Improvement

Lin Wang, the conductor of the blog chain train this week.

All of us strive toward improvement.  I don't think there's a definitive formula to improvement. Plus, some people improve faster than others.  Some of us are just the tortoise, slowing making our way to the finish line.  Well, maybe the blind tortoise, since we can't see how close we are to the finish line or where the dang finish line is.  But WE'RE GETTING THERE. Inch by laborious inch.  And because I am the Queen of List-making, here is the List for today:

1) Read.  This is so redundant.  Read everything you can get your hands on.  That's great if it's your genre; that's also great if it's not.  I wasn't much of a fantasy person before I started writing a fantasy.  But the process of writing that genre made me appreciate reading it more, and then I learned more about the genre through reading.  I read a lot of YA.  I read adult too. Sometimes I still read children's books.  And when I'm not reading novels, I'm reading textbooks.  Or biographies.  Or short stories.  (Short stories are really great if you're pressed for time).  Read something.  Really read it.  Don't just skim either.  Pay attention to the direction the stories go.  Reread too.  Don't read something once and never pick it up again.  I reread stuff all the time.  I mean, I don't reread it from cover to cover, but I like picking up a book I've read before and opening it to a random scene.  I do it SO MUCH that I basically reread the book, but out of order.

2) Betas.  You need people to tell you what is wrong with your stuff.  Always good to know. Sometimes, you don't even know you're doing stuff wrong.  My creative writing teacher over the summer told me I use an overabundance of long sentences.  I didn't even notice I did it until he pointed it out.  So yes.  Critical readers are scary, but they are good.

3) WRITE.  Do it.  A lot.  If you write pages and pages year after year, I can bet you, even without betas or reading, you'll be better.  You might be thinking, "This writing is total crap." It's hard to get started if you're a perfectionist.  But just think: you're building a bridge out of the crap you're writing today to get to the good stuff you'll be writing tomorrow!  If you want a solid bridge so you won't fall into the ravine, you need a lot of crap.  So get started today.  If you want to destroy the evidence, you can burn the bridge once you're across, and everybody will think you sprouted wings and flew.  But you will know the secret.

Sorry.  I wanted to reveal something totally REVOLUTIONARY and UNIQUE like: take your favorite books, burn them, and inhale the fumes.  Then you'll absorb all of its WRITERLY MAGIC.  (Okay, don't really do that.  The only thing you'll end up inhaling is the magic of lung damage.)  But alas, I have no miraculous shortcuts for you.  Writing is a straightforward business.  It's like learning how to play piano.  You can either be a prodigy or you can practice.  No matter how many hours you stare at the sheet music, you will not absorb technical proficiency through your eyeballs.  You're going to have to sit your booty on that piano bench and work it out yourself.

Monday: Flames and Shadows

Tuesday: Sometimes Helpful Nonsense

Wednesday: me

Thursday: Girl With A Notebook

Friday: Somewhere Nowhere In My Kingdom

We Fell Into Fall

It's autumn.  So maybe it's not officially autumn.  Or is it?  I haven't checked.  But it feels like it.  Autumn is my favorite season.  It's when there's that chill in the air that makes you pull your jacket closer around you.  The bright wind picks up and makes your cheeks cold.  The sky is hard, deep blue, a colder shade than summer.  Outside, it smells like ripe leaves all the time as they blow in spirals on sidewalks like dancing.  You can do your homework with a blanket wrapped around yourself.  You can wear cute scarves and look normal.  You can legitimately have hot apple cider again without feeling lame.  I know they say the east coast has the best autumn, but I think the Midwest puts up a pretty good show too (by Midwest, I mean Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, maybe Ohio, and part of Missouri; Wisconsin and Michigan do not count, and anything from Kentucky down is the South--my definition, not the US Census Bureau's definition).  You can't have autumn without cornfields.  Corn is a way of life in Illinois.  Fun factoid: my university has the oldest experimental cornfield in the western hemisphere.  It's in the middle of campus, and it's the reason we have an underground undergrad library (so shade won't fall on the corn).  If you trespass, you get expelled.  

I don't know about you, but autumn makes me want to write.  There are so many pretty things outside to take inspiration from.  And it's not to cold to go outside yet.  This means I still have a couple of trips to the CPL yet, before the snow deters me for four months.  Also, admit it: autumn brings out the best coffee drinks.  Pumpkin spice?  Maple white mocha?  Toffee? Pretty things + cool weather + good coffee = yay writing.  It's a very simple equation.

What is autumn like where you live?  What's your favorite season?

Something New

Kim asked us whether we were doing anything new with our writing.  There are several things new with my life/writing.  Let me list them for you.  Have you noticed that probably 50% of my posts involve lists of some kind?  My life is a list.  Seriously, if I could put up a screenshot of my desk and show you how every post-it is a list of things I have to do for so-and-so class on so-and-so day, you would see that the previous statement is true.

1) My schedule.  My schedule is a full-blown mess, since I can no longer write every day.  And I'm okay with that.  I used to be psychotically not okay with that in the summer, but when school starts, that GPA (ahhh!) is my number one priority.  If you want to know how much of an Asian GPA freak I am, I panicked when I got my anthropology quiz back today, and it was only 91.35% (oh yeah, you know I remember the EXACT percentage).  Because that's an A-. Just while I'm at it, I'll go ahead and let you know my one out-of-this-world-impossible dream in life is to be like Barack Obama/Elle Woods (obviously interchangeable) and go to Harvard Law.  So as you can see, there are a lot of other things occupying my mind.  Instead, I try to block out days where I can have at least an hour to write.  And then the trouble is trying to follow that plan religiously, instead of getting distracted by Bubble Tea! or other things that suddenly seem invariably more important during Writing Time.

2) My story.  I'm writing fan fiction instead of real stuff.  But that's okay, because the reviews I'm getting shallowly boost my self-esteem.  And I'm not just saying this--it's really dorky, but fan fiction improves your craft.  Usually.  I mean, if you're one of those people who can't spell "please read" or "summary" correctly in your summary, then maybe all hope is lost for you/the English language/humanity.  In attempting to prove the worth of my detour to myself, I'm also in a way, practicing plotting.  Because I have come to the conclusion that I am awful at plotting.  It's a weakness of mine.  I can do dialogue.  I can do description decently.  I am a pretty above average writer.  But plotting is HARD.  So I'm going to use this opportunity to practice in a way that only involves rejection/acceptance from casual anonymous readers on the Internet instead of SCARY AGENTS.

3) Rewriting.  I rewrote the last chapter of said fan fiction story 3 times already, and it's still not done.  Before I started writing seriously, I never rewrote.  Like, never ever.  If it was out on paper, it was IN STONE.  It was like a commandment of God.  The delete key did not exist for me.  But now it does, and I am happy.  I am learning the magic of the "try, try again" theory.

4) Keeping at it.  I've also learned it's unacceptable for me to use writer's block now as an excuse to not post a new chapter in three months.  Which happened for my last fan fiction novel.  That is called laziness.  I am a hard worker.  I can do this.  I can update on time.  I can be on a timely schedule.  I can WRITE STORIES and most importantly, FINISH THEM.  This is a good lesson for life in general--not quitting.

5) Appreciation.  What's new?  My appreciation for the journey of writing, instead of the months from January to August where I was hellbent on rolling out a novel for publication. I'm getting a lot better at appreciating the spontaneity of the beginning of a chapter, the frustration of the middle of a chapter, and the satisfaction of the end of a chapter.  Life is about the journey, not the destination (because the destination is invariably death...), so stories are too.

WHAT AM I DOING?  It's midnight, and I have a British history test tomorrow.  If I don't get an A in that class, I will be SAD.  I also wiped out half of a full-sized bag of Flamin' Hot Cheetos and had frozen yogurt twice.  The story of a college student (by that I mean, the story of gaining the Freshman 15, except every year).

Monday: Somewhere Nowhere In My Kingdom

Tuesday: Can we please pretend like I got this out on time? Edit: HA, my timestamp says I did!

Wednesday: Sometimes Helpful Nonsense

Thursday: Flames and Shadows

Friday: Girl With A Notebook

Stop Reading, Children

That's right, people.  My blog is R-rated.  So don't read on, because you know there's dirty porn if you continue scrolling down.

I'm blogging from the CPL.  One of the reasons I love writing here is because their walls are actually gigantic glass windows.  You can see everything outside.  The library is surrounded by trees and one side has quaint little brick streets.  Especially when autumn (my favorite season) comes around and all the leaves start changing colors, this is the ideal place to get my write on.  Also, there is a cafe downstairs.  Could this place be any more perfect?  I'm about to go down and get a strawberry-banana smoothie in a few minutes.

I wrote 1,700 words last night, albeit for my fan fiction story.  It's on a roll.  I'm going to write until I get sick of it, and then I'll switch over.  I don't want to throw water on a fire that is crackling merrily.  I don't want to rain on my parade.  

So I don't have much to say, other than that, I'm going to milk this afternoon (and night) for what it's worth, since I have 300 pages to read by Monday and a British history test coming up next week.

Happy Friday!

Snippet:

-----

He wanted to sleep for the rest of the weekend.  He checked his watch.  Five o’clock.  Cassie would be coming over in three hours.  It was so unfair.  Here he was a twenty-nine-year-old man, and every time there was a disturbance within a hundred mile radius, he was still the one to call.  Didn’t they have up and coming heroes for this?  Oh, right.  None of them were well-trained enough.  Camp Half-Blood evidently had better liability rules now about not getting so many of the trainees knocked off before their sixteenth birthday.  That would’ve been super convenient in my day.  He closed his eyes and groaned.  Gods.  “In my day?” What am I, forty-nine going on fifty?  I need a nap.

His cell phone vibrated on the table.  Annabeth's number.  Cassie wouldn’t be calling him at this time.  She would be doing her homework.  Annabeth was very strict about Cassie getting her homework done before going off to play.  Most likely, it was Annabeth calling to say she couldn’t bring their daughter over, or she was going to be late, or maybe she just wanted to berate him about signing the papers again.

He screened the call.

Inspiration

LATE, LATE, LATE, LATE, LATE.  Yes.  I'm sorry, guys.

But here we are, three weeks into the school year, one physics test later (A, thank you very much), and my writing life is going better.  Tomorrow is Friday, and before I go camping (I'm going camping with some people in my dorm at night), I'm going to have a write-in.  I get done at 11 am, so I'm going to go to the CPL finally and get in a good 3-4 hours.  It'll be good.

Last thing that inspired me?  Research for my history term paper (divorce law in India), the PJO Fic Battle, and greenconverses.  It's important for me right now, not necessarily to shoot for publication at breakneck speed, but continue honing my writing until I'm ready.  So I'm starting a new fanfiction novel project that I'll be writing at the SAME TIME as ATRS. Alternating chapters.  I consider it a good sign that I wrote 1,400 words in an hour last night. This is the result: The End of You and Me, Chapter 1.

------

Percy put the papers in front of him and stared at them as if he could will them to disappear. This was one problem he couldn’t fix with Riptide.  This was one problem he couldn’t figure out how to fix.  It pissed him off.  There was nobody in the apartment, so he picked up a plastic cup and threw it at the wall.  It made a loud clunk and fell to the floor intact.  It left a tiny dent.  He would have to pay for that.  Wasn’t throwing things supposed to give people some satisfaction?  He still felt as if angry little ants were crawling under his skin.

He glanced at the handful of pens in the cup on the coffee table.  He couldn’t make himself go get one.  If he put his signature on that bottom line, that was it.  It meant he was really calling it quits.  It meant everything he had worked for since he was twelve years old was a total waste.

She said something a long time ago that stuck with him, particularly right now.  It seemed so ironic.  They thought they could trump the statistics.  They had beaten every Titan in the book, hadn’t they?  It turned out beating monsters wasn’t the same thing as beating real life.  Real life was harder, and real life didn’t go away after you solved one thing.  You woke up every day, and you had to work at it every day.

“Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce.”  She said it before they got married.  “Do you think we can beat those odds?” she asked him then.

They were young and in love.  Everything was easy.  “Yeah,” he told her.  “I promise we will.”

The stupid cuckoo clock on the wall struck six.  It made the most obnoxious dings.  He wanted to strike it down from its perch.  “Damn it, Annabeth,” he said out loud.  “Why did we have to be in the wrong half of the fifty percent?”  This was one more thing she was going to hold against him.  Promises could be broken, and he broke the most important one.

Continued.

Monday: Girl With A Notebook

Tuesday: my assigned day

Wednesday: Sometimes Helpful Nonsense

Thursday: Somewhere Nowhere In My Kingdom

Friday: Flames and Shadows

Making Yourself Happy

I think I need to address this issue, because writing sometimes counteracts it.  Well, actually because I just "read" Lady Glam's post.  By "read" I mean, I skimmed the first two paragraphs. I should be studying physics right now, but blogging is MORE IMPORTANT on my list of priorities.

So, who really knows what Lady Glam's post is?  I will when I read it later.  But the point is, it provided a good springboard for my own post.  Isn't how they all come about?  I am the opposite of creativity.  I suck the creativity out of everything.

There are a lot of writers who are depressed.  Like Emily Dickinson.  I don't know; I guess creative people need that negative energy to a certain extent.  I mean, not to a suicidal extent, but for purposes of channeling things.  When I was younger, I tried numerous times to keep a diary.  I have four or five of them, each filled to maybe ten pages if I was ambitious, less if I was impatient/forgetful.  Going back and reading them, you know what they sound like? ANGST.  "Blah blah, I hate my brother, blah blah, my mom is ruining my life, blah blah, why is everything so DRAMATIC?"  I don't know about you guys, but my diaries (which I don't try to keep anymore, since my brother is super good at using them to blackmail me) were canvasses upon which to vent the woes of my complicated pre-teen life.  I only wrote when I was emotionally disturbed.

But I think there's a point to which you have to understand that writing is not actually about being depressed.  If writing is not making you happy overall (so I admit, writing pisses me off a lot, but I am happy OVERALL with it), then a reevaluation is necessary.  Don't do something that ruins your life, for obvious reasons.  It's not worth it.

If publication is ruining your life, then don't think about it.  I definitely get sucked into thinking about publication a lot, but I try not to.  Writing should be about enjoying whatever stage you're in.  I tell myself that I would write even if I never, ever get published.  And that makes the climb a lot better.

Some of my happiest, most fulfilling moments have been when I wrote a fanfiction piece I was particularly proud of.  I don't even need a lot of validation--but you know, because I am egotistical like that, I save every single review I get in a folder.  So maybe not everything I write is a jewel.  Maybe it's a piece of coal.  It doesn't matter to me as long as it's something I spent time on and slaved over.

Anyway, it's time for me to write another fanfiction piece (or two, but probably not) for the battle, and I was thinking about how it wasn't adding to my novel.  But sometimes, it's best to do what makes you happy.  Learn to be selfish for the moments that matter.

Except for school.  If school makes you unhappy, that's too bad.  You have to do it anyway.

Linky Linky News

I am keeping a pretty good blogging schedule this week!

If you all haven't heard yet, The Hobbit has been greenlighted for production.  Peter Jackson will be producing, but Guillermo Del Toro is the director.  Supposedly, unless something goes horribly awry, Sir Ian McKellen is coming back (as are many other original cast members) for the part of Gandalf.  I wasn't planning on seeing it because Peter Jackson wasn't doing the actual directing, but I have been won over.  I am in love with Sir Ian McKellen, as much in love with an old gay man as you possibly can be.  Gandalf is up and close to my favorite character in the LotR movies.  In my imagination, I like to pretend he is Dumbledore too.  Wouldn't he make a great Dumbledore?

Anyway, the point is, I have to go read The Hobbit now.  Yes, shoot me if you must, but I've never actually read the book.  I found it rather boring in the first couple of pages as a kid.  So I'm going to try again.  

Also on my list of books to be read: His Dark Materials series (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass).  Greenconverses read  and recommended it.  This is another series that I started and found dull in the beginning.  But if it gets better, I'm willing to give it another chance.  

Speaking of greenconverses, the newest PJO battle is up.  The Battle of Mount Olympus has begun.  I think I have at least a few people reading who might be interested in getting their Percy Jackson fanfiction on.  Participants put up prompts.  Participants write prompt-based stories.  Pretty easy.  Pretty fun.  I'm pumped.  It's a struggle for me to write off prompts, but it's good practice and I always feel accomplished when I finish a piece.  

This is unrelated, but on October 2 (coming up soon!), the IOC votes on the Olympic host city for 2012.  Go Chi-town!  It's running up against some stiff competition.  I guess my second choice would be Rio de Janeiro, because I don't think Brazil has had a chance to host yet.

In personal accomplishment news, on Tuesday, I wrote 1,000 words.  Yay!  I'm still not pleased with this portion of the story.  It's already gone through two rewrites, but I'll let it be.  No doubt, it will undergo several more by the time the novel is completely finished.  

I've been slacking on my personal reading.  I've let several books sit in the middle, not having finished them.  Hopefully, this weekend, I'll read Beloved by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison and finish Troy (Adele Geras) and UnLunDun (China Mieville).  Yes, I still haven't finished UnLunDun yet.  It's a good book so far.  I've just been reading a couple pages before bed at night and well...clearly that's not fast enough.

Also, if any of you guys are historical fiction fans, Philippa Gregory's newest novel The White Queen about Elizabeth Woodville released on August 18th.  I've noticed that for her last couple of books, Ms. Gregory has shifted to using present tense, a shift that I like very much.

Question of the day: What is the proper balance between dialogue and exposition?

Ratings or Censorship: Politics, Social Commentary, and More

Nathan Bransford put up an apparently controversial issue up to vote on his blog today: should children's books be content rated?  If you have an opinion on this matter, please go vote.  As for me, I'm going to delineate my views on the matter right here, right now.  

Disclaimer: I am not a parent.  I do not pretend to know good parenting.  For all we know, I may be a terrible parent when I finally pop those babies.  But not being a parent does not mean I can't have an opinion.  Also, I am legally an adult, so whether or not a ratings system is put in place does not really affect me.  I can buy porn and cigarettes.  It's not like I'm trying to sneak into the library restricted section at Hogwarts.  

Let's be honest.  Rating systems don't work.  They're too subjective.  One person's R is another person's PG-13 is another person's NC-17.  Knowing where we live, the second a parent gets offended by a "wrongly labeled rating," he/she is going to freak out and sue.  Come on, people, this is America where someone can win a lawsuit over too-hot coffee.  It's like the universal solution to life.  Got problems?  File a lawsuit!  Nobody will ever agree to one rating system. There are those psycho over-protective parents, and the ones who practically let their kids smoke weed at the age of 3.  They will never come to a consensus.

Historically, rating has commonly been used for discriminatory purposes.  For example, popular YA author Maureen Johnson wrote the "controversial" novel The Bermudez Triangle in 2005.  It portrayed a homosexual relationship in a positive way.  No graphic sex, nothing.  Yet some mothers saw fit to petition libraries to essentially give it an "adult" rating.  They wanted the book out of the YA section.  Why?  Do people only become homosexual once they turn eighteen?  Is it like the magical age of the disappearing closet door?  So we expect gay teenagers to struggle through their adolescence without any fictional examples of their normalcy?  The message those mothers are sending to other people's children is you're dirty, and your lifestyle is not appropriate.  And they want to foist their opinion of correctness onto the general public.

Beyond that, there are still parents who believe in shielding young children from sex, drugs, and other un-childlike things.  Okay, I get it.  But here's my problem.  Parents seem to hold this notion that they can keep this kind of stuff from kids.  Not to scare the bejeezus out of you, but you can't.  In junior high, at the tender age of eleven, I found used condoms in the hallways, saw drawings of genitals on bathroom walls, bomb threats, nudity, all kinds of profanity, and drug deals right under my nose.  No, I did not attend school in innercity Chicago.  I lived in a small, relatively conservative town, surrounded by cornfields, home of State Farm, upper middle-class people, and poster child for good morals and Americanness.  There's TV, news articles, textbooks, video games, people.  Do you plan on locking your kid in your basement until they're 18?  Home-schooling?  Go for it.  But one day, you're going to have to let them go.

I see this problem all the time.  Parents who don't know how to let their kids learn on their own. There are masses of college students all around me who can't function without their parents. They can't make their own decisions; they're crippled by fear of mistakes.  Hell, if you left them alone, I think they would starve to death.  I think the scarier thing, scarier even than having a nine-year-old accidentally read the word "sex," is having an eighteen-year-old enter the world with no clue as to how vulgar things can be and no idea as to how to deal with it.  It's the sheltered kids who are going out and getting alchol poisoning, because they are finally "free." They can't deal with freedom.  They overdose on it.  Do you want your kid to be that kid?

I was probably eight when I read my first graphic romance novel.  My aunt left it in our house by mistake, and I was curious.  It was one of this 1980's rapey ones where the hero rapes the heroine until she loves him.  I read an excellent novel, When Dad Killed Mom by Julius Lester when I was in sixth grade.  It's exactly what it sounds like.  A father (probably mildly sociopathic) kills his wife, and the two kids learn how to cope with a dead mother and a father going to court for murder.  

I think people have this misconception that humanity is unsalvageably stupid.  Reading a book by an atheist will not make you a devil-worshiper, listening to a speech by our crazy socialist black president (sarcasm) will not transform you into Joseph Stalin, and seeing a picture of a naked person will not make you move to a nudist colony.  I've had socialist teachers (they're both brilliant).  Doesn't make me one.  I've had pregnant teenage friends.  I'm not pregnant.  So I read a rapey romance novel.  I barely understood what was going on when I did.  I couldn't even grasp the concept of sex.  And it has not made me think rape is okay.  When I read Julius Lester's book, it did not make me want to be a murderer, or think homocide is okay, or consider getting a nipple-piercing (as the daughter does).

If you are disturbed by a book, here's the greatest thing: you can close it and never lay eyes on it again.  You run across some profanity?  Stop reading.  Sex scene?  Skip it.  It's a pretty awesome concept.  :-)

So you're a time challenged parent.  Do you really feel the need to check every single book your kid lays hands on?  Do you know how many books I read as a child?  If I had to wait for my parents to pre-read everything, I would have a lot less reading experience.  Are you going to scour their school for everything you deem inappropriate?  Scrub the graffiti off every bathroom you walk into?  Pre-screen every single movie, presume they're not lying to you about what movie they're going to see?  Read their history textbooks for "graphic images" of whipped slaves and starving children?  Interview all of their friends?  Interrogate all of their teachers?  

Tell me.  Are you going to do those things?  Do you think a rating system is going to solve your problem if you are so paranoid that you think one inappropriate novel is going to psychologically ruin your baby, turn him into a delinquent?

I say no to a rating system on books.

PS: You can always use review sites and/or Amazon, and the rest of us won't have to put up with a rating system.  The Internet, guys.  It's a wondrous thing.

Please share your opinion, either in the comments, or in a blog post (link me up, so I can read it!).  I love dissenting views.

(Although, I'll be honest.  If you're hell-bent on rating systems, I won't have changed your mind.  As someone who is a political enthusiast and did grassroots canvassing, I've found that people are notoriously stubborn.  When was the last time you convinced someone that your party was right and theirs was wrong?  Yeah, didn't think so.  Bi-partisanship sounds like a great deal.  I've come to the conclusion that it's a load of crap both parties feed the public, as if we can hope for some kind of compromise.)  

Red Pill or Blue Pill?

On Sunday, The Matrix: Reloaded was playing on TV, and because I have no self-control, I watched it.  Part of it, anyway.  I didn't have time to watch the whole thing.  So I was thinking about how in the first one, Cypher betrays/kills people because he makes a bargain with Agent Smith to plug him back into the Matrix.  He got tired of living in the "real world."  

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, The Matrix is basically a sci-fi movie about how the world as we know it is actually an illusion.  In real life, humans are kept dormant in nasty liquid pods by machines and harvested for energy.  A select few people have been "unplugged" and thus liberated, and they fight a perpetual war with the machines.  The main character, Neo, is still in the matrix (the machine-created illusion) in the beginning of the first movie, but he is offered the choice of being freed and learning the truth.  At this point, of course, he has no idea the extent of the truth.  He has a choice of either taking the red pill (being liberated from the machines and fighting the guerilla war) or taking the blue pill (where he will wake up and forget he had this entire conversation and continue living in the matrix).

So maybe it's just me, but after seeing how awful, gray, and depressing the real world is, I have to admit, I thought I would take the blue pill, no question.  Screw that.  Fighting machines and eating snot every day?  No thanks.  I'd rather live in my happy illusion of blue skies, even if the machines are slowly killing me.  I always related to Cypher.  Not in the killing-your-friends part, but in the get-me-out-of-this-damn-nightmare part.

Then, I thought this was kind of funny, because I was also the girl who tried to Blue-Ski-Doo into pictures as a child and loved the Narnia idea of walking into the wardrobe into a different world.  Isn't that essentially the same thing?  I wanted to escape from the current world and explore some place new and exciting.  Except, The Matrix presents a much more adult, more bleak version of Narnia.  Right?

In the end, I guess it comes down to whether or not you can stomach the truth.  If you were presented with a red pill or a blue pill, which would you take?  On one hand, the red pill could give you a better reality, or it could give you a worse one.  But you don't know.  Would you take the chance or stay in the status quo?

After much consideration, I think I would still take the red pill.  What would be worse, taking the road less traveled, but turning back later and regretting it?  Or wondering for the rest of your life what would have happened if you took that road?

Like Shia LeBeouf says in Transformers, "Fifty years from now when you look back on your life, don't you want to be able to say you had the guts to get in the car?"

Definitely.

Quirks

I thought it would be interesting to know more about everyone's personal writing habits.  So this week, have at it.  Tell me what your quirks are, and we'll see if we aren't as weird as we seem.

1) I cannot write at home.  I just can't do it.  "Home" encompasses everywhere I have to sleep (so, dorm room too).  It becomes a concern for me where I can go next to write.  I feel weird going to the same cafes, so I'm always on the lookout for a new place.

2) The smell of coffee stimulates my imagination.  I learned in psychology that the part of your brain that processes smells is connected to the part that processes memory.  So the sense of smell can bring back memories better than any other sense.  I don't necessarily have to drink coffee (although that helps too), but I like being in a place that smells like coffee.  The smell of books (ie library) helps too.  Borders, with its mixture of books and coffee, is the ideal place for me to get my write on.  It also lacks free wi-fi, which is great, because I can't get distracted.

3) The only way I can get through my academic texts is by making up stories while I read them. It sounds kind of hard, but when it's history, it really isn't.  In fact, I get bursts of inspiration for my novel while I'm doing homework  Like when I'm reading an article on the trend of the modern family pre-Industrial Revolution in northwest Europe, I can wonder about what it was like to live back then?  What kind of tales did they have to tell?  Setting?  Description?  It all leads to great fodder for writing.  You do what you have to in order to survive the massive busy work professors assign.  For me, that involves making the texts into some kind of story. Everyone likes reading stories, right?

That's it.  Can't wait to see what everyone else has to say.  Happy Labor Day!

Monday: me

Tuesday: Somewhere Nowhere In My Kingdom

Wednesday: Flames and Shadows

Thursday: Girl With A Notebook

Friday: Sometimes Helpful Nonsense

Obsessions

Yeah, I'm late.  I'm sorry.  Jenita starts this week's topic.

Hmmm, let's see.

1) Greek mythology.  Shocker much?  It's in my bio.  Check it.  Have I told this story before?  In fourth grade, I checked out D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths.  The rest is history.  Since then, I've gone out and devoured every book and website on Greek mythology ever.  I've also been a fan of Egyptian and Norse mythology, but they've never really captured me the way Greek has.  If there was such a thing as reincarnation, I would have been an Athenian in a past life.  Easy. Funny thing is, I remembered the first book that sparked my imagination, the illustrations, the cover, and even certain sentences word for word (yes, that is how many times I checked it out; the library should have given it to me on a permanent loan), but I could not remember the title. Last winter, when I read Percy Jackson, I was so inspired to figure it out that I spent almost an hour on Amazon pouring through titles of Greek mythology books until I found the right one. Then, I promptly ordered it.  It was like finding a piece of my childhood.  And there it sits on my desk still.  I love it.  Except the one in elementary school was in hardcover.  It's a beautiful book.  

2) Fairytales.  I love fairytale retellings of any kind.  Preferably not modern, though.  My favorite author is Donna Jo Napoli.  She does a lot of this kind of stuff, and she is a stunning writer. She's done Beauty and the Beast, Rapunzel (my personal favorite), the little mermaid, Rumpelstiltskin (a close second), Hansel and Gretel, and more that I can't remember.  I very much enjoy a good Beauty and the Beast retelling, since it can be retooled in so many different ways.  Robin McKinley has done two herself: Beauty and Rose Daughter (one of the best B&B retellings ever).  I have personally tried writing Snow White, Rapunzel, and B&B.

3) Villains.  I don't have a true villain in my current novel, only characters who desire the same goal and can't share it.  But one of my great loves in writing is telling a story from the point of view of the villain.  In a sense, making the villain the protagonist.  This is an idea I've played around with many times in fanfiction.  Peter Pettigrew, I did more than once.  Petunia Dursley--I'm had a lot of fun with that one.  My next novel uses someone who is traditionally viewed as a villain for the main character.  She's quite forceful and evil.  Perfect!

Monday: Girl With A Notebook

Tuesday: Sometimes Helpful Nonsense

Wednesday: Flames and Shadows

Thursday: supposedly me, but not really

Friday: Somewhere Nowhere In My Kingdom

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

My days are so packed from minute to minute that I'm literally doing this blog post at work (the newspaper).  The rest of the articles aren't in for copyediting yet, so I'm waiting.  

I feel good about myself so far, though, because I've managed to write this week.  Around 800 words a day, not that I'm really counting.  I have about 45 minutes to an hour I make for writing, so it's how much I can get in that time.  I'm averaging less than I did in the summer, but I'm still writing, which I consider a victory.  I'm incredibly jealous of people who can write a lot in a short amount of time, but I can't.  Everyone writes differently.  I'm pretty slow.  But I will get done, eventually. Eventually.  Can you believe I've been working on this same novel since January?  Not the same draft, of course, but still.  I've never consistently worked on something for that long.  My fanfiction novel took two years, but I wrote intermittently in bursts, not every day the way I do now.

Hopefully, this summer, I'm aiming to go for a six-week study abroad program to Greece.  I have decided that to successfully understand the culture and setting of my novel (and its future companion novel), I should at least try to visit Athens.  The trip costs over $7,000, so it kind of depends on how the scholarship situation pans out.  My parents, no doubt, can afford the program if I ask, but I don't think it's fair for them to pay for it.  They are already financing my entire tuition (minus the National Merit money I get), room and board, and they're going to pay for three years of law school too.  So I'm going to try to cut the price of the trip in half (that's my goal anyway), and if I can, then I'll go.  

I'm not, however, very psyched at the idea of adding several scholarship essays to my workload. But as you all know from the theme of my blog, I would love the opportunity to see Greece in person.  Therefore, I will try.

I've been breaking my rule lately of not going back until the end.  I'm rewriting the most recent three chapters, because they're so awful I can't even handle it.  Plus, I changed the plot some.

So.  Share your thoughts about how your summer is transitioning to fall.  Or whatever.  I know for some of you, summer and fall schedules are pretty much the same.  You could also share some craft book suggestions.  I would appreciate it.  :-)