ARLKSJDKLASNBIAMEXCITEDFORMYWRITING.

Flipping holidays can't come soon enough! Holiday time means writing time (and friend time, but that's not what this post is about...).

Having one of those moments where the story idea in my brain is positively bursting with AWESOME and I just want to write it. As you've probably heard I'm revisiting my superpowers story, and revamping the characters that have been with me since 2008. It still shocks me that they've been around that long. Finally, I think I've figured out what their story is supposed to be. And who doesn't belong in the story. Many a character has been scrapped. Also many have died. But that's a different novel, to be written one day when I'm famous and my readers are begging for the backstory....

Totally pumped for the epicness that will be this book! I'm using NaNoWriMo to bust out 50k for it, which is kind of cheating since I've already started the story, but seeing as NaNoWriMo is made for personal gain, I guess I can use it for the best benefits possible. Right? Heh. We're all NaNo rebels sometime or other (or every time if you're me...).

I was talking to Keira yesterday about the authory things that I wish I could do but don't yet have the skill. Number One is better foreshadowing. I wish I could master foreshadowing for a huge series like Harry Potter. JK Rowling is a genius. Don't believe me? Go read The Prisoner of Azkaban again.

The second thing is pushing my characters one step further in the way of er ... torture. I don't know how else to put it. Basically, when you write a story your character has to get past many bad obstacles, and each time they escalate, pushing the character to their limits. I can never seem to get my characters to the step that breaks them, or nearly breaks them, depending on your character. A perfect example of this is Amy in The Doctor's Wife. While she and Rory are lost inside the TARDIS (I still don't know if I'm supposed to capitalise all the letters or not!), Rory gets shut behind and door and Amy finds him only seconds later, or so she thinks. Turns out for him it's been hours. That's step one. Step two is when she's tricked into thinking Rory has waited his whole lifetime for her, and to her horror she finds an old Rory still sitting behind the door. Now, if I had written this episode, that's as far as I would have taken it. The genius bit comes in step three, the moment that breaks Amy. The moment that pushes her over the edge, and gives us a real insight to her character, and makes us care. Because we knew that the old Rory was just a fake one put there by the badguy, so now that the scene is over we don't care anymore. The writers need to scare us. To make us feel what Amy feels. So when Amy next turns the corner she sees DIE AMY DIE graffitied all over the walls and the dead skeleton of her husband Rory, and she just breaks down. Now don't lie, your stomach twisted when you watched that didn't it? You felt it that time. Now the writers have got you to care. And when the real Rory comes around the corner, perfectly fine, confirming that what Amy saw was just a hallucination, the relief that you feel is the WIN for the writer. Yeah that's right, they've got you to love their characters. And THAT is what I want to master. Not everyone realises how important step three is in pushing your character to the limits. It's the final hurdle. Right when you think everything is going okay, something ten times worse gets in the way and you groan at the TV or shake your book in frustration because you just want the character to get through and be all right! You care now. I want to make my readers care like that.

Anyways, the post just sort of became a rant and ended up twice as long as I thought it would. So I'm going to go now. Off to continue this stupid plastering. Have a lovely Sunday!

P.S Had a ridiculously long conversation with Keira last night about names. We came to the realisation that Karen Gillan is a really, really terrible name (especially when you add that her middle name is Sheila! What is wrong with her parents?) and that Amelia Pond is a beautiful, wonderful, roll-off-the-tongue name. I love writers and how much thought they put in to names. :)

Exciting thing of the day:

The proof copy of Seven Stones, my fantasy novel, came in the mail today. Thank you, Createspace! It will now sit on my desk as a trophy, to remind me that I CAN write a book because I've already done it! Now I just need to write a much better one.

I will do this!

RAWR.

Hello hello. I've been forcing myself to write today because I didn't want to feel like I waste the entire day... my stupid ankle has continued to create a barrier between me and the outside world, so it was home again from dawn til dusk for me today. It's okay. I finished my website assignment so I'm pretty happy :) I also wrote 1000+ words of a story, so all is good. I created a book cover for one of my stories, and I really love it and I wanted to post it on NaNoWriMo to ask for opinions, but the site has been down all day! Some lame Amazon hosting error. Ugh. Hopefully it will be back up by the morning.

I ordered some more books online yesterday but I don't think I beat the holiday break so they won't get shipped until Tues :( oh well. I'll probably have to wait about a month for them because Book Depository is a little hopeless when it comes to postage and handling ... probably because they don't charge you for it! So I guess it's a win-lose, or something like that. I got two more books on the Victorian era to add to my growing collection, plus a novel called It's Kind of a Funny Story, by Ned Vizzini. It's about a teenage boy who has depression, so he checks himself into a psych ward for a week and meets some weird but friendly people. It's sounds strange when I say it like that, I mean you're probably thinking, 'Erin, why on earth would you want to read a book like that?" but I stumbled across is online and as far as I can tell it has a happy ending, so I'm hoping it will be a nice little odd 'feel-good' sort of story. Here's hoping. The problem is, whenever I order a book online it's all I think about and all I want to read, so now when I look at all the other lovely books on my shelf that are waiting to be opened, I think, 'but I don't want to read these books right now...' Hmm. Maybe it will just take a bit of force, like my writing did today. Like I said it's probably going to be nearly a month until I see my order, so that's more than enough time to get started on something else.

By the way, I just made this poster and I'm going to print it out really big and hang it on my wall. 

Anyway. It would appear that I am now nearly out of words. So I shall leave this post here and go back to trying to force some more writing. One of the worst things I can think of is suddenly NOT being a writer anymore, and even though it's hard I never want to stop, so I must press on during the difficult days.

Tata! :)

NaNoWriMo win!

I did it! I wrote 50,000 words in a month!

I wrote a 30,000 word novella which ran out of plot really quickly because it was so simple, so for the second 20,000 I started a second novel, which is nowhere near finished and the first story needs MAJOR editing, but I'm happy that I accomplished my goal of writing that much in so little a time.

Congrats to other NaNo winners! And good luck for the last two days if you're yet to reach the mark :)

It's almost time!

Gearing up for NaNoWriMo in just a few days! So I thought I'd share with you my writing space, as I did last year - it's changed somewhat! I still have the same space, same desk and chair, but the photos around the wall have spread much wider, and more posters have been acquired ... here's a wide shot of my room:

There's still a bit of space in the top-right corner yet to be filled with photos ... but I'm getting there :D Here's a closeup of the desk: 

Featuring my amazing NEW macbook Artemis, No Plot, No Problem! by Chris Baty, and a wonderful, epic NaNoWriMo calendar made by and awesome NaNo-er. I was going to credit them with it but when I tried to get back onto the thread where I got it from it wouldn't let me! So I will come back and credit them for it later. If you happen to be that NaNo-er ... thanks a million! :) It's awesome. Now, over to the right of the desk....

Is my epic book shelf. The lower shelves are quite obviously in need of arranging as I'm running out of room for books ... but the row of books on top are the most important for NaNo, as they're all the writing/reference/research books and stuff. Here's a close-up if you wanna check out my books ;) if a title catches your eye leave a comment and I'll let you know if the book is worth getting .. some of those are AMAZING and some, well ...

 

So yeah! My space. I'm pretty pumped for NaNo. Let's hope I do better than last year ... if you're participating, leave a comment with your username and I'll add you as a buddy! :)

It's him!

I'm just absolutely over the moon right now, because some lovely young man on NaNoWriMo offered to draw my character for me! And it's brilliant! So here he is, with his Victorian clothes and his shy stance and his awkward smile, the protagonist of Eloquence, Christian Rheese!

Yay! It's so epic. I'm so happy right now. Thank you, Buster Brown! I can't wait to see the other drawings he does for people....

NaNoWriMo!

Hello!

Now, I know I've been away for a long time. And I'm sorry. But I've had zero motivation for decent blog posts lately so all my stuff has been going on Picture Poetry and my tumblr. But I'm back here now, to tell you how excited I am for NaNoWriMo 2010!

I failed miserably last year with only 4,000 words, but I'm hoping I'll do a lot better this year. I already have my story idea, my title AND my book cover, which I made today on Photoshop. Thought I'd show it to you on this public blog seeing as I can claim no copyright to any of the images anyway:

Huzzah! It's about a girl and her siblings setting out on a road trip across Australia to find their long-lost Dad. I think it will be fun to write. I recycled some of the characters from a story I started writing about a year ago, so the character development I already have should give me a jumpstart, seeing as the biggest cause of failure last year was the lack of character development.

So yeah anyway. Hopefully this is the nudge back into proper blogging, so ta ta for now fellow unschoolers (as you're probably the only people who will read this)!

Saturday....

Took Juliette to basketball today. She's seven years old. I forgot how many questions seven-year-olds ask: What bus are we taking home? How do we get to the bus? How long is the bus trip? What's your favorite kind of chocolate? When does the bus come? What's that? How long til we get home? Where are we now? What does that say? Did you see that? Why's that sign there? Do we get off at the next stop? What's your favorite colour? Is this our stop? Do we have to walk down that street to get home now?

And so on, and so forth... It was a long morning. But good. And I made money, so then I got to go dress shopping with one of my most favorite people in the world! =D Though I probably drove her crazy trying to find a dress for my formal. I'm terrible at clothes shopping. I don't know what I want, I just know what I don't want.... Sorry Katie! It's okay. We found a dress, finally ... its blue! I like it.

Came home through Newtown ... on Halloween. So weird! We saw a horse-drawn carriage with steampunk-style goths riding it for a funeral. Kinda cool. Also a guy dressed in ragged clothes with fake blood all over his face, staggering down the street like a zombie ... I worked out that I don't really want to be in Newtown when it gets dark. That's when the vampires come out....

Got back and played Raving Rabbids with Katherine, Jono, Dan and Justin. SO MUCH FUN!! They stayed for dinner and we got slurpies after. Now watching Terminator 2 with Katherine and Justin. I love you guys.

Oh, and NaNoWriMo starts in 2 hours!!!!!!!!! Can't wait. ^_^

The clock is ticking...

NaNoWriMo starts at midnight!!!!! AHHHHH!!!!! I'm so excited!!!!!!!!!!! ^_^

My writing space!

I promised myself I would ACTUALLY USE my writing space during the month of November for NaNo. It's really is a cool writing space ... I'm just too lazy and like to lay on the couch instead....
So, to make myself more eager to use this coolio space, I'm putting some pictures up. Here you go:

Now, I'm hoping you can see the numbers in the picture that I have added for your convenience. Only problem is, if you can't see them then they're obviously not convenient. Hmm. Well, I'm gonna go along like you can see them, sooo.....

1. Is the stack of manila folders I keep in a folder-holder (hehe). Handy for dividing all my printed-off material into organized piles.

2. Is the chair that I do not like. Probably part of the reason I don't like to use this space very much. When I am a rich and famous author (unlikely, but hey) I'm going to by a wonderful leather chair on wheels that's so comfy I'll want to eat dinner up in my study, which my husband will not like (yes in my fantasy of being a rich and famous author I am also married - and I would like to think at least that part is likely).

3. Is my little notebook laptop. His name is Trent. He's a bit small and a bit slow but don't pick on him ... he's not a Mac but he tries his best! Go Trent.

4. Is quite obviously, a Ghostbusters poster. I acquired it from an Empire magazine. Thank you Kristen, for introducing me to Empire.

5. Is the bulletin board. Pics of all my incredibly awesome friends. Take special note of the Scott Pilgrim drawing and the green badge next to the US dollar bill. It says "Vote for Katherine".

6. Is the white-board. Currently (meaning, in the photo) it says "PRACTICE LINES!!" "NaNoWriMo Prep" and "Costume Design" which I have done.

7. Is a pile of uni work crammed into a holder so it looks neat. trust me it is not. I can't find anything.

8. Is the stack of pencil cases and notebooks. Writing notebooks, drawing books, and my NIDA folder.


So yeah, that's my writing space. Next to it, is this shelf:

Which contains all my writing books an a few of my favorite books and plays. Though unfortunately,  I was an idiot and did not make sure that the shelf held all its contents before taking the picture. So missing from the photo are my beloved book "45 Master Characters" and a dictionary of idioms given to me by my parents. :)

So yeah. Cool.

Steampunk! For the Sims 3....

So, the Sims 3 got steampunk. And I HAD to get some stuff for my sims. I made a sim of my main character, Christian Rheese, for my up-and-coming-in-November steampunk/dark fantasy detective novel.

I'm kind of torn between thinking that this is WICKED-AWESOME and thinking that this kind of sucks. Here I was for a little while, thinking I was ahead of the market, going to write a steampunk novel that was really cool and actually have a chance of getting published. Turns out on NaNo there are A LOT of people writing steampunk.

Oh well. I'm writing it anyway, of course. Nothing will stop me! Guess it's just a bonus that I can make a sim of Christian now. ^_^

10 days and I'll be writing!

NaNoWriMo begins at midnight, November 1st. There's still time to sign up! Do it. There's a link for their page if you scroll down a bit and look to the left where it says "wicked-awesome links" or something like that.

My plot is all mapped out. I have all the characters. The setting. The mystery. I have a narrator now, too. Double points for me. ^_^

I nearly signed this post as "see you in November" in hopes that you would sign up for NaNoWriMo, but since I will be writing all-November-long, I probably won't see you.

The blog to start blogging again

Hello! I haven't been here for a while. But that's ok, because I'm going to start blogging again now! I need a topic of interest to start upon ... oh! NaNoWriMo! National Novel Writing Month! Look it up. If you are a writer, or want to be a writer (like me) then NaNoWriMo just might be for you. My novel planning is pretty much complete and I'm waiting anxiously for November to come. November is THE MONTH for NaNo. So look it up while you still have time! Here's a picture for you to get you even more interested....