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Apparently I'm walking to Mordor...
…with S…
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John Green's "Top Five Movies I Enjoy Watching"
(a list that can be found in this FIFA video)
5. The Sting - “The great con man grifter...
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It seems very strange to reblog someone reblogging me, but people have asked me to, as when I answer questions directly, as I did here, on Tumblr...
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22. Mum calls it the two little ducks.
And after turning 21 the year before, 22 feels like a funny number. Like it doesn’t mean anything, or maybe just means less. But of course as much has changed about my life in the last year as any year that has preceded it. And the 12-months ahead promise to be some of the most exciting (and busy) yet. I’ve picked up a scholarship to work with the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery on my Creative Writing thesis for Honours, and to have access to materials that very few have the privilege of exploring. I have been hired as Writer-in-Residence at St. Helen’s District School, where I will spend 25 days of the first half of this year engaging in an artistic and social experiment, the magnitude of which not even I fully understand yet. I will, for 2012, be a writer. Full time. And making money from it.
On top of that there is my new position as judge of the Tasmanian Children’s Book Council, and as head of the Tasmanian Chapter of the Harry Potter Alliance (more about that last one in another blog post soon). It seems inconceivable that I will be able to juggle it all. It seems inconceivable not to try.
And here I am, on my birthday, kayaking across the sea with my closest friend in the world. I am glad that James is here, and that the sun is shining and the water is crisp and sparkling like glass. For a while we swim, for a while we paddle, and for a while it is like we are two little ducks.
Later I go home, tired and happy, and I have dinner with my family and then I walk to the top of the hill. There is scaffolding from a building site and I climb up to get a better look at the sunset. The sky is lit up like embers.
I notice that people on Twitter are talking about ‘Page 31 of 366’. I don’t understand it, until I realise that today is page 31. And this year is 366. And it seems so far into the book already, and like it will be over too soon. Perhaps it will be.
But page 31 was an excellent page, and no matter where the story goes from here, page 31 will be a page I return to. Many times.
I recently bought a Jawbone UP fitness band, and since buying it I’ve been excited about the idea of doing a fitness challenge for 2012. I thought about trying to walk the equivalent distance from one city to another, or around the world, but then thought: Wouldn’t it be interesting to walk somewhere I could never go in real life?
Within a minute, the Walk To Mordor challenge was cemented into my head. The goal is simple: walk (or run) the equivalent of the entire distance from Hobbiton to Mordor (2224km) before Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit comes out on Boxing Day 2012. The challenge starts tomorrow, Monday the 9th January 2012, and if you can maintain an average of 6.5 kilometres a day, you should get there without any trouble.
To sweeten the deal, I have calculated various landmarks and key events in the novels, and which kilometre of the journey they occur in. So as you go, you can enjoy the precise moment when the fellowship enter the Mines of Moriah, or when Gollum reveals himself and is kidnapped by Sam and Frodo. Using the official hashtag #WalkToMordor, we’ll be able to compare our progress in real-life by following key moments in the books, and, hopefully, encourage each other to make it through.
I’ve written a 7-page guide to my version of Walk To Mordor which will tell you absolutely everything you need to know to join in. You can find that here:
http://dft.ba/-WalkToMordor2012
And I’d love to hear if you’re going to join us! You can contact me through the comments here on Tumblr, and through Twitter or Facebook. The more people we have, the more enjoyable the experience will be, so I do encourage you to give it a go! And feel free to tweak my ideas and make it something that works for you!
If there is one thing to learn from The Lord of the Rings, it is that the road goes ever on and on, and it is company that makes it worthwhile.
Thanks so much for reading, and I hope to hear from you soon that you’ll be participating in 2012’s nerdiest fitness challenge!
Neil Gaiman often writes a New Year’s benediction for his fans, and reads them publicly, before posting them on his blog. You can find an example of one, turned into a poster, here.
This year I decided, inspired by Neil’s own versions, that I would write you one of my own. So here are my hopes for each of you in the year ahead:
I hope next year is slightly better than you are hoping for.
I hope you find a song that puts into music what you feel in your heart, a book which puts into words what you feel in your mind, a film that makes you cry, and another that makes you cry with laughter.
I hope you have a child this year that you are proud of. Not necessarily a chubby-handed, breathing, baby one (though that’s fine), but anything that you’ve made yourself, and that could have only been made by you - a song maybe, or a painting, a knitted toy, a poem, a garden. It doesn’t have to impress everyone else, but it does have to be yours. And then I hope you will be proud of what you made.
I hope you get to say thank you to someone you admire, and I hope you are surprised to find someone doing the same for you. I hope you surround yourself with the sort of people who would hate to be called ‘normal’; who surprise you and impress you just by being themselves. I hope you find the best kind of love, which is not a contest, unless it is the kind of contest where everyone wins, and with much more kissing.
I hope you will spend many nights surrounded by friends and family, with good food and drink, and with laughter and joy. And I hope you will spend many nights quietly alone too, thinking or reading in the silence, and smiling for no-one but yourself, but smiling, just the same.
And I hope, perhaps most of all, that you will be kind. Because the only way that we can cure the loneliness, defy the colder sides of ourselves, and fight back the wolf at the door, is to be kind. Really, when it’s all stripped back, there is nothing else but kindness.
In doing so, I hope you find that the world is kind to you in return for another twelve months, which I look forward to sharing with you, wherever they go.
Happy New Year. All of you.
A beautiful piece of tile art by Ruan Hoffman.
Happy New Year everybody.
