Blank Journals

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Written by: on Sunday, August 14th, 2011

This is probably the last blank journal I have ever purchased. It was sold on a local ‘yardsale’ site for $2 and I just pounced on it. I didn’t care of if it was used, if it had any pages torn out, etc… They sell for a lot of money and I just had to have one. (Didn’t realize there was an inverted star on it.)

Problem is, I already own a stack of blank journals and lined journals that never got used. I remember receiving some journals that had the Harry Potter theme on it. One was “The Blank Book” that was packaged with some book from the Series of Unfortunate Events series.

They’re so incredibly neat to have but I just never know what to write in them. I currently have one ‘leather’ journal where I’ve written a few entries in it after reading from an ‘ancestry/family tree’ site that it never hurts to keep an actual journal to write about daily events in. It may be boring and dull to you now but a descendant may be fascinated to know how you lived a hundred years ago.

I did think about writing my story in one of the journals but I just don’t think I’d have the interest to write the whole thing down. Some part of me may cave after 100 pages and want to print them out via printer instead. On the other hand, I am a little nervous that everything is on computer or on my external harddrive. I make several copies so that if something happens to one or the other, I’m safe. Printing out on paper is a good idea but … one day, a story written in a blank journal may become valuable!

The only question left is… Thinking of the future if the books ever got passed down, do I print the letters out or write in cursive?  ( Cursive is a dying art form. )


Location: The Green Room
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Where are you going?

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Written by: on Thursday, August 11th, 2011

Eleventh day. I have WORD open. I have about two hundred words typed out so far. I’m doing good. I got 17,201 words all counted out from my ‘Day 1’ to ‘Day 10’ files (I like to open a new word doc for every day to make sure I’m meeting my daily goal). I’m not behind. I’m not far ahead. I’m just slowly wandering down this woodsy path with no clue of where I’m going. This is bad.

I keep going back to when I wrote ‘Caspar and the Lunar Magic’. I was excited to write the beginning. I knew where the middle was. I knew how it ended. I paced myself. I made up conflicts that took me from one scene to the next. And then I was pretty proud of myself for having a whole adventure written out on the last day of November.

As I type the ‘sequel’ this time, I feel like I’m just doing a lot of babbling. I feel like the story is unfolding in such a boring way because I’m not sure what’s going on myself. I still don’t know what the middle of the story is and I don’t know how it ends. I keep expecting that as I feel my way through, a plot will jump right out of it all and say, “Here I am! Aren’t I just the perfect thing to explain all the crap your characters are mucking through right now?”

The last thing I want to do is write 50,000+ words of a story that sounds like a non-stop role playing session instead of an adventure that has a start and an end. I’ll never do a full outline and I do like the idea of coming up with stepping stones on the spot but if I have no idea what those stepping stones are leading me to, it feels like I’m standing in the middle of the woods with no visible clearing to get to.

This has definitely shown me that when I try “Coming of the Second Phoenix” for November of this year, I need to know the beginning, middle, end, and some major plots to push my main characters through.

Well, It’s just days shy of being halfway through the month. I have no choice but to keep wrestling this dragon and tame it.

 

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Location: The Green Room
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This is the true story of six strangers picked to live in a cabin…

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Written by: on Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

Looks like Camp NaNoWriMo‘s ‘cabin’ feature is happening. They say the bots are running so not everyone is in a cabin yet. I checked. Low and behold, I saw “Messageboard”. I visited and saw the others that I was put in a cabin with.

I crossed their names and novels out for privacy, of course. 🙂

It’s an interesting little feature. There doesn’t seem to be anything beyond what you see. You just make an update and it appears in your thought bubble. I guess the feature really plays on the ‘camp’ theme and how people got grouped into cabins. It appears they’re being really strict with the cabin feature. You’re stuck in a cabin that you’re put in and if you opt out, that’s it. You don’t get any other cabin.

My writing is going along. I met my daily 1,667 word goal yesterday and the day before It’s going slow today but I expect to reach the goal before the day is over.  I found my D&D dvd and popped that in so that it discourages me from watching tv – as funny as that sounds. The movie used to put me in a storytelling mood since it feels like an RPG but now I just glance over, watch a scene, and then I’m back to staring at Word. I don’t think I’m burning out yet. Just that it’s very hot here and I feel like doing nothing. I also don’t seem to dwell on the story. Normally if I’m away from Word, I just play with the scenes in my head and try to figure out something that’ll happen next or where they should go… This time around, I don’t focus on the story when I’m away from it. I only ever think about the story if I’m trying to make my goal for the day.

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Location: The Green Room
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Would you ever get a tattoo?

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Written by: on Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

The Daily Post asks:
Would you ever get a tattoo? If you had one, what made you decide to get your first? If you don’t have one, why or why not would you ever consider getting one?
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No, I would never consider getting one. I’m sure if I was standing in front of a tattoo shop, I might be tempted – some part of me just might burst out at the excitement of experiencing it – but the idea of a tattoo being permanent is just too unnerving for me. What’s also scary is how sometimes organizations or groups may adopt a tattoo to represent them and if you happen to have it… yikes. The tattoo removal process is also frightening so I wouldn’t want to go through it if I absolutely hated my tattoo after. I refuse to do one of those ‘cover-ups’ where they design a bigger tattoo over it to obscure/hide the original. Some of those cover-ups aren’t very well done.

So ultimately, no, I would never get a tattoo. I don’t see myself just deciding to get one with the ‘cons’ always pressing against it.

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Location: The Green Room
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Camp NaNoWriMo

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Written by: on Monday, August 1st, 2011

So Camp NaNoWriMo has started today for the month of August and of course I decided to give it a try which meant I’ve spent the past few hours staring at Word while trying to figure out what happens. It’s more difficult this time around. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this but for NNWM of November 2010 when I started writing, I knew the beginning, middle, and end. Because I knew what would happen in the middle of the story, I was able to tell myself that I couldn’t reach the middle of the story until it was November 15th or so. This forced me to find other things to fill the gap in between so that I couldn’t go rushing through my story and hit the end so quickly. Then after hitting the middle of the story, I was forced to write in other things to fill in the second half before I reached the end of the story near the end of the month.

This time around, I know how the story starts. I know why it’s happening. I just don’t have a middle or an end. I don’t know how to pace the story so that I’m not speeding to the end and then end up with a quick story. All I can really do is what I did last time. Just feel around in the dark and let the story unfold. Maybe I’ll know what the middle is and how it ends and then pace myself then.

According to Word’s word count, I’ve written 856 words. This is going to hurt. A lot. Back to the storytelling…

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Location: The Green Room
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Weekly Photo Challenge: Broken

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Written by: on Friday, July 29th, 2011

The Daily Post‘s Weekly Photo Challenge is: Broken

So I submit this photo. A birdfeeder brought down by a nasty squirrel that chewed at the strings. Even though it was dangling from a shepherd’s hook (The other end of the hook dangled from a branch), those squirrels are still pretty crafty. I guess they didn’t much care for the seeds after they helped themselves to all the fresh sunflower seeds from my sunflowers.

We’re in a severe drought right now with temperatures in the 90’s (Currently spot-on 100°F on weather.com at the moment) so the grass is dead/dying/roasting. Trying to save the beds in the meanwhile.

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Location: The Green Room
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What would it take to get you to move?

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Written by: on Wednesday, July 27th, 2011

The Daily Post asks:
What would it take to get you to move? If someone you trusted offered you $1000 to move to a different city, would that be enough? More? Or would you need other things (the promise of friends or better weather?) What would they need to offer you before you’d instantly say yes? Or if you already want to move, what would it take to get you to stay?
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A thousand dollars seems rather meager. I’ve been wanting to move because it gets hotter here every summer. The vegetable gardens have stopped thriving. I even tried semi-sun/shade arrangement and the plants still flopped over from the insane humidity. That’s another thing! We’re in a severe drought and yet there’s still insane humidity here!

I miss the old days of when we first moved into this house. I’d water the cucumbers and yellow squash and there’d be so many of them that we couldn’t eat them faster than the plants were producing. I’m still struggling with the tomatoes as the regular varieties don’t seem to care about producing but they sure do grow into big plants in the meanwhile. Nowadays I’m lucky if anything grows before the heat picks up and they’re pretty much stressed before dying out mid-summer.

What would get me to move? Guaranteed privacy. I can’t live in a city. I grew up on base housing where 4 to 8 families were squished into one building. No yard to call your own and everything was public (which made it tons easy to play games like tag and hide-and-seek, I’ll admit). I also don’t want to live in a neighborhood where houses are all built neatly and when you step out into your backyard, you can see into the 5 other backyards pressing up against your own.

Right now I live in a house where woods surround the backyard and my closest neighbors are spread out quite a bit and divided by ditches and/or trees. I love it here – except for the weather. I’d like to move up north a bit but I hear it’s been much hotter up north than it has been down here so I guess I just can’t win. There’s also a gas station at the end of the road. I used to walk to it just to get soda from the fountain since it tasted much better than bottled and canned soda.

To make me move, it’d have to guarantee privacy and nicer weather in which a vegetable garden can thrive and help save money with groceries.

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Location: The Green Room
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What would you like 200 more of?

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Written by: on Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

The Daily Post asks:
In honor of reaching topic #200, what in your life would want to have 200 more of? Some people say they want to live longer, but would you really want to live for another 200 years? Others claim they want to be smarter, but how would you get along with your friends if you were 200 times smarter than they are (assuming that’s not already the case)? Perhaps you’d like a new car, but would could you possibly do with 200 more of them?

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I almost said 200 wishes but seeing as how it’s asking ‘more of’ and I have no magical wishes at the moment, 200 more of nothing is not helpful. I do not want to live longer than I have to and I don’t want to be insanely smart.

I’ll take the more predictable route and say that I want 200 more of my written books. I wrote one during NaNoWriMo 2010 and to have 200 more books materialize that I would’ve written on my fantasy worlds is a truly exciting idea. All those books sitting around, I imagine it’d be real neat to read them all and be happy that it’s all put down on paper. Then I’d start writing my 202nd book.

The more and more August approaches, I’m starting to think that maybe I should participate in Camp NaNoWriMo. They’re doing their official run in August and my muses have been kicking my butt about writing a sequel to ‘Caspar and the Lunar Magic’. I have a story in mind for November which is totally unrelated but I guess my mind isn’t done playing with CatLM right now. I still keep tinkering with the idea of creators returning to the world to handle another problem that’s unfolding. I think I want to tackle this and have a second book written.

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Location: The Green Room
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Five Important Books I’ve Read

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Written by: on Monday, July 25th, 2011

The Daily Post asks:
List the 5 most important books you’ve ever read. Don’t think too much, just get a pen, or open a new post, and start listing books. When you’re done, go book and write a sentence or two about why each book ended up on your list. Do you think those books would have been more or less important had you read them at a different time in your life? Or would each one have effected you just as much regardless of when you read them?
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Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling – I can’t pick which book so I might as well go with the whole line-up. This has been the only series where I just couldn’t put them down. I couldn’t get enough and actually finished each book within a day or two because I just had to know what happened. I’ve never been able to do that with any other book before and after.

The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams – I have learned from this book that it is a very bad idea for the first 100+ pages to have no action. No action at all whatsoever. It’s a very bad idea. I made it through the first 100 pages and had to call it quits. I just couldn’t take it anymore.

Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – I own these two volumes that are supposed to be the complete collection about Sherlock Holmes. While I devoured the first volume and part of the second (I died out during The Baskerville Hounds), it was a real lesson that it is very difficult to write a character that’s supposed to be much smarter than you. The fact that the author was able to pull out tons of little details and deduce major plots based on them and move things along… I loved it.

A Spell for Chameleon by Piers Anthony – This was my first leap into a fantasy world where things really pushed the envelope and still managed to work. This taught me that not everything has to have a scientific reason or has to be explained. Fantasy is truly where anything goes.

Desert Eden by J.M. Morgan – I’m not sure why this comes to mind. I just know that this was pretty much the first book that I willingly read outside of school. I remember liking it a lot and always wanting to get the other two books. I tried but libraries in the area never had the other two books or even heard of it. It wouldn’t be until years later when the internet came around and eBay was at its peak when I tracked down the other two books and finished the trilogy.

 

As for whether it makes a difference on when the books were read, I don’t think so. Harry Potter was consumed upon sight. I think the only thing that really would be affected is Desert Eden as I pretty much mark this as my first book despite my having read a number of books from the Great Illustrated Classics line-up. I figure the GIC books were often required to read in school so it wasn’t my true step outside to other books.


Location: Library, The Green Room
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Weekly Photo Challenge: Colorful

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Written by: on Saturday, July 23rd, 2011

The Daily Post‘s Weekly Photo Challenge is “Colorful”. In this heat, I’m afraid all I can offer is a tiny playground that remains unassembled because it’s just plain too hot to do anything outdoors.

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Location: The Green Room
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