Author Interview-Cathy Cassidy

Hi! Today I'm going to share an interview that I got with Cathy Cassidy. She is a brilliant author whom I just adore. Her books are meaningful and heartfelt, and my no. one favourite is the first book I read by her, Driftwood. I believe that she tackles a lot of issues that other authors do, but the difference is that you can actually relate to her books. Each character is three dimensional and I adore every single one of them!

I hope you enjoy this interview!

1.Hi, Cathy! What began your interest in writing?

I've always loved to create characters and stories in my head… writing them down was the logical next step! This has been a compulsion and a passion ever since I can remember.

2. What is your favourite book?

That someone else has written? At the moment, I;d say a fab YA book called The Sky Is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson. Loved it. 

3. What is a snack you have on hand as you write?

I chain-drink herb tea and when the going gets tough I reach for the chocolate... 

4. Who is your favourite character out of your books?

Mouse, who first appears in Dizzy and then gets his own book and his own happy ending in the book Lucky Star. He is awesome! 

5. If you weren't an author, what profession would you be working in?

I've been a teen magazine journalist, an illustrator, an art teacher, an agony aunt and a waitress in my time. I'd happily do any of them again, except possibly be a waitress… I wasn't very good at that. I dropped a lot of food on a lot of people!

6. If you could time travel, which period of time would you go back to?

So many eras I would love to visit! I'd start with the New Stone Age and see how life was then… then hop to the Dark Ages… then 1066… then Victorian times… Edwardian… the 1920s… the WW2 era… and the 50s. And I was born in the 60s anyway, so I'd better stop there! 

7. Thanks Cathy!

You're welcome!

Sia - Elastic Heart feat. Shia LaBeouf & Maddie Ziegler (Official Video)

This is the second song in a series I am doing called Song Reactions. This means that without looking at any comments or news articles on the song, I break down the meaning to interpret MY meaning. I hope you enjoy!

In this song, what I think Sia is trying to achieve is saying that she's built up walls around her, and that no one is going to tear them down now. But sometimes there are people who come in and can begin to chip away at the walls and reveal a little more of her each time. Now she wants to free herself from those walls, but she's built them so thickly she can't get away.

Sia's music is often a statement. She is revealing a little more of herself with each song. I think this is a massive statement about Sia and how she is trying to push away from everything. All of Sia's songs are beautiful, but this one raises the bar so high. Sia has struggled with depression and she says that music is an outlet for her. I agree. And for the record Sia, you've just torn down a bit more of that wall.

~El

Jess Glynne - Don't Be So Hard On Yourself [Official Video]

Hi, guys! This is something new that I'm going to do. I will take a song and break down my meaning for it. DBSHOY is the first song that I'm going to discuss here. I'm strating to transition my blog into more of a 'covers lots of different topics' blog, as I'm fast losing ideas for my other blog posts. Please remember to tell me in the comments what you want me to cover next.

This is, quite honestly, one of my favourite songs of all time. It's not about someones relationship or lyrics that don't even make sense-It's about finding security in a world where everyone but you is perfect. And it's not true, because the person sitting beside you is probably think that too.

It's about trying to realise your ambitions in this world, and recognizing how to make your dreams real. Because no ones dreams are worthless-If we didn't have dreams we wouldn't be able to recognize our potential in this world. It might turn out that we're not quite right for our childhood dreams, but it does mean that we have some ambition in this life.

Do you like this new idea? Comment below to tell me about it, or you can recommend a song for me to break down next time. See you!
~El 

Stereotypes

First of all, apologies for the lack of blogging lately. You will not believe how long it can take me to write these posts; I have four different ideas going but I can't figure out how to write about them. Double apologies that I'm writing about a topic that I have touched on already, but I am going to look at stereotypes this time.

Stereotypes are everywhere. They are used on TV without the producers knowing; They can be harmless references in a conversation that we don't even know are wrong. I've used plenty of stereotypes before, because believe me when I was that I'm certainly not flawless. For example, about a week or so ago I was watching The Bachelor Australia with my mum. Sam Wood (the bachelor) was taking one of the girls out on a date. They had a helicopter ride over the Blue Mountains and then went to a small creek, where a boat was waiting for them. As they got in the boat, Sam said to the girl "I decided to do this because, like every other girl on the planet, your favourite movie's probably The Notebook."

Now, there is actually a scene in The Notebook where the couple do go out on a boat ride, and that was the reference Sam was making. But to just say that ALL girls favourite film's The Notebook-It's wrong! And I don't condone it at all. But Sam probably didn't realise that. It isn't really something that you can absolutely hate him for, but it does prove that we need to think before we speak. Oh, and for the record Sam, my favourite movie's Saving Mr Banks.

An even worse case of stereotyping was one that our Prime Minister Tony Abbott made. When asked last year about the best thing he'd done for women in his time in parliment, Tony said that it was taking away the carbon tax. Why did Tony mention this? I quote Mr. Abbott directly...

"Taking away the carbon tax was an enormous bonus for women because it is now cheaper for women to do the washing, dishes and much more"...

Ummm, is that not the most sexist thing I've ever heard on the news? And I'm not gonna give Tony Abbott leeway for this one. What about all the work he's done for domestic violence (take that that one with a BUCKET of salt)? He could've mentioned that!

And we go even further. There was that Muslim boy in America. He took in a clock that he'd made in his spare time-not because the teacher asked him to-into school. Five seconds later he'd been arrested because the teacher thought it was a bomb. The only reason he was accused of this was because he was a Muslim. Muslims aren't all gun carrying, gang raping extremists, people! For every bad Muslim, there are ten more who are nice, kind people who are blamed for half of the worlds problems today! It's wrong!

So I hope people can actually think before they speak next time. Stereotypes are everywhere and most of them need to stop.

~El.

PS: I've decided to change my blog name, but I can't think of any. Any advice? And I'm gonna do my next blog post on a topic you guys choose. Please comment with a topic that you would like me to write about and I'll consider it. Thanks guys!

Grief

This is a tough subject for me. It's really close to home for me at the moment. I suppose that it should make this post easier to write, but seriously, it just makes it harder.

Grief is a tricky emotion. It's an emotion that we try to cast aside, insist that it doesn't exist. When we're actually feeling it, maybe we don't recognize it. I certainly don't half the time. It swathes itself in a million layers so that we don't recognize it and we cover ourselves in as many blankets to get as far away from it as possible. I've certainly been doing that for the past few months. But here goes.

Three months ago, my grandma and my great grandma died. It would've been hard enough to lose just one of them, but to lose both of them was devastating. I was so lost. It made a whole heap of changes in my shattered life that I'm now trying to piece together. I distanced myself from my friends and didn't tell them anything about what was happening, which means that now I'm trying to convince them that I am their friend. It was so tough for me.

I'm actually crying as I write this, because it's just so hard to remember all of this. Some might say that 2015 has been their best year yet, but for me, it's quite definitely the worst. And it was supposed to be great-the year that I graduated from primary school, the year that I started soccer. Instead those have all been shoved aside as I wallow in my grief.

As some of you may know, my actual name is Amelie. Both my gran and great gran loved that name, so I wanted to get as far away from it as possible. I considered a bunch of different names, from Beatrice Finch (my two favourite book characters) to Thejellybeangirl, but I knew I wanted something simple, something that I might be able to commemorate them with. So how did I get El? Well, not only is my name amELie but my grandma's name was Elizabeth Leslie. I liked the name El, so I became El. At first I just wanted to do really light hearted blogs, but I realised that it might help me to unload a little bit of everything in a blog. So My Random Life was born.

Now it feels good to hide behind a name on the internet, and to just spill. It helps in a way that I can't even describe.

So grief.. How do you deal with it? Well, you tell your friends, you don't try and hide how hurt you are, you just try and shuffle along to get away from it all. You make sure that someone knows what's happening, and make sure you have some sort of habit to fall back on. Mine was reading-I have read nearly 200 books since my grandma died in June. I am trying to regain my footing from all this, and with this blog post I feel as if I've taken one big step.

~El