I'l just do your conventional biography thing here.

Hi, I'm WritersBlock, and music is a large part of my life. I was born in September of 1990, in a small town in Western Australia. I'm 17 years old. I finished high school last year, with my exam results placing me in the top 15% in the state, which is pretty good considering that I barely studied. I took the toughest subjects the school offered: Calculus, Applicable Maths, Chemistry and Physics, as well as Music (which I chose not to sit the final exam for) and standard TEE (tertiary entance exam) English.

I also participated in the "Countryweek" school camp, where schools from all over the state come to Perth to compete in team sporting events to find the best talent in rural WA. I'm not particularly athletic, as my chosen "sport" was in the drama section: Prepared Speech and Monologue. I like the theater, and my creative side loves the prospect of acting, but I spent a lot of time before the camp rehearsing my monologue and writing a speech. Both went pretty well, although I failed to make the finals for my monologue, my prepared speech (which was a parody on advertising through television) came third for B-grade. Yes, one of the best young speech writers in the state right here. You've probably already picked up on the irony that is my alias by now... but just to highlight it more, my friend, who was doing a speech in A grade hadn't written his speech because he didn't know what to write. He ended up writing his speech the night before he had to present it. The topic: Writer's block. He got through to the finals but failed to place.

Now, I have a job at the local Bunnings (DIY Warehouse type business) even though I know little about the DIY market... But the money is a nice change, as I'll be needing lots of it when I go to uni next year. I'll be packing my bags up and moving to Perth to live with my brother, so that I can attend Curtin university, and spend 4-5 years on a double degree: Bachelor of Education and Bachelor of Arts. It's a nice balance, I think. I'll study secondary teaching (Maths) as my main subject, and maybe music as my second option, and the bachelor of arts will probably cover things like literature editing and publishing, creative writing, that sort of thing, so that I've got some good options into what field of work I want to go into when I'm finished.

As you can see, the main focus of my life at the moment isn't music. Music is my passion, but it's also just a hobby. I'm not so ambitious that I want to write music and get famous without stopping to actually think how realistic that dream is to me. So I thoroughly enjoy tinkering around on my piano or guitar, composing stuff for newgrounds, knowing full well that I'm not going to try and end up with a record deal. So anyway, I think you should know SOMETHING about how I got to here with my music.

At the start of the year 2000 (I was nine at the time), I started learning the piano with the teacher that lives across the road. She holds a funnel up to the window to hear if I'm practicing when I'm not having lessons (lol not really, she's a nice, supportive teacher, as you'll find more about a bit later). Around about the start of the school year, my school had a test for all the kids in my year, to see if we had a natural ear for music. It was all simple stuff really, but to the kids that did best in that test, they offered free music lessons for an instrument of the kids choosing. If I didn't have the instrument I wanted, there was the option to hire, but since I already had my dad's old 3/4 length classical guitar (restrung to accommodate for my left handed playing style), I decided to learn the guitar. In October of that year, I performed in my first music festival for piano and guitar. Over the next few years, my skills developed, and then came high school...

My town has about 4 primary schools, and there's only 1 high school (there's a new Anglican one opening soon though...). So, I went from my little primary school, being the biggest and smartest little kid, to being the new kid in a school of about a thousand kids. There were two kids that had kept up music lessons through primary school in my year: One was me, the other was one of my best friends, who moved away at the end of the year. So I kept up my private piano lessons, and my guitar lessons in school, but I also had actual music classes for 3 periods a week, and I was in a class of about 30 kids (that's not counting the other music class), and I knew no-one.

But everyone was pretty awesome, and I was having fun learning theory, rather than just reading notes. I started learning compositional tips and tricks and I got to go on the annual "music camp", where we go up to Perth for a week and go watch performances, and perform and do artsy/music stuff. Our music camps were awesome, almost legendary. But the next year, the music teacher moved to a school over east, and the guy replacing him was a big jerk, making us watch videos on the beatles, and sniffing whiteboard markers and telling us about marijuana cakes. It might sound like fun, but we learned nothing. And then he needed to present some sort of test results to the principal, so he gave us a surprise of 2 tests on one day, which we knew little about, and which I could only get one done. That year my grade was about 50%, and I blame that solely on the fact of the teacher being a total knob-for-brains. That year we had no music camp, because apparently there's nothing in Perth that we can't learn locally. And the grand finale of this guy's asshole-ery is his description of a guitar as "a box with strings". So... any old box, with any old strings can make a perfect guitar sound? [/rant]

The next year, year 10, jerk-face left and the awesome teacher from year 8 came back. Rejoice. His students over in Melbourne were assholes, so he came back to the kids that truly appreciated him. by this time, there was a dwindling number of students in the class. It was from about 5-10 kids. The teacher was quite disturbed that a year had been wasted on the beatles and stories about drugs. So we had a lot of catch up going on in that year, and I think I ended up winning an award for being at the top of the class at the end of the year. The music camp was back on again, with the typical going to an art exhibition here, going to the opera there (the opera we saw was really mediochre "shut up and die already, bitch!") and the dormitory raids in the middle of the night, it was music camp at its finest.

Meanwhile, my piano grade at this point was at grade 3. I was doing well with the music festival and my AMEB (Australian Music Examination Board) exams, but next year the piano would make me its bitch. Year 11. The year when the school started doing its exams. I was doing TEE level music. There were 4 people in the class, and there were 3 different courses within the class spread over 2 year levels. One student was doing year 12 TEE, who's now studying music at UWA (University of Western Australia: The elite uni of WA. My brother studies there). There was one year 11 doing non TEE music, and myself and one other learning year 11 TEE music (she's also studying music at UWA at the moment). There are several different sections in the TEE music course that we're graded on: Perception (ear tests, for rhythm, pitch, cadences, that sort of stuff), which I was kinda average at, Literature (analysing scores, history) I was pretty good at that, but I remember a lot more now, than when I was sitting in the exam rooms, Composition (rearranging 8 bars for piano into a piece for 4 instruments, one of which has to be transposing, adding 8 more bars in that same style and adding appropriate articulation for a given style), I usually did alright/pretty good with these, Performance; I had to perform on the piano at a 5th grade level, I did really poorly with this, as I had to skip a grade, and my sight reading was pretty average. But I plugged away at it anyway, and there was a silver lining on the cloud, as this year, I had my last music camp (technically it was just a guitar camp), we went to Margaret River for a week and participated in a big performance, as well as getting up to the usual shenanigans.

Overall, my academic achievements were of a high standard. And then came year 12. This year raped me with truth. I was not going to get into music at uni, and I did not want to become an engineer. I kept on keeping on with my music until my mid year exams. My grade in music and my skills on the piano were getting increasingly better. But when the results came in, it hit me like a frozen fish to the face. My performance was judged by unbiassed teachers. I think the score was less than 20%. I filled out a form stating that I didn't want to sit the final music exam. It was tough for me to do that. I'd been learning for 7 years, and this was the end of the line. Filling out that form tore me up inside. I wanted to keep going, but I was also breaking down inside by keeping going. I was nervous to perform, and I was feeling so much pressure, I was ashamed of the standard of my performances compared to where I should have been. And it was affecting my other classes. My morale was low, and I wasn't studying nearly as much as I should have. My grades were dropping. But I came to realise that giving up the burden of the hard practice of my music lifted a huge pressure off my shoulders. I realised that these exams were really important to me. So I made a huge push at the end of the year to get my act together and pull through to the end. I was still doing my music classes, theory, composition, and performance. While I had put down that I wasn't sitting the exam, I never gave up the class, and that was one thing that I was desperate to hold on to. Without the pressure and importance on my music results, I could relax and enjoy those classes, and my performances were doing better for it. I finished the year with a C, I think. And I'm proud to say that I've finished the course.

There was also that other side of my music, the composition and the internet alias of me, WritersBlock. In December of 2006 I started making music on a site called bandAmp. It's pretty small, but I got a lot of support from there. Sometimes I feel guilty that I haven't been back there in ages, and my main focus of music is newgrounds now, but now I'm making music for me, I've learned a lot from my years of guitar and piano lessons, and the 5 (technically 4, year 9 doesn't count) years of music theory, added onto the year and a bit I've been making music online, I feel that I've gained a lot out of music, and a lot out of life. I love music, and I love art (I'm not as good at it), and I love literature, and writing fiction, and movies and games. I love creativity. I embrace it with open arms. I'm excited to see where my future is headed, and I hope that I'll always have my own music with me wherever I go.

Thanks for reading, whoever you may be. A friend, a fan, an anonymous user. Thanks for letting me share this part of my life with you. I think that it's pretty detailed, but I keep anonymity towards the people in my life.

Cheers.
-WritersBlock