika had many other stories in my head, including getting married and having a child. In fact she was the cornerstone of all my stories back then as her husband's family tree branched out and each one of them had different stories and her children's children had stories and her guardian married her clone *_*, really he should have married her... but she had already married Vaughn >_<, that story was the saddest one as he had to let her go to marry him *sniff*, ah nostalgia!!

Write poetry?

Of course, like all angsty teenagers, you can still find it over at DA.

Angsty poetry?

Of course!

Favourite genre of writing?

Fantasy setting, Romance at the centre of the plot.

Most fun character you ever wrote?

Anika, because she was a total Mary Sue and I never indulged myself like that ever after.

Most annoying character you ever wrote?

Annoying... huh, well if I get annoyed by a character I usually stop writing them, but I guess right now it would be Iris, Rana's servant, she loves Rana too much and will never end up with him, it's so tragic...

How often do you get writer’s block?

I'm still not sure what this means, I believe being unable to write, I suppose. So as I said before I get it all the time. My inspiration is a fickle thing. Also right now i'm not as mentally well as I would like to be so it can be hard to write or have inspiration.

How do you fix it?

Just write, write, write and edit, edit, edit until it is done.

Write fan fiction?

Once I wrote it, with a friend. Never again after that.

Do you type or write by hand?

Type, when I was younger I used to have a notebook i'd write in, with my back against the door so my parents couldn't come in XD, that led to many hilarous mistaken beliefs my parents had about what I was doing! Now however I type with my thumbs and index fingers and sometimes my third finger it depends where the keys are on the keyboard because my handwriting is so bad even I can't read it when i go back. When I type in front of people, they all go "aaaah you type so fast" my reaction is... well I've been writing novels for over seven years, of course I type fast!

Do you save everything you write?

Yes, I horde so much stuff my "My Documents" folder has to be backed up seperately.

Do you ever go back to an old idea long after you abandoned it?

No, never. Sometimes I may use an idea from a discarded novel in a new novel but it will always be different. If I stop writing something it was because something was fundamentally wrong with it, so I never look back.

What’s your favourite thing that you’ve written?

I guess it would be 'Hazards' right now :D, though as always I tustle with it.

What’s everyone else’s favourite thing that you’ve written?

According to my DA, it would be a short fairytale I wrote called "The Umbrella Man"

What’s your favourite setting for your characters?

Dark gothic castles, wide sweeping fairytale landscapes, heavenly palaces and norse settlements.

What’s one genre you have never written, and probably never will?

Anything in a contemporary setting, sorry it bores me. (Oh wait... I did write that one novel... but uh... lets not talk about that heh heh)

How many writing projects are you working on right now?

One. I can onl ever work on one.

Do you want to write for a living?

No, no way. I cannot write without doing something else. I am a passionate person, to sit at home all day with just my novel would be living hell for me. I have to go out and about and do day to day things, my novel is my hobby, not my life.

Have you ever written something for a magazine or newspaper?

No I write rather dark things... haha

Have you ever won an award for your writing?

Nope.

Ever written something in script or play format?

yes, unfortunately....

What are your five favourite words?

Love, wings, bright, heaven, blood.

What character that you’ve written most resembles yourself?

Cerys from QOWE, she was a mirror of myself in all her glorious insecurity.

Where do you get ideas for your other characters?

From other books i've read/parts of myself or people from history, like St. Grieve, he was an amalgamation of a man from revolutionary era france and Dom Claude Frollo in Hunchback.

Do you ever write based on your dreams?

I think I did once, however a scene with Naoise in 'Hazards' is based on a dream I had about a fictional computer game I was playing, where there was a cutscene with a lonesome man standing in a garden smelling a rose.

Do you favour happy endings, sad endings, or cliff-hangers?

it depends on the book, books like Hunchback, I don't mind. Books with Romance however HAVE to end happily or I get angry XD.

Are you concerned with spelling and grammar as you write?

Spelling, oh man yes, grammer not so much. If word goes all green on me, I try to figure out why. I think my grammer has (hopefully) improved.

Does music help you write?

Yes, yes yes! I listen primarily to folk music because they tell stories and therefore I get inspiration from them. Actually my use of the word "wan" has increased after listening to The Blacksmith XD. Also music does inspire me, Blind Guardian helped me get back into 'Hazards' but I can't have music on too loud, as long as it's background music I don't mind :D.

Quote something you’ve written. The first thing to pop into your mind.

Um.... from a poem, said by an oracle.

"An easy steal for someone like you, who sacrificed the power of the Peris, for a black hearted Harlot"

On Strong Women

Though I disagree with Yo Su Lan's views on Christainity, I'm still a big fan of hers. I started looking into other work she had done like "the Fire King" and "Dark Princess". Since she doesn't have an English site (not yet anyway), I had to use google translate on her webpage, and hopefully you can understand this quote (here she is describing her main female character in dark princess):

This is my favorite female role, but I think a lot of female readers may be disagreement with my views on it? @@ @ @
Female personalities of the characters were said to be not a good personality (such as echo), if the point was hate tough ─ ─ woman anyway, as long as they are not pleasant, right? ="= = "=

I just hate to pretend to be in front of men on the delicate, private fierce cruel woman too!
So, I Dakelisi definitely have the capacity of self-reliance, when necessary, she will be more reliable than men!
Anyway, this is what I like women.

Really I couldn't agree more! I also hate the idea of pretending in front of men to be delicate and I can't believe that people thought that Hui Sheng (the main character of Angel Myth, here refered to as Echo, as that is the literal translation of her name) was a bad character! I liked her, she seemed a really real character and someone I myself could relate to, she had friends but was also a loner, she was quite strict with herself and others, in fact a lot like me XD. I guess she is different from usual comic heroines, I can only really relate to the manga heroines i've witnesses who are in their own way good characters, who are always eager to please, sweet and love everyone around them and who are often saved by the Hero.. huh, actually that describes western heroines quite well also XD.

I wonder then what readers will think of Angelique and Maudlin, intresting :D.

Uh.... whaat?

An except from writer, talking about (what I think) is his writing process (gotten from here):

In a general sense, I write elliptically. By that I mean I open sections with some detail I want to resonate throughout the entire section, and through the course of writing that section you can imagine me tapping that bell again and again. Until with the final few lines, I ring it one last time – sometimes hard, sometimes soft, depending on the effect I want, or feel is warranted. It’s become such a habit now that I often do it without conscious thought.

On a most basic level it shows up in paragraphs (and no, there’s nothing unique to me in any of this). Look two paragraphs upward on this screen. The opening line talks about multiple points of view; the last line describes the many ways of seeing the world. But that last line isn’t just reiterating the first one. Something is added (in this case, a personal comment on my desire to experience every one of them). It’s probably the only structural lesson I learned in school that I still use on occasion – the whole introductory and concluding sentences to frame a paragraph.

uuuuh.... what?? I'm sorry but I can't understand this at all, the ringing of the bell? what? Is being completely incomprehensible a new kind of writing now? I realise that many people expect a writer to write online as they do in their novels... if this is so with that guy then... I mean I don't mind things that are hard to read if they are from another time, but this is the modern day! Write in contemporary style! dammit! However it is not as bad as this:

When buzz first began to build about Peter V. Brett, it wasn’t his debut novel, The Warded Man (REVIEW), everyone was talking about. Rather, it was about the Blackberry-like device he wrote the majority of the novel on, during his morning commute. Once readers got their hands on The Warded Man, the seriousness of Brett’s achievement became readily apparent – not only had he written a novel during his morning commute, using little more than his thumbs, he’d written a good novel during his morning commute. A damn good novel.

I'm sorry but are you f-ing kidding me (see I censor myself, oh the pain), on the communte! on a blackberry! argh this just makes me want to rage! The kind of effort you put into a novel is not something you can tap out on a dirty train, cramped against stinky passengers while simultaneously being rattle from side to side and listening to the girl two seats down chatting loudly about some guy she f***ed (see did it again) last night! Ugh, Argh... I just... argh!!!

I realised that if I ever did become famous (remember if, I said if... I am not big headed!!!) that I would make all sorts of big headed (ha!) mistakes! Like Nicholas Sparks and his "Jane Austen just did the same story over and over again" and "I am not a romance writer!" Like doing the above thing and writing like a moron -_-, I hope I never forget the fans or anything like that or become a "reclusive writer" or like that guy in that Frasier episode *shudder*

Also I decided that I may stop writing about my novel here because

1) it leads to crummy sentimental posts like the last one... which no one wants to read and diminishes my story by relating it to cliches -_-... man, did I actually write the phrase "warrior women" what was I on?

2) I get a sense of horrible insecurity that I am writing about it here and yet (here is the most big headed thing of all) people aren't flocking here in the dozens (oh man... -_-) I know that a family tree and a few posts doesn't even make a dint on the plot of my overall story but anything that makes me hesitate over the faith I have in my writing has to be eliminated or I will stop writing that novel all together (yup! I am that fragile!)

However then on the other hand, the reason I created this blog in the first place was to talk about my novel and I even named it after the dream I had where I was a published writer and had a website called Cloak and Candle, and after all this is my blog, if you don't like it then pants... you don't have to read it, but then... (ok I really shouldn't write this late at night and being lonesome from being stuck in all day -_-)

I'll think about it tomorrow... hahahah XD.

Mad Maudlin

Maudlin is the main antagonist of my novel but she is in no way a villain, I do not wish for her to be seen as evil, though she does things that would consist of that. Maudlin is a mirror image of Angelique, both start out as fierce warrior women, who act like and are the equals of men in their society, both break the boundary between the sexes, Maudlin breaking the patrilineal line to become Queen of Opis and Angelique becoming a sort of Joan of Arc character. However both branch off in different directions, Maudlin becomes so strong she becomes unfeeling, and unable to feel empathy she does horrible things and remains untouchable. Angelique however allows herself to become weak and vunerable and is betrayed for it, her resolution to overcome the terrible things that happened to her make her stronger than Maudlin and in the end she prevails.

I think that this is my brains way of telling me that, after what happened to me, I chose to remain a kind and feeling person, rather than become someone cruel and unfeeling even though I knew I would be hurt again in the future.

However Maudlin's character is in no way wrong, in fact she is a vessel through which I pour out my own anger at the sexist things that have happened to me and the utter revulsion I feel about the idea that all girls are so kind and sweet. There is nothing feminine about her, nor is she the epitome of masculinity, she exists to break the female sterotype and Rana the male.

Angelique's Body

I make it clear in my novel that Angelique is not thin, she like me has what I like to call a pre-raphaelite body :D (not even sure if that's correct... ah well) considering she's a concubine, you can see how i'm making a statement.

Review: Jodhaa Akbar

After loving Om Shanti Om, I asked a friend of mine about some good bollywood films to watch. After poo-pooing my taste in films, (she does love the films XD) she recommended Jodhaa Akbar to me and here is my review!

Actually it was really intresting for me, I know quite a lot about ancient cultures in Europe and the Far East but nothing much about India, I also don't know much about Muslim involvement there either, so I found it intresting to watch a story about a Muslim King and a Hindu Queen.

Basic Plot:
Akbar is the heir to some kingdom or other and wants to take over the whole of Hindustan, as a boy he shows a tendancy to be lenient and kind, especially to his
prisoners whom he refuses to kill even though his regent says he must. He grows up and so does his ambition, meanwhile Jodhaa is growing up as well, she has a foster brother who she sees as her real brother and they get on well and fight together.
Jodhaa has a condition for marriage and that is her brother should inherit the throne along with her real brother (or something like that) but her father refuses and makes him subordinate (even though his father was king before Jodhaa's father) he leaves in a huff.
Jodhaa's father gets all antsy because the Muslims (that is Akbar) are winning battle after battle (oh and something else I don't remember) so he betrothes Jodhaa to Akbar and a romatic story ensues!

The costumes in this are beautiful! I especially love Jodhaa's dresses, with the beautifully coloured veils, if only I were thin enough to wear those kind of clothes! with the tight short top and all :D.

The settings are beatiful as well, I love the palaces and the shots of the landscape and as for the story, yes it's intresting, I knew immediately that this would be an Epic story, it reminded me very much of European historical movies and folklore, with the "I won't marry you until you win my heart!"

I liked the story, but then I'm a sucker for the arranged marriage turns into love theme :D but I have a low threshold for gagging romance however... I had to have the VLC media player up in the corner of the screen so I could click off whenever a romance scene got too cring worthy for me >_< aaargh...

Also it does suffer from unintentional hilarity due to low budget/bad directing a la the Merlin film haha... the flying axe :D. Also don't expect too much from the characters, they are like many legends, cut-outs of social norms... I may have talked about this before somewhere... hmm...

So if you like, pretty costumes, epic historical stories, bollywood singing (the singing was good but you might want to fastforward they get pretty long sometimes...)
then look this up :D.

More Writing Techniques

As I write a learn more and more about my writing style. When I was younger, I would run out of steam after about 50 pages (even that), give up and start something new. After that I started writing full length novels, my first was Verglas which wasn't very good, I wrote that in high school (english high school, that is 11-15) the second was Queen of the World's End, which I started in College and gave up on last year. The problem I had with them was that I would just keep writing not thinking about what I was putting down, I would scoff at people who had writers block, but now I realise I have the most writers block of all!

If I don't have inspiration then my scenes fall flat, which is considering I don't plan, which is bad, I should plan but I find planning takes all the excitment out of writing. However right now i've devised a way around it, by re-writing my scenes after i've written then, kind of like shining a diamond until it's brillant, if you know what I mean but without inspiration... they really aren't as good, so i'm trying my best to re-inspire myself. The problem is also that I forgot most of the story when I went back to University *sigh* annoying...

Hopefully in the summer, I will be able to re-start where I left off, as none of my work has been as good as the work I did last summer on Hazards. So hopefully *crosses fingers*, my muses are pretty men (i'm not kidding XD) so i'll get a hunting pretty man pictures :P.