College

Yes, I am that old. And if you want to know how much of a nerd I am, I'm majoring in Computer Science with double minors in Mathematics and Writing.

Although honestly if my school offered a writing/creative wring major, I probably would have double majored in that.

Anyway, back to the "daily grind" of school means that I am doing a lot (and I mean a lot) of reading. Seriously. When you go to college, everyone will be like "yeah, join a lot of clubs!" or "take classes you think you even might be interested in!" or "make friends with everyone!" or something like that. My advice: don't spend the summer forgetting how to read academically. Seriously. I did that, and I keep hitting walls in this first week of class because I forget how to read critically/mark up text/etc.

Oh, more advice: write all over everything, as much as you possibly can. And remember, you own your books (if you're like me and went to a public school, this is new and different). That means you won't get in trouble for writing on your books. (I mean, don't do it on the ones you take out of the library.) Seriously. I've never been a huge history person and even though I've only so far done one reading for history, I wrote all over my book (which I got for six dollars*) and it's already helped me remember stuff from it.

*More advice: I'm going to guess that when you find the books you need for a class, you'll be provided with an ISBN. (If not, google should give you one.) I would definitely search by ISBN when looking for your book online, because the ISBN of different editions of the same book is different. And if you're lucky like me, you'll find somewhere that is selling a lightly used textbook for $6 including shipping. Of course, you need luck. But hey, I don't think I normally have any :)

So that was just a bunch of random side notes. Basically I just wanted to say I'm reading interesting stuff. (But you know me, I ramble.) So, you might see some interesting new ideas floating around, say, my figment account.

Sequels

Normally, I try to stay away from sequels. Mostly because real sequels are just cop-outs. They're generally just throwing new drama into a plot that's already been tied up with an elaborate bow. So the sequel becomes like confetti on top of the bow, which just makes it look excessive, or a second bow on top of the bow, which just makes the whole thing look stupid.

But if you're tired of metaphors, I'll stop talking about bows. The point I'm trying to make is that good sequels shouldn't really be called 'sequels' at all. They're the kind where the original story isn't entirely tied up, and you need more story to resolve the conflict. Those are the kinds of sequels I like, and there are often multiples of that kind of sequel. Those kinds of sequels make up trilogies and quartets.

Why am I talking about sequels all of a sudden? I'm working on a sequel to The End... as I use this to procrastinate from actually writing it. (Ironic, really. I started this blog to talk about writing, and it's ended up as somewhere I can procrastinate from writing by talking about it. I never think to post here when I'm not writing....) And some of the time, this sequel is being stupid and obnoxious. Actually, all of the time, so far, this sequel is being stupid and obnoxious. But if/when I finish it, it will resolve that ambiguous ending for you.

I mean, if you want the ending resolved for you at all. I wouldn't.

The wonders of 250 gigs...

That's how much memory I have on my hard drive. Since the most of what I do is word processing and internet browsing (not that this poorly tricked-out netbook can handle much more), I still have like 90 gigs of free space, even though I don't think I've deleted a single thing since I got this computer two years ago.


(Useless Update: I have 199 files in my recycle bin. I'm pretty sure 175 of them are music files which somehow imported into iTunes twice.)

Returning to the point, however, requires me to explain a few things. For the first four years of writing fanfiction, all my work lived on a 1 gig flash drive. This meant: 1) I actually took the time to properly back up my things 2) When I was done with a story, I would toss it away on the backup drive and promptly forget about it 3) I started freaking out whenever my flash drive got close to full, because that meant I would have to not carry around one of the stories that my life depended on, and 4) I thought 1 gig was a lot of memory. Granted, technology changes so quickly that this was back when external backup drives were 80 gigs and the size of a small novel.

However, my point here is that because of that kind of disturbing practice of getting rid of all my stories in some obscure place where it wasn't easy for me to find them again on a whim, I never really went back to old stories, at least not unless I was willing to devote a bunch of time into digging them out. Now, however, because I never delete anything, I spent a bunch of time re-reading my semi-recent stuff.


Another advantage -- almost entirely for you readers -- is that re-reading my semi-recent stuff inspires me to finish it, or to realise that I had a fanfic sitting on my computer finished but not entirely good enough for publishing, that on re-reading I decide, screw it, this is going on the internet. Because if I was brave enough to post the awfulness that was Letters to No-One back when I was twelve, I can bloody well publish some of my lesser works now.

In conclusion, I have posted a new fanfic. No, it's not my best. Yes, I am stupid for leaving it on my computer for so long without publishing it. I'm sorry. It's okay; I'll make it up to you by returning to fanfiction for a while. Fanfiction is far more comforting than original stuff, because at least fandoms come with pre-made characters.

The Worst Month in the Best Possible Way: November

Goddess, I hate November. Especially since I've jumped on the crazy NaNoWriMo bandwagon, it's probably the busiest month of all twelve. Also, probably because it's already the busiest time of my year, I come up with tons of inspiration for stories and interest in keeping up with my TV shows and the desire to catch up on tons of great shippy fanfiction that I follow inconsistently at other times of the year. Actually, all of that is probably just my procrastination talking. Still, why couldn't November, like, be a bunch of months? Why couldn't the play happen in November, and NaNoWriMo in December? And all this inspiration for stories that aren't my NaNoNovel come to me in that awkward time after the play, but before the musical? WHY MUST EVERYTHING HAPPEN ALL AT ONCE?

Anyway, enough of this rant. I have to get back to procrastinating, after all. Heaven knows I wouldn't want to procrastinate my procrastinating by talking about it. So, instead, I'll avoid getting to a reasonable wordcount for NaNoWriMo for tonight and instead go read some of my Teslen fiction. Because everyone loves Teslen.

November is fast approaching

Wow. I can't believe it, but November is almost here. That is more than a little bit terrifying. For me, November is going to be a particularly huge month this year. First of all, I have to get all of my application to Carleton by November 15th. Secondly, it's November, which means NaNoWriMo, of course! This year, I'm going to shoot for 75k, even though, yes, that is in fact fairly ridiculous. Last year, I got to 60k without too much overt effort. I scraped most of it, but I knew where I was going -- so it made it worth it, of course!

In preparation for November, I am going to read over Strange book 1, mostly (though of course I would never admit this :P) so that I can remember what my characters are like, and what plots I've already figured out. Anyway, I'll probably be posting here sporadically again while I'm procrastinating from writing in November!

NaNoWriMo

Yeah, so I've officially decided as of about thirty seconds ago that I'm going to do it again this year. I can totally get in the habit of writing 2k words per day, right? That's not a big deal, right? I mean at the rate it's getting worse (which it really isn't, I have to say), then school work isn't going to be anything of a problem. And even if the play is something like a problem (which I honestly doubt it will be because I managed around it last year and I didn't have any faith in myself from previous experience to count on), then I still have half a month to finish the 50k.

But really, apart from saying this is absolutely something I'm doing again, I wanted to talk a little bit about what I'm going to be doing. I'm pretty confident that I'll be writing the second part to Strange. (I have another post explaining what on earth that is.) I say that this counts because it'll eventually be its own book, even if I have already written over 100k words for the whole story. So, for those of you who know -- almost another quarter of the whole entire story will be out soon! :D

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

Difficult topics make the best stories

Really, they do. At least, with my sadistically poetic muse, they do. For example: The End Is Where We Start From, my latest Sanctuary fic.

I wouldn't read the following if you haven't read the first chapter of the story, or you don't plan on reading it. The fic is rated "M" for good reasons: violence, sexual situations, and language.


Helen dies. Nikola is upset and angry and suicidal. And yet, in the midst of all this pain and suffering, my muse decides that there is quite a bit of beauty. I love her. And I hate her. But mostly I love her right now, because she's being nice and giving me something to write about.

Of course, this comes at the price of writing the death of beloved character(s), completely messed up sleep schedules, and sobbing as silently as possible at two in the morning so I don't wake the family.

Character death, however, is apparently one of my favourite difficult topics. I seem to have a penchant for characters who killed themselves when loved ones die. Look at FLW as well as "The End...". Look at my original fiction: My first short story involved death, and the short story I like most at the moment involves infanticide. Something in me just cries out to talk about death -- in the most beautiful way. I don't begin to understand it.

But then, my music is sadistically poetic, after all.

Four Years

So, I was looking at my ff.net profile to prove something to my boyfriend, and I realised that I've been on ff.net for four years to the day. It's kind of incredible. It's kind of timely, in a way, for me to return to fanfiction when I did, so that I'd be calmly resting in the waters of familiarity when I realised that it's been four years.

Wow. Four years. I've come so far since then, as anyone can tell who looks at my really old fiction. When you look at shameless self-inserts like TTLT, or disorganised rambles about irrelevant topics like What-Ifs, you can see how my immaturity was what I liked writing about. And now, especially when you look at "The End Is Where We Start From" (Let's see... TEIWWSF... okay, wow, that looks weird), you can tell that I've really grown up a lot since then.

I like having ff.net at my disposal. I'm glad I managed to stick with this silly thing I discovered with the help of a friend close to six years ago. I'm glad that I've been comfortable enough to keep up my messing with other people's characters in order to develop my writing skill, and that, in turn, has led me to working on my own original stuff. Also, gathering the courage to post fanfiction led me to gathering the courage to post original fiction, and with both of them getting better as I go along, I find that reading reviews of my work is why I keep writing -- and posting. Because I know that, somewhere out there, there are people crazy enough to enjoy my writing as much as I do.