C.V. Sutherland's Blog

Photography Blog!

Hello, everyone! Today I wanted to share with you some exciting news.

As many of you may know, one of my hobbies is photography. I love taking pictures and I love the concept of creating art with what the world gives you. So, I decided that it would be an interesting experiment and a fun project to start a website entirely dedicated to just that – photography!

Little Gardenia (www.littlegardenia.wordpress.com) is the product of this idea. I’m really happy with the way that it has turned out so far. I know it will probably be difficult for me to get up posts on both blogs, especially now that I’m also juggling band and the second semester of the school year. But I will try to post as much content as I can, and I really hope you guys enjoy it!

In case you were wondering, I’ve had to take a break from writing for a while and focus on school instead. I plan to resume my current novel in late May or early June, when my summer break begins and I don’t have to worry about schoolwork anymore.

Okay, that’s all for today’s post. I know it was super short, but I just wanted to tell you about this new project. I hope you like the content that I’ll be posting there as well as on here, of course. :) I’ll be back with a new, longer post sometime next week.

Dear Diary: Page One

Dear (online) diary,

The new year has come around, just like it always does. It’s finally 2015! New Year’s is always refreshing for me, because I don’t like to spend a lot of time thinking about the past – which is why this blog has been good for me, because it’s given me a chance to go back and find out what I was thinking a year ago. I’m never usually sad to see the previous year go, and as far as I can tell, it’s the same now. Although 2014 was a wonderful year to me, which I’m very lucky and happy to be able to say, I’m not particularly sad. I like to think of New Year’s as a new start (I know, I know, incredibly cheesy) and I can just let go of all the feelings and thoughts and regrets that I’ve been clinging to over the course of the year. At New Year’s, I can begin again. I can make myself a blank slate and no one will notice, because they’re all too busy doing the same thing themselves. However, I don’t like to set ‘resolutions’, necessarily. When I think of the word ‘resolution’, I think of something that you’re bound to, that you have to carry out whether or not you want to. I like to set goals instead. Goals are less constricting, and they give you more freedom to achieve your plans in the way that you want. Resolutions have never worked for me because I feel stuck to them, and on top of that, I kind of feel like they’re meant exclusively to be created around the New Year’s time. Goals are something that you can drop and pick up again later when you feel a bit better about it.

I spent a lot of time during 2014 thinking about what I wanted to improve about myself and my lifestyle. Whenever I stumbled across something that I wanted to change, I just made a mental note and told myself, “Save this for New Year’s. It’ll be perfect for then.”

In that case, I suppose you could say that my very first 2015 goal will be to stop procrastinating. ;)

I’ve been looking back at the past year, and I’ve decided that I want to try and become a nicer person. I tend to blurt things out before I think through them, and some of the remarks I make are kind of cutting, even if I don’t mean them to be. I know it’s not a transformation that happens overnight, but I’m going to try and learn how to bite my tongue before I speak. I think that’s the most important skill in conversation – being able to decide what is appropriate to say out loud and what should be kept to yourself. I also want to improve upon the things I love to do while staying humble, because I think that’s important. The best quality about a person is when they are really passionate about something, but also really modest about it. That’s something that I aspire to achieve. The things that I would like to dedicate more time and work towards are my writing and my music.

My third goal is to become better at seeing through the projects that I start. I have a really bad habit, as I’m sure most people do, at abandoning the things that I begin. I’ve begun to learn how to code through a really cool site called http://www.codecademy.com, and that’s something that I hope I don’t forget about soon, because it’s really awesome to learn how technology works. I also have a bunch of different story plots that I’d like to set into motion, but again, I’m afraid to do so because I don’t want to abandon it, which I have a horrible tendency to do!

My fourth and final goal, at least for now, is to become more tolerant of the opinions of others. I won’t publicly state my opinions for this exact same reason, but I find that in general, humans tend to value their own viewpoints over the viewpoints of others. This can make us, as a whole, rather violent when it all boils down to who is right and who is wrong. I understand that everyone is entitled to their own outlook, which we should respect as a general rule, but there is no point to forcing your opinion onto others that might not share it. I wouldn’t say that I’m the kind of person who does that, but I am the kind of person that is easily frustrated when others do it. This kind of goes hand in hand with the ‘think before you speak’ goal, but I’d like to learn how to ‘think before I explode’. We have to respect what our peers do, even if we don’t agree with it. So, to sum this one up, my fourth and final goal is to become more agreeable and not as irritable.

I hope you enjoyed this post and that perhaps it inspired you to set some goals of your own this year! I also hope you had a safe and happy New Year’s with your family and friends!

Light

I don’t know about you, but for me, October through December is the best time of the year. Sure, students like me have to study hard for midterm exams, but we get Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa (and for me, my birthday!!) in this span of time. We’re also in the beautiful transition between golden, glittering autumn and frozen, silver winter. In my opinion, there is no better time of the year.

As you can see, I have changed my header image of this website to something a bit more festive. I usually get excited for Christmas, which is just a few days before my birthday, at around the beginning of the month, but it’s not until about now that I start feeling really festive, and all I can think about is Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, as I’m sure most of my peers are as well.

But besides being the most thrilling and joyous time of the year for me, it has also intrigued me very much. Why is it, I wonder, that a lot of the most gorgeous, brilliant and shimmering holidays all occur in the same small sliver of the year? What was going through those people’s minds, all those years ago, that encouraged them to create these holidays in the incipient days of winter? I think it was the natural shortening of days, but I’m not sure. I believe that they made these holidays to celebrate the light in the days when the night was expanding. We humans are like moths – inexplicably drawn towards things that glimmer and sparkle with hope and purity. You can translate light into whatever it means to you, but as a species, we’ve always been attracted to the alluring brightness of the things we can’t explain. What really is ‘light’? What does ‘light’ really look like, if we could see it and not just the things it touches?

We may never know, and the constantly curious may never be content. But although we do not know what light, or life, or anything really is, I, for one, am happy with the sight of light’s work – glittering tree ornaments, jewels and sequins, vivid nature, and everything else this mysterious thing has brought us.

Giving Thanks

As many of you are aware, today is American Thanksgiving – a holiday of food, family and gratitude – so naturally I thought it would be fitting to give thanks; first and foremost, to all of you who take the time to read this blog. I’m aware that in the scheme of things, that’s not a very large number, but I’m grateful nonetheless for each and every one of you, whether you are a relative, a friend, or even a complete stranger who happened to stumble upon this little website. None of this could have been possible without your support.

You might now be thinking,��well,��what��could have been possible? I know I’m not exactly Veronica Roth, but what I do know is that I’m incredibly lucky to have been given all these amazing opportunities to publish my work. As you know, writing is not something I do for money or fame. It’s just my passion, and I’m so thankful to have had the chance to share it with the world. It has definitely motivated me to work harder on my projects, and it has been very rewarding so far. And, as a result of that, I was able to create this blog, which has been such a life-changer for me. This website, although it’s just one of billions of stars in the galaxy of the internet, has become an outlet for me to spew thoughts and emotions and experiences into, and even though it’s not the most popular website, that’s perfectly fine for me. Even if no one read this blog at all, I would still be so proud of everything that I have written here. Whenever I was having a rough day, and whenever I couldn’t sleep because my mind was stumbling over its own ideas and theories, this blog was always here, dutifully waiting for me to log on and begin typing – like I am right now.

And, of course, so has my family – always supporting me with whatever crazy plans I dreamt up and helping me achieve my wildest goals. Without any of them, I would never have found the immense courage it took me to do the things I’m doing today. They have always been at my side through everything, and I can’t even begin to thank them enough for that.

There are so many more things I could talk about – the opportunity to go to school, the freedoms we take for granted every day, my friends and dogs, the roof above my head and the clothes on my skin and the relief that I know where my next meal is going to come from – but I don’t want to pile on the cheesiness on you any more than I already have. *laughs* I know that it may seem silly to read these words right now, but sometimes they just have to be said – and what better day to do that than today?

So, basically, I am grateful for everything that is helping me to write and post this, and I am grateful for the people who take the time out of their days to read it. :)

(By the way, we’re approaching the two-year anniversary of this website! That will be super exciting, and I can’t wait to celebrate it with you. Also, this is the 50th post! Talk about coincidences!)

New Days Ahead

Hello everyone, and welcome back to this quaint little blog. To celebrate the progress of my new novel, I decided to give this little site a bit of a facelift, which is why you see this new theme today. In fact, the picture of the butterflies is one that I took myself; I’m quite interested in photography, alongside my writing, which has always seemed like a good mix to me. Journalism and fiction, tangled together.

Anyways, I thought it was kind of unfortunate that a new wave of writer’s block – the most dreaded thing for a writer – has crashed upon me. My book is frozen in place. I was hoping, honestly, that writing on my blog would help jumpstart my brain for novel-writing mode again.

Basically, my train of thought right now goes like this: I need to alter the way that I’m living my life. I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again. Part of my first “transformation” involved me chopping off all of my hair (which I’ve now decided to grow out again, and that will be a tiring, long process), erasing my former work and starting fresh, and cleansing myself of relationships with people that I didn’t want to be around. This will be mostly the same, really. In order to access the part of myself that writes the best, I need to clear the rest of myself – and if you’ve found yourself in a particularly nasty ditch in your life, I recommend doing the same thing. As humans, we need to treat ourselves with constant care and love and respect, not just on the outside but on the inside too. We must nourish ourselves not only with nutrition but with affection! If you don’t cleanse all parts of yourself, you can’t do whatever it is that you want to achieve. I have learned this from experience. There have been times in my life where I wasn’t happy with myself, and I assure you that everyone goes through this, but the thing is that few people try to change that. I know that it sounds incredibly cheesy, but I can’t stress enough how important it is that we all take good care of ourselves – our bodies, our minds, our hearts, and our relationships with other people. I know this now. I don’t know if my words or my writing will influence people, but I’m at least going to try.

So the next time you find yourself in an undesired situation, I hope that you know what course of action to take.

Valor

In my eyes, chivalry is most definitely not dead – if you know where and how to look for it, that is.

In my latest novel, which I’m writing right now, the enemies of my protagonist (among many others) are the soldiers and knights in the kingdom. And I hate how their hearts are filled with malice and cowardice. So, I thought I would stress the importance of being polite to you all, so that maybe someday the people of this world will have good manners at long last.

So, listen. I realize that in all eras and ages there are faults. Nothing is ever perfect, or we wouldn’t be human, right? But I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with striving for perfection, at least. The more you try to achieve it, the closer you’ll be.

In the writing industry, I know that a lot of people are in it for the money. You can earn a good bit if you know how to navigate this deep, dark ocean that so many drown in. That’s why a lot of agents and editors and authors get away with publishing books that really aren’t that good. The book business is, to me, like the Titanic – sailing peacefully towards the iceberg lurking beneath the surface. Eventually, myself and everybody else on board is going to splinter into a million pieces, because of all the weight of unnecessary stories.

Let’s just say that if I was a literary editor, I would be a very picky one, because I believe that all pieces of writing have to make an impact and a difference, and they have to be the very best that they can be. Cliche, I know, but true. I can’t be the only one who seems to be constantly disappointed with the majority of books these days. (Leave a comment down below if you want to see a post of my all-time favorite books!)

I digress very easily from the main topic, don’t I?

I have three different books in the works right now, and I already know that each one is going to take a couple of years to complete. And I’m okay with that, because I know that they’ll be as close to perfection as I can make them.

Putting Out The Fire

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my blog. It’s nice to see you again. I thought it might interest you to know that I actually have nothing planned for this post – I just felt the urge to write something besides my book, which I’ve been working on for most of the day. I have no idea what is going to happen right now – so let’s just go ahead and see!

Alright, well, since this is a bit of an experiment on my part I guess I’ll cut myself some slack here. I will admit that I used the same method for this blog post as I do with my actual writing projects (novels-in-the-works) – I made up an intriguing title and I’m going to work from there with no idea what I’m going to say. It’s really quite interesting, the way my brain works when I’m writing, because I’ve read a lot about the processes that other authors do when they’re writing, and I’ve never heard of anyone that does the same thing I do. Titles mean a lot to me – they’re the very first thing a reader usually sees.

It’s very cold where I live today (for once it actually feels like autumn), and I don’t know about you, but when I think about the fall time I think about fire. The smell of cooking on the brisk air, the leaves that turn into flaming, sparkling jewels on the trees… I think it’s pretty apparent that autumn is my favorite season, even if it’s usually the one that lasts the shortest. So I try to savor it while I can.

In the book I’m writing right now, it’s winter, and I’ve dropped my protagonists into a world of snow in the very north of their kingdom, so I’m constantly having to describe the chill in the air and the snow on the ground and the frostbite nipping at their fingers. But once I do that for a little bit, I start to feel cold myself, like some of the wintry essence in my writing is oozing out of the computer and taking hold of me. So, to ‘keep myself warm’ while I work, I like to write about fire. My main character’s eyes are golden, and I constantly describe the topaz flames that rage in them – and that’s the reason why I made them amber. Most readers will never guess the little reasons behind every little detail, but no one would ever guess that. Why would an author write things to keep themselves comfortable?

Why do people extinguish their fires?

In a sense, I suppose, everything we do is about ourselves. I think that’s what I’ve been trying to imply all along – even if we’re doing things for other people, our best interests are and always will be in the center of our minds. I think it’s kind of impossible to be truly, really selfless, because there will always be a part in everyone that screams to be put first. You can’t stop it from shouting, but you can ignore it. You can put out the fire, but it always sparks back to life.

Do you feel cold now?

I don’t know. I guess I’m just always assuming the worst about people. That’s one of the things that a person like me is always thinking about – what do all people lie about? What does everyone try to hide? That’s the only way that a writer, or even just a philosophical person, will ever be able to capture the true nature of humans and put that into words. It’s so important to me that everything I write is true in some form, that everything I say has a meaning. Empty words mean nothing. You could have a whole book full of words, but if they’re not genuine, if they’re not blunt, then they might as well be nonsense.

Hmmm. That took a bunch of very unexpected turns. Isn’t that peculiar?

Well, thanks for reading my rant today. I always appreciate it.

A Funny Tale

Hello everyone, and welcome to the first installment of #flashbackfriday! I thought it would be hilarious if once a month, I look back into the past and tell you guys a funny story of something that happened a while back. I was inspired to write about this particular tale by thedailypost’s Dictionary, Schmictionary post, so, credits to that. Anyway, I thought you guys might get a laugh out of this, so here we go! (Also, I know I’ve been bad about past series on my blog, so I’m going to make an effort to revive them. It’s time to add a little spunk to my miniscule corner of the world wide web!)

I must’ve been only nine or ten when this happened, but I can remember the incident perfectly. Even as a little girl, I’d always had a tendency to try and use big words whenever I could, even when I didn’t fully understand their definitions. It’s safe to say that I was a pompous child, perhaps. I still do attempt to insert complex words from my vocabulary into my mundane conversations, but not on the scale that I used to. I think this incident is one of the things that helped tone it down.

So, I was talking to my friend over the phone, thanking her for a special gift she’d given me – a book. As I was talking, a sudden urge fell over me to try and impress her like I always did around other people, and thinking I was being clever, I slyly inserted a new word I’d learned into my thanks.

“I’m just appalled by this new book!”

Yes, yes, I know. Mortifying.

My mother rushed to my aide, helping me correct myself in a (hopefully) nonchalant manner. But still, I fumbled over the rest of my words and hurried to end the conversation. The heat of humility made my cheeks flush a vivid scarlet. In all my pride, I’d thought that appalled meant pleased, not horrified. *smacks forehead*

I can laugh about it now, but it was really quite distressing at the time. I was very, very upset. I don’t, and never have, enjoyed the sensation of being wrong – if I must confess, I secretly take pride in feeling confident in my eloquence. No one likes making mistakes, but me even less. I feel like that’s something that everyone can relate to in some way – everyone has a skill or a passion that they feel like they’re the best at. We all want to be revered.

So, in conclusion, allow me to give you a word of advice – check your vocabulary before you speak.

Beautiful Nonsense

Isn’t the word ‘beautiful’ just beautiful? Lovely to look at, pleasant to say, pretty to hear. Words like that are what civilization is built on, is it not? We need to communicate, after all – why not make it enjoyable?

As a writer, words in general have found a way into my heart and my soul. They affect me. I feel them, I understand them, I touch them and they touch me and we commune. Each word means something, something symbolic and important and special, because why else would we have such an abundance of them? The words resonate with me on every level, and they make different noises, different flavors. The world might be slowly disintegrating around us, but at least we have plenty of words to describe it. The human race evolved from nothing – our thoughts were our own but we had no way to use them. Not now, but someday, we will have cultivated every single way to extinguish separation and privacy, to make everything accessible to everyone. Our words will never be our own, and that is the way this species will go out – voices and voices under a dying sun, using our last breaths to utter beautiful nonsense – our words that will become so small in the vastness of the universe.

But I’m getting off-track now. Words, to me, are like a puzzle that can never be solved. You can only look at them closer and closer, and wonder, and hope. They hold so much power – but do they have the ability to rescue us from our self-created demise?

Short Story – ‘Grass’

Hello! This week I thought I would switch things up a bit and post one of my writing pieces – just a short one, nothing major. I thought it would be cool for you guys to get to read a little sample of my more recent pieces, to kind of refresh you on my writing style and how it has changed since Wildflower Dreams because believe me, it has changed quite a lot, and in my opinion, improved. I’m constantly working on new things and new ideas and new techniques, and I wanted to share a bit of that with you! I wrote this short story in spring 2014, and I really like it. There is more to the end, but I decided to leave that bit out because it would make the post kind of long. :) So I hope you enjoy it!

Grass. Crea had never liked grass, never liked the feel of it on her bare feet or the stains it left on her clothes and the itchy feeling of it against her bare skin. Grass was pointless, it simply existed to fill space, to occupy the areas that nothing else would.

Crea, the girl with hair as yellow as grass in winter and eyes as green as grass in summer, the girl that sat on the swing and stared at the grass beneath her feet.

Grass.

As Crea grew, her feelings towards grass changed.

She’d grown up in a large estate, secluded from the rest of the world by a row of trees and a long, long driveway. And it was beautiful, but she was surrounded by grass. It closed in on her like walls. Her father raised her all by himself, a wealthy man whose wife had died giving birth to Crea. She was a living shrine to her mother, a breathing replica. She was everything to him, and if she hated the grass, then he hated the grass too.

But when Crea turned twelve, she fell ill, terribly ill, and she was ill for weeks before the doctors told her she had a brain tumor, a large one, and she hd mere years left to live, at the most. Her father took her from the hospital after her treatments, the only part of any city she’d ever been to, and kept her safe in his mansion, separated from the rest of the world.

“The world is a bad place,” he’d told his daughter as she’d begun to lose her dull yellow hair. “But you are safe here, I promise.”

She was not even allowed to leave the house; her father feared her condition would worsen. So she watched the grass and felt her hatred towards it slowly turn to envy, for every blade of grass was a hair on her head that she’d lost, to the tumor, to the doctors who’d tried to treat it and failed and sent her back home.

Grass.

And even that jealousy evolved into something different, in the end.

She could feel death all around her, she could feel its grip tightening and closing in on her, and yet she was not frightened. She couldn’t explain how. Sometimes she would catch a glimpse of her father, in his office, weeping uncontrollably. Crea would be sad for a moment, for she would remember his promise to her, that she would always be safe in this house with him, and how soon he would find out that the promise was false. But every time her father sobbed for her, she grew stronger.

And she began to love the grass, for its willingness to fill the space where nothing else would, the same trait she’d once despised about the small green hairs that sprouted all around her on Mother Earth’s large head. For she had realized that it was modesty, that the grass was humble. And she had been humbled by it.

One day she became too sick to get out of bed, and she knew the time was coming near. It took all her strength to hold back tears as her father sat at the edge of the bed, watching his daughter die, and freely shedding tears of his own.

She held his hand as she passed, and as she fell into eternal slumber she thought of grass, and wished to be surrounded by it in whatever life came next.

She was.

Grass.

That’s it! I hope you enjoyed it and that it inspires you to think about all those little things in life. Thanks for reading!