Teaching kids

I've been teaching 10 year old kids the last week and this, and let me tell you, it is.... weird.


Like, the actual lesson/teaching thingy is hell of a lot easier than teaching to those 16-19 year olds that I'm used to (I was a teacher last year). Then, I could spend quite some time making lesson plans. Here, I'm basically opening the book 5 minutes before the lesson starts and quickly check whatever I even will talk about and then the kids arrive and I start talking.

The actual "having lessons" part is easy peasy. But the real challenge is getting the difficult children to keep themselves on topic. You have to be present in a whole another way when teaching for kids than when teaching to independent youngsters. It's hard to explain, but a 45 min lesson takes as much energy as a 75 min lesson for teenagers, but it's a lot different.

I'm not sure if I like it. I love talking in front of the class and have the lesson, but my god, kids need the adult so present that it basically annoys me.

It is a difficult class. Every teacher here gives me sympathetic smiles and probably thinks "luckily it's not me" and the head master said that it is the most challenging class in the whole school. The class has two difficult students. Only two. And those two is all that take to bring the whole class down in a downward spiral.

So my job is to redirect those kids as much as possible, before things spiral out of hand. They can be violent, too.

But I think I've done a good job. They listen for the most times. I've got their respect. I once shouted at one of them because I was so goddamn tired at their fuckery, but otherwise, I think they like me.

I mean, teaching is fun.

But I don't like teaching to children that much.

But who knows, maybe I could work as a teacher for kids for a year or so, if I turned out unemployed and this was the only solution.



Other than teaching kids, I'm still writing my story. I'm currently at 75k words and it's almost hilarious how fast I've spit out this story. It took me almost a year to write my 110k word original fiction story (Children of a Murderer), but this fanfic comes like diarrhea out of my fingers and brain, and those 75k is from less than two months. Lol. And I'm writing my other play by the side of this, so my brain is very occupied, sadly at the expense of this blog and I hate that I only upload once a week, when I want it to be every three days :(

I'll try <3

A little snippet of my text

Let me share a little snippet that I like quite much from the story I'm just about to finish! I'm currently writing the final chapter (chapter 16) and then it's finished and I'll edit the final four chapters before uploading them to the site I'm using and THEN I can focus on my Master Thesis lololol

I won't however write the character names out (I'm for some reason embarrassed by showing the character names even though I haven't made them up myself), but we have J, S and C, all fourteen years old. J and S are boys, C is a girl.

“I won’t ever be able to forgive myself if J dies”, S said, staring in front of him. “I should have been able to figure out that someone might want to ruin the conference. I should have been able to hear whoever it was that shot us. I should have been able to find out a way for us to escape. But I didn’t. And that lightning – “

“S, don’t beat yourself up”, C said. “It’s also my fault. I should have taken this more seriously; I should have known –“

“I’ve tried, C! I’m this close to just throw the bombs away and just do nothing, but they’ll know”, S hissed. “And I – I can’t stop thinking about him. How he’s alone there in that cold cell, like some animal ready to be butchered. I can’t stop myself, C, and it hurts! It hurts everywhere.”

“It hurts me too –“

“No, you don’t get it”, S yelled, and his voice was rapidly picking up sound level. His thoughts spun around in his head and he felt sick. “He is – we were supposed to – I get that he’s your friend, but to me… he is my boyfr –  hell, I love him!”

His puberty voice cracked at the final line like a stick snapping and his loud voice echoed in the valley.

There are less stressful ways to come out of the closet tho, poor little S.

Adapting

I'm somewhat enjoying my life again, more than earlier this autumn. I've found a new friend in school so I'm not all alone anymore and things have worked out in my family with my mum falling ill and stuff.

My life is very much filled with acting, or is going to be! I like that.

Earlier this autumn I wrote how acting has lost its spark within me, but EHEY it found its way back! Figures.

The thing with this new theatre group is that I am, or was, extremely used to the very routine that the old theatre fomation had. I mean, it was present in my life for eight years after all, and I can't be too harsh on myself for constantly comparing this to that. This new director is veeery different from my old co-worker/boss/teacher. There's way less order here. It's a lot of downtime (dead time). It's not almost at all playing, and to be honest much less acting than I'm used to.

I'm trying. Trying to adapt as much as possible.

Trying to see the good things in what I have now.

Time IS indeed running fast

How suprisingly easy it is to fall down a hole where suddenly life just pass by and you don't even notice?

Time is runnig so fast I can't keep up.

I am currently listening to my new favourite piece of music (and have done so for quite many hours in a loop because I am that person who literally listens to a song for a year non-stop)

it's called Save me by the band Globus.

And I swear, when I heard that song for the first time it awoke so many emotions in me, because I knew that if I had heard this song when I was 17-18 it would.... I don't know, but I felt that this song fits in my mindset and my then current emotions when being in that age.

Ok I know the song is extremely angsty. It is about a person on the verge of suicide and asks for help (hence the name "save me") but my god if it isn't the most beautiful song I've heard in a good while.

Oh, Save Me from fear and pain

And love will rain on me

Save Me today, 'fore tomorrow 

Finds me at rest

This song became now the theme song of the story I'm currently writing. No, there's no suicide involved, but a kidnapping and hostage situation that is very stressful for the ones in the that situation and those lyrics fit that scenario too, and ooooooh I get emotional when thinking about my baby characters!

They're a bit younger than my usual main characters, they're just fourteen instead of seventeen eighteen that is my usual target to write about. The best thing is that I'm the writer so I can make sure they get a happy ending (or I promised my readers that already because someone was worried about that so I promised to create a happy ending and tbh I would be sad too if I were to kill them off. I love them cuties).

I even drew a pic of them when being bored that turned into a full lineart picture. These are my main characters :) Though I didn't make them up myself (fanfic u kno), that's why is was so easy to draw them lol.

The middle character to the right is activating "magic", hence the hands in such a weird position. The symbols beside each character symbolise their home country.

Feedback on angst

I've always been so unapologetic, and especially when it comes to my own fantasies. Like, you better deal with my territory or get out- kind of stuff.

The story I've been writing on (and publishing on the internet) is an angst piece and at the last chapter, where the actual abuse and angst begins someone commented along the lines of "nonono, i can't this is too much"

I was... honestly startled and it made me extremely selfconscious.

Did I overdo it? This was just the beginning of the angst-part (there's also an adventure part and a fight scene and drama and love and all other kinds of stuff, the angst is the main theme of one arc in the story), but was it already too much?

I know authors shouldn't take all feedback that seriously, but it really made me think.

AM I overdoing the angst part?

I rewrote the next chapter, which I am about to publish today. The original version was angsty, but then I rewrote it as even more hopeless and helpless and total despair, and now I redid the ending of the chapter to end on a positive note, because I'm scared people will stop reading if they find it too much to stomach.

There's a genre in writing called Hurt/Comfort. Hurt/comfort (or H/C) means that you can hurt your characters both emotionally and psysically, but they have to have some sort of comfort after. You end things usually positively.

I decided to turn a little bit away from angst (which usually keeps the miserable tone for a longer time than H/C) in favour of H/C.

Because, for the first time in my life, I decide to listen to something else than my sadistic tendencies.

It is weird and a little bit scary, but I'll try.

But the hard moral choice is still there for my characters, and I will not change the devastation it'll give them.

Writing rambles

Happy November!


November is also known in the writing community as NaNoWriMo, which stands for National Novel Writing Month.

It's basically a challenge where one would write a full sized ass novel in 30 days, mimimum word count 50 000. This year it's also 20 years anniversery for NaNo.

I might have cheated a bit, as I've been written in a really fast pace my second fanfic, which is as of now, 44 000 words.

Those 44 000 words are written in 20 days. TWENTY FUCKING DAYS.

That is around 2200 words each day, and that, my friends, is really, really tough to accomplish.

This is not the first time I've speed-written something, I managed to puke out 30 000 words in seven days when I was 15 and that was madness.

But I'm proud. Proud that I seem to win the NaNoWriMo this year, that it looks like I'll manage to write 50 000 words in 30 days, even if I started at October 10th instead of November 1st.

Maybe I'll one day be a writer and author for real. I think I someday might. Maybe not now. Maybe when I'm 30 years old.

For now, let me finish writing my little angsty piece where I put three teenagers through really difficult moral choices. Ah. I love writing angst.