One Lovely Blog

http://somerville66.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/one-lovely-blog.html

I recently got tagged in a One Lovely Blog award by Somerville66 (Liz Lloyd.) you can click on her name to see her post on One Lovely Blogs! Thanks Liz! xxx

Here are the rules for the One Lovely Blog Award:
Thank the person that nominated you and link back to that blog.  
Share seven things about yourself – see below. 
Nominate 15 bloggers you admire – also listed below. 
Contact your bloggers to let them know you've tagged them for the ONE LOVELY BLOG AWARD If I've nominated your blog, please don't feel under any obligation to join in.  I am just pleased to recommend your blog here.

Here are seven things about ME:

I grew up in Istanbul, Turkey. Until I was 11 when I came to the UK to take my exams. My mum still lives in Turkey with my step-dad while my dad, my sister and I all live here. I speak very bad, broken Turkish, and I forget it while I'm in England but I try to learn it when I'm home for holidays.

I am a publishing Intern in London and have been working in publishing gaining experience for 12 months! 

I had a pretty eclectic schooling let's go backwards: I went to Hurstpierpoint college, a boarding school in sussex, for four years, one year at Oundle school in Peterborough, 2 years at Reigate St Mary's Prep school, a year at MIA - an American academy in Istanbul which one day was mysteriously closed by the police for having no permits and IICS an international school in Istanbul. CRAZY.

I love to dance. I can tango, but my favorite is modern jive, or Ceroc dancing, which is loads of fun. I like it because they play pop music with a beat and so it is always really good fun. I also love to go to the Rivoli ballroom, they have a Jive night there once a month with live music and dancing.

I love to cook, I follow recipes most of the time but I can judge things to my own taste as well. I really like to feed other people and see them say how lovely it is. I'm my worst critic and am always trying to get better. I'd have to thank my other half for being one reason why my cooking has improved over the last few years. He always needs feeding when he comes over, so I have become more experimental and more daring and had a lot more reason to practice. He is also on a paelo diet so I have to really get creative to make something delicious we both like.

One of my favourite and most cathartic things to do is to reorganise my bookshelves. I always feel a huge sense of accomplishment when they are newly ordered and have had the dust shaken off them. I don't have a lot of space so I also have trinkets and nicknaks filling the shelf too. Maybe I'll do that today...

I can't get enough of period dramas. Any thing from Lark Rise to Candleford to the Illusionist. I was raised on a TV diet of Pride and Prejudice and Tess of the Durbervilles. Now that I am older I love to read those stories too but when it comes to movies, I cannot resist a spot of old time fashion.

Here are my recommendations! Go look at them. Immediately.

Chic It Yourself
Up The Hill And Round The Bend
A Seasonal Cook in Turkey
Catherine Bennett
Dark Readers
Damn Interesting
Bookables
Books, Biscuits, and tea
little paper pages
The Hungry Reader
So Many books So Little Time
the thrifty garden/home
eat like a girl
Writers and Artists Blog

Interning at Movellas

I was an intern at Movellas in June 2014 for three weeks. If anyone is interested in publishing internships Movellas is an awesome place to start. Movellas is a teen story-sharing community. In a nutshell, teens can write and publish their own stories on the site. Other teens read, comment and offer constructive criticism. The company has gone from strength to strength and now has over 250,000 active users a month. Users post 5,000 comments a day and there are 10,000 hours of daily engagement on the site.

So why choose Movellas? Well, there are a couple things that you want from an internship:

1) A really cool team. If you can't get along with the people that you're working with then it is really tough to drag yourself into work every day. I loved working at Movellas.  At the moment the team is in Soho, central London in a very trendy office. There are five members of staff who are all lovely and the benefit of being one of five is that the CEO of the company is there as well as your direct bosses. Publishing is a small world, so it is always good to be noticed by the whole company rather than just your manager.

2) Expenses. Preferably, you really want to be looking for paid internships, especially in London as it is pretty costly. But often expenses only internships might be the only thing available. Paid internships also tend to have a more rigorous interview process and want people with more experience.  Having said that, Movellas want good interns to work for them. They can be a great place to gain that experience. PLUS digital publishing is a very good place to start out and could give you the edge over other people. Movellas pay travel and lunch expenses which is V. generous considering it is all London prices. They were also understanding and flexible about peak times and peak prices.

3) Cool Factor. Movellas is swimming in cool. But what I mean by Cool Factor is totally subjective. you have to enjoy the work that you are doing and that means being interested in what the company is doing. Movellas has alot of exciting and new things happening at the moment and it was easy to be enthusiastic and pleased about the projects they are working on. You need this in any job, if you're not excited about where the company is going, you're unlikely going to enjoy your time there. For me that meant getting excited about Movella's engagement with their users.

4) Work. The worst thing in the world, is going into an internship and the whole experience being a waste of time. Movellas always have things for the interns to do, if you lend yourself to one particular skill or another, they will ask you to do more of it.

Movellas was such a great opportunity for me, I learned so much and highly recommend it as an internship placement. Movellas is awesome. As Google would say: +1

Here are just a few things I got to do while at Movellas:

I wrote a blog post introducing a Movellas author getting published on amazon: http://www.movellas.com/blog/show/201406241216248575/movellas-author-gets-published-on-amazon

A round-up for sugarscape.com of 8 alternate endings to The Fault in Our Stars
http://www.sugarscape.com/main-topics/book-club/1047192/top-8-alternate-endings-fault-our-stars-fan-fic

Announced the winners of competitions: The Forever song.
http://www.movellas.com/blog/show/201406271135518662/the-forever-song-illustration-competition-results

My TFIOS movie review also featured on Movellas
http://www.movellas.com/blog/show/201406181650227291/movie-review-4-the-fault-in-the-stars-spoilers

Composed a quiz.
http://www.movellas.com/blog/show/201406201433401186/are-you-a-john-green-super-fan

Was hilarious.
http://www.movellas.com/blog/show/201406251758255238/funny-friday-face-the-boggart

I proofread and edited the full manuscript of The Last Girl by Riley Shasteen. I also helped to publish it through Amazon Kindle.  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L8CUD6A

Why I'm Not a Writer

There is an essay in the Writers and Artists Yearbook 2012 (Bloomsbury) by Alison Baverstock called Is There a Book in You? It is a very thought provoking essay:

I graduated from Bath Spa University, where the English and Creative Writing staff are some of the best in the country. Spa's MA writing course has a reputation for producing a long list of published authors alumni.  So - budding writers flock to the West Country.  My classes were filled with very talented people, amazing writers with potential basically oozing out of them.

I went to a uni acclaimed for producing authors, I did a creative writing course, and I'm not an author. Why?

I went to university with my GREAT NOVEL unwritten.  I had no big idea to give, really. I already knew that that feeling I saw in my classmates, the great work that just needed to come out of them wasn't in me. I loved my Literature modules, carrying on where I left off A levels with MORE reading, and taught by some fantastic tutors. Creative Writing was my fun. My cathartic 6 hours off from reading (and everything else) to write.

Lecture 1 of my second year I had one of the most simultaneously depressing and inspiring lectures of my uni career. Talking to this tutor was like being hit over the head with your favourite book. You love it, but it hurts! He told us to basically forget the dream of making a living out of writing. That raised some hackles, I can tell you! He probably pushed one or two of the people in the room to really focus on their goals and prove him wrong. But I never wanted to be a writer, and what he did over the next two years was give us some excellent examples of alternative routes that would still keep us in contact with books. I now realise that that is all I've ever really wanted. 

That tutor and many others drilled a sense of hard work and the importance of reading into me.  I have never met a more well read man in my life. He ended up lending me three pivotal books as source material for my dissertation, that he just happened to have! He used to make us read our work out loud to the class so that we could hear how the writer intended it to sound. And he made us comment on people's work, out loud and to their faces.  If I didn't know it before, I knew it after every one of my creative writing seminars.

I'm not a writer because I am an editor.