Overload Anticipated! Warning! Warning!

Another very rapid update from me - proper posting will resume next week, honest!

Some very quick things you may like to know about my life:

• On Sunday, I fly back to school again.
• On Wednesday, I take the ELAT - English Literature Aptitude Test - as part of my attempt at gaining a place at Oxford university.
• On Thursday, I will have a practice "interview" with a full-time academic in my area as preparation for the occasion of being called to interview at Oxford (if I am).
• By Friday, I need to have sent off two pieces of marked work, also for Oxford's perusal.
• My History coursework needs to be completed by the end of that week.
• My English coursework needs to be drafted after inspection by the teacher, sometime the week after.
• I need to amalgamate more research for the school debating team, and attend the event as a planted nasty-question-giver.

And that's on top of the 50,000 word novel, ten-tonne-mountains of schoolwork, and heck knows what else might creep up on me in the meantime.

This is going to be fun!

However, to prevent you all from getting bored, I'm going to make my NaNoWriMo updates weekly only - every Thursday, I think, is a good day for that. This is both to save you the mind-numbing experience of being deprived of my regular posts, and so I have more entertaining typos and stories to tell you of during each update.

As I accidentally castrated my narrator with a typo last chapter, I sure there'll be no shortage of those.

Enjoy your weekends everyone! I'm off to try and hit 10,000 words before supper time.

~ Charley R

Showtime!

Some might have taken it as a bad omen that, by the time the cast of the pantomime took to the stage during the interrim of the inter-house drama competition, the stage was covered in an assortment of straw, discarded crockery, and a couple of broken glow sticks.

That "some" clearly didn't stick around to see the performance.

I was so giddy by the end of it that I almost fell off the stage. The punch-lines were spectacular, the improvisation by the cast was impeccable, and our put-upon lighting and sound director was absolutely spot on - especially when she wasn't meant to be.

Dancing down the aisle between rows of cheering spectators, waving a school tie around my head and singing along to "Oppam Gangnam Style", I can't remember the last time I was so proud of anything.

I hadn't just been in the play. I'd written it. I'd cast it. I'd gone prop hunting, I'd organised rehearsal times, I'd dealt with queries from cast, crew, and curious onlookers. I'd even decided on some of the music.

Until our housemistress suggested the idea, I'd never written a script before. With only a couple of weeks to go before the performance, we thought it would be better to simply buy and alter a script from the internet - it would save time, anyway.

Just our luck that the script we bought was useless. So, I decided, I wouldn't waste my energy mangling someone else's work. I'd do it myself instead. After all, it couldn't be too hard, could it?

If I ever work out why I thought it would be clever to make the narrators speak in rhyming iambic pentameter, nothing will ever surprise me again.

Not only that, but there were so many new dynamics to script writing that I'd never had to deal with in a novel or a poem. Actual people were going to have to play the roles, so characterisation was more crucial than ever. I needed stage directions every other sentence, so that the actors wouldn't be left hanging between one moment and another. I needed to set out which lines were the punchlines, and place them to avoid both over-saturation and sparcity.

Thank goodness for my wonderful housemates. They wrote the musical number, they sorted out the costumes, they sat at the back of the hall to see if they could hear us, and left me to deal with the script itself.

The acting came easy after that.

The stress was inevitable, really. Cast members pulling out, not turning up to rehearsals, complaining over parts, getting distracted, forgetting lines, forgetting moves . . . I suppose it was my fault for organising our first rehearsal only three days before the real performance.

We had five rehearsals in total, because it had taken me so long to write the script.

But it was amazing. They loved it, the crowd loved it, I loved it.

The compliments, congratulations, and suggestions of pursuing stage writing as a career are lovely, but nothing will ever make up for the fact that this is a moment I'm going to treasure for the rest of my life.

Not in the least because I have never seen a more interpretive version of the chicken dance. And I doubt I will again.

~ Charley R

Oh No I Didn't!

Oooooooooh yes I did!

IT'S BEHIND YOU!!!

Only joking - it's sitting on the desk next to me, glaring balefully at the biscuit crumbs that are encroaching a little too close to its edges.

And yes, I'm talking about a pantomime.

Every year, my school puts on an inter-house drama competition. I've acted in most of them on behalf of my boarding house - last year being my last, which ended with me dressing up as a tramp, brandishing an empty bottle of whisky, and banging on the stage door loudly enough to send the audience into hysterics for a full five minutes.

This year, however, after moving into the boarding house reserved specifically for those in their final year of school, I was left at a loose end. We don't compete against the mixed-age houses for house drama, and after failing to gain a part in the school musical (which didn't surprise me, really as I couldn't be a sexy nightclub dancer if I tried) I was faced with the terrible prospect of being play-less this year.

Until someone came up with the clever idea of filling the boring interim, when the judge goes off to make their final decision on the competition winner, with a pantomime.

Guess who got to write it?

I've never written any sort of script before in my entire life, so we decided to buy a script off the internet to give me something to work on. Unfortunately, that script turned out to be entirely useless, and I ended up writing it from scratch myself. Sure, it only had to be ten minutes long, but . . . do you have any idea how hard it is to squash two rhyming narrators, innumerable jokes, and a musical number into ten minutes?

With some help from my co-directors, I managed it though. The script is now complete and sent off to the cast - which we organised last night - and we're going to spend this next week running around trying to organise rehearsal times. Luckily, most of the talking - or rather, rhyming, as I decided to write all the two narrators' lines in rhyming couplets (I'm still asking myself why I did that) - will be half done by me, who has spent so long staring at the script that I probably know most of the lines already. My "other half" is just as enthused as I am, so at least we have that covered.

Costumes, staging, lighting, background music, and writing the actual musical number, we have yet to cover.

We perform on Friday.

Wish us luck!

~ Charley R

Conflict and Resolution: How Being a Bookworm Saved My Sanity

As I mentioned in my last, somewhat emotionally fuelled, post, I've taken quite a few knocks to my confidence recently. The biggest of these, without going into too much detail and turning this post in an elephantine whine-fest, were the results of my AS exams. And how they didn't go according to plan in the slightest.

For me, it was a nasty shock. Without sounding arrogant, I am what many people would call "a bright cookie" - I've not really achieved anything under an A grade in any area of academia for the past five or six years in my exams (even in Maths and the sciences, which was a wonderful surprise). My GCSE results were all A and A* grades, and I'd been doing well in my Lower Sixth year, I'd revised hard for the exams, done lots of extra work for practice . . . I felt confident.

Then results day turned up. My English exam was a D grade.

I've never got a D grade for anything in my life. Let alone the subject I wanted to study for the rest of my life.

I was upset. As in, crying-into-my-pillow-for-twenty-minutes upset. All my hard work, all the stress, all the confidence and high hopes I'd had . . . all gone in a moment.

Oxford was well and truly off my university application list. I'd have to get a re-grade, possibly even re-sit the exam, adding extra work to the already mammoth load that comes with one's final year of school. In fact, I'd have to rethink all my university application.

I'd single-handedly screwed up every facet of my future. And I just couldn't work out how it all went wrong.

While I was curled up in my room, retreated deep into my reality-free bastion of misery, my brain performed a feat of typical inappropriateness - it started thinking about books. I started thinking about all the dark moments when characters have felt like I did then. Sam collapsing in the depths of Shelob's lair, despairing and exhausted; the Pevensie sisters weeping over Aslan's body on the Stone Table; Meggie Folchart hiding in a cave while her father goes to entreat with death for the life of their friend, possibly never to return; Henry V kneeling in the darkness before the battle of Agincourt,  practically weeping under the burden of responsibility he bears for the life of his miserable, starving army.

No matter how sad I was, my situation wasn't half as bad as that. Though perhaps bashing some French soldiers over the head with a broadsword would have made a wonderful release of my pent-up anger and frustration.

I didn't know why I thought like this at the time. I thought I was being silly, childish even, trying to distract myself from the fact that I was a dithering bumberclark. It took me a while to work out that it wasn't the characters' dark moments that were comforting me, but what happened next.

Everyone is entitled to their waily fits. But everyone also has a responsibility to sort themselves - and their respective messes - out afterwards. And that's exactly what these characters do. They don't just sit around and wait for someone to rescue them. They wipe their eyes, slap themselves across the face a couple of times, and move on. And it works. The Ring is destroyed, the White Witch is slain, the Inkworld is saved, and the French survivors are running for Paris in terror.

People have suffered, and their best-laid plans and hopes have been utterly obliviated. But they pushed on. They made it.

And that's what I'm doing now. My sword may be too big, I can't understand the coded riddles on my moth-eaten map, and I'm pretty sure my helmet's on backwards, but I'll be damned if I let that stop me.

People, circumstances, and the cosmos at large can cause our conflict. It's up to us to work for the resolution.

~ Charley R