The perfect sentence

Well, perhaps not the perfect sentence, but I certainly wrote a perfect sentence the other day. And, since here I am unable to go to sleep before I'm exhausted (ahh, the perils of being a writer), I decided that I would share it with you all.

In the hour before dawn, the luminescent sky tickles colour into the field of flowers.

 In my humble opinion, this is perhaps one of the better sentences I've ever written. I can use it as a prime example of the maxim "show, don't tell" that my English teachers, at least, have shoved down our throats for as long as I can remember. And, grudgingly, I would hap-hazarded my way with words into something more showy than literal, but never before have I been quite so proud of a single sentence.


Oh, you want to know why I suddenly decided to write this perfect sentence? Well, truth to be told, I stole it. But then, does anyone come up with a truly original idea? We'd spent the three days of class before I wrote that sentence discussing a few hundred words in English class, written as an intro to an astronomy book, as a way to show us the proper way to write our college application essays. (Yes, I know. My English teacher IS bloody awesome. Although it's my Euro teacher who's English.) So, yes, blame any future philosophical questions on that mindset, combined with the fact that I'm tired but not enough so to go to sleep, which usually just results in me not caring whether the random string of words I throw together and out at the world actually make any sense.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Anyone who knows their literature should recognise the title as being on of Shakespeare's most confusing plays. Seriously, the more of it you leave out of an explanation, the more sense it makes. Simple version: Girl likes guy who is in a relationship with someone else. Lovers run away and things go a bit pear-shaped when a fairy trickster intervenes.

And even extremely dumbed down, it's not straightforward. Gotta love Shakespeare's comedies.

Anyway, the reason I'm making a post about it is because my school is performing it in November, and I'm... well, I suppose you could call my title "Assistant Director" or "Student Director" or something like that. So it's been eating up a whole bunch of my time, but in a way that's totally rewardingly worth it. So yes, it is an excuse. But with a plot as confusing as its is, comprehending it is a perfectly valid excuse.

Strange

I suppose that I should probably take the time to explain Strange, before I start talking about it and confusing the heck out of everyone.

Strange is the working title of my longest, original WIP. The 'original' part of it is more or less self-explanatory -- it takes place in my own fantasy world. The 'longest' part applies to everything you could think it would apply to. I've been working on it for five years now. It's nearly 100k words long. It has a massively complicated plot that can be simplified into 'girl is fated to win a major war in her country', but doing so really loses a lot of its fun.

Strange is about a girl named Leyha. She was raised in a foreign country, because her parents' love was incredibly frowned upon. The two sides of her family run two subsections of the country right next to where she was raised, and have a long-standing feud between them. When she is taken from the only home she's known at the age of fourteen by her father's family, she discovers that she is supposed to possess a great power that will help her father's family win the war. She eventually gets fed up with the way her uncle, who has power over the throne after her father's death, and his lords are treating her, so she runs away to the other side of her family, where her mother is still alive. Her alliance goes back and forth and gets more confusing as time goes on, because her father's family is the one that's supposed to be the "bad" side, according to people outside of the country.

The fun part of Strange is that it gives me a place to play with the ideas of "good" and "bad". They're words/ideas that have interested me for a while, and I have lots of fun little things that I've done in the way of playing with the two ideas, and our preconceptions about what makes something good versus bad, especially in literature and film. For example, the Menla (Leyha's father's family) have their symbolic colour as black, and they are seen as the evil side by outsiders, but it turns out that they're much less restrictive and much more open with their citizens than the Pilo (Leyha's mother's family) are. It's a whole lot of fun, especially because good and bad become nothing more than ideas by the time the whole giant story arc is done.

Right, so, the reason this is coming up at all is because I wanted to have a reference of what it is, so that when I reference it later, you guys know what I'm  talking about -- or can have somewhere to look. Also, I'm bringing it up because I'm nearly finished what is looking like it will be the first of three or four books (probably four), because apparently my story arc is too big. 100k words, where I am right now, is barely finished the first half of the expositionary stuff. So, yeah, I don't know who would want to read a 400k book in one go either...

Anyway, just wanted to let the fanfiction readers of mine who may actually, on occasion, look at this, that I'll be working for the next maybe week or so to get this whole first part finished so I can figure out what I'm doing with the rest of it. So I'll be around, but rather sporadically, and not really with fanfiction all that much. Oh well. Sorry guys.

Flooding = no school!

Apparently, this is how the minds of my school administrators work. Truth to be told, we have been experiencing rain to rival London here (remarkable because this is the Philadelphia area), and it's certainly nice to be out of school after only one day of classes, but that doesn't make the idea in and of itself and less ridiculous. Let's just cancel school because it's been raining for a million days and it's gonna keep raining here through Sunday.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up, other than because it's nice and ridiculous, is that I had time to write more of "The End...", but I ended up sleeping for 15 hours. No joke. I got 12 hours of sleep last night, and took a 3 hour nap this afternoon. So, I started writing more of "The End...", but I still have a lot more to go until it's anything any of you lovely readers would be willing to read.

Also, I'm getting back into the beta-reading business because applying to college and stage managing (assistant directing?) the play isn't enough stress to add to school work, so if you have anything to read, I'm up to the challenge :P