I know it's past the deadline for this project, but I just wanted to post this last post, half because I felt like it, but half because I felt like I haven't finished things up here yet :D

This project was better than I expected, to be honest. I could take control of my own website, customise the way I liked and post my progress as I went. The only part of making the website I didn't like was the note-taking part. The summarising part didn't go down well, and I think a lot of people, including myself, had issues with the formatting of notes and summaries. I tried posting my notes document, but it didn't work, because it was a PDF or something. (-.-)

Anyway, the other thing I didn't like was how we had lessons at the beginning, instead of at the end (near the deadline). During the lessons at the beginning, I really couldn't do a lot because I didn't know specifically what question I wanted to answer. So that resulted in a heap of research, and then the final product which barely used any. I think the lessons should have been focused on refining the final product into a product that directly raises an issue or addresses the question, rather than wasting the first two weeks of lessons looking for a question or searching for information that might not be relevant. That happened to me...and I spent the last week freaking out over whether it answered the question or not.

The good parts: I learnt a lot about the area that I was interested in, and I feel like I have accomplished something? In a lot of projects, we don't get the freedom to choose a specific area of interest from a broad topic, let alone the life, legacy and character of a given personality. Although it took me a while to narrow it down to a specific question - Catherine's authenticity - I think that this freedom was what made this project so interesting. Everyone chose different topics, and everyone had different final products. It was really cool to see what other people have made and what ideas they had about Catherine's relationships, her character compared to other people, and her contributions. In terms of feeling like I have accomplished something - I used to never write fiction (unless you counted when the meaningless rubbish I wrote in year 7), and I actually made something that I spent a lot of time drafting. It was a process I never really gone through  - how can you draft an essay in 40 minutes during a class test? Creative writing itself and learning different writing styles from people like Felicity Pulman and books like the Royal Diaries was really interesting and I liked it. That's why I felt like the final product was something I had created from scratch and something I developed over time. 

Um, I hope you like the final product, but more importantly, I'm glad that I could show you the process of how I made it :)

Writing fiction is harder than you think. I scrapped so many drafts before I found a style of writing that I liked and suited Catherine. And that was merely the first draft. So! In my historical fiction, I'm going to portray Catherine as a witty, and clever woman, who twists everything to her advantage. She is secretive, because she has so many different 'faces' she must have for different people. The 'face' that she shows in her memoirs is mainly that of a reflective and intelligent leader, always fighting to overcome adversities. I want to show these different 'faces' that she has.

When I was writing, I found a lot of useful resources like the Royal Diaries series. I selected Anastasia the Grand Duchess and Marie Antoinette, Princess of Versailles because Anastasia was Russian, so I might find some cultural information and Marie Antoinette, political and social etiquette. Anastasia was a while after Catherine the Great, but the book was useful in providing Russian terms like 'moujik' which means peasant. It also taught me about Russian names - that the last names came from the person's father's name with the ending depending on their gender; 'evna' for women, 'vitch' for men. Marie Antoinette was a Princess in France, who lived just before and during the French Revolution. She was very extravagant in court and in the book, she had a rivalry with Madame du Barry and found ways to scorn her and belittle her in subtle methods. These subtle methods were what I was looking for - I didn't really know about manipulation, so I learnt from this French princess. Both the books however were of the perspective of 14-year-olds, which was disappointing, because I was writing the perspective of a 50 or 60-year-old. The level of maturity was vast, so the books were only as good as minor references. 

Other than that, I'm nearly done with the writing, but I think I need to have a 500-word explanation of how the fiction relates to my question. Bleugh. I wish I didn't have to spell it out, but I guess it's necessary.

Two weeks left, and all I have done is blog. I am incredible.
Lawl jokes, I actually did some research yesterday about Catherine's memoirs, from Mrs Colmer's link - thank you so much! It was extremely useful and also linked me to other sources that I can use for my research. The only bad thing about it was that the source basically was what I wanted to do for this project; an analysis about Catherine's authenticity in her memoirs. Now when I do get started on my work, I'll keep checking not to make my work similar to the source :/

I'm thinking that my question could be: How real is Catherine the Great in her memoirs? I think I'll explore what the memoirs talk about, what ideas they are trying to show about Catherine and what other people think of her authenticity and her memoirs. So...it looks like I won't be doing the creative option. If I was to do the creative option, though, I think I'll worry too much about it, but I can't afford to do that (next week is doom week part II where I'm going to drown in assignments and all-nighters). Shame.

Next step: I'm going to look at the source mentioned in the original source from Mrs Colmer (writing that confuses me) and scavenge for more information so I can put it into a report or something. I want it to be more of a presentation - visual sort of thing. It's easier to understand and create if I make some sort of visual representation of my findings.