...And an update in general

So...I realized the other day that I haven't written anything here in awhile, and that I really should make another post. January hasn't been very exciting - let's face it, it's bitterly cold and quite boring, especially if you live in rural Pennsylvania - but February is shaping up to be one heck of a month.

Let's see. On January 31, we're leaving for Key West, Florida, and will be there for a week. I'm extremely excited about this, but I'm really hoping that the weather will be WARM - and when I say warm, I mean 80. I know that I should be grateful for even 70 degree weather, since it's been 15 or below for awhile here and is about to get even colder, but I am a very summer-oriented person and I plan to spend my entire time in Key West laying by the beach/pool/ocean in the sun. And I would really prefer to be in a bathing suit and not a sweater while I do so.

Then, on February 18, I leave for Youth Retreat with my Youth Group, which is always fun. (Although greatly lacking in sleep.) After that, I don't think we have anything - except planning for Script Frenzy in April and finishing my novel.

Which is going well, by the way - at least my NaNoWriMo novel. I'm writing the climax right now, so if all goes well I'll be able to finish it sometime this week - if I have time between school and preparing Florida. I'm planning to use the plane ride to get some more writing in on my other novel, and hopefully that one will be wrapped up by the end of February.

Yeah. So...when some of these exciting things actually happen, I'll be able to write a more interesting blog post. This was just sort of a, "hey, this is what's going on, if you care." *shrugs*

Hoping for a heat wave in Florida,

~blackandwhitedreamer

A Writing Update

If you've been reading my blog over the past few months, you know that I wrote a fantasy/comedy novel entitled "Pen and Sword" for National Novel Writing Month in November. NaNoWriMo may be over, but my novel wasn't quite finished. So I'm here to give you an update on how the finishing process is going.

First, I was unfortunately delayed by the inability to access my notes - after the free trial expired, Scrivener exported my novel but not any of my notes. I managed to write a bit here and there, but I always assumed I'd be able to export the notes, so I didn't bother to remember them.

I've finally bought Scrivener, which means I have it now and forever. Hooray! As I've said thousands of times before, it's the most awesome writing software, ever. I was able to access my notes again, and so I started writing

Okay, so, erm, since NaNoWriMo ended, I've written about 7,000 words. Embarrassing, I know. I write 50,000 words in one month, and then just...stop? Apparently. But, I'm going to get back to writing every day, making sure I get at least 1,000 words in, and I should be able to finish this novel by the middle of this month.

As for the plot, things are really heating up. For those of you who've read my earlier blog posts: My character have succeeded in their quest for a fifty-thousand word adventure, but they're left stranded on the far side of a mountain range from their home, without any food, supplies, or horses; they've lost most of their weapons and are left only with Katarina's knife. The wizards that were chasing them are gone, for now, but they're in unfamiliar territory and they have no idea what they're going to run into next.

As for Eleanor and Ferdinand, they managed to track the characters far enough to find the note The Authoress sent them, telling them they'd reached fifty thousand words. Eleanor and Ferdinand are overjoyed at this; they leave the characters world to congratulate the authoress, but not before another run-in with the travelling-shovel-of-death-weilding gang that was chasing them earlier.

Ferdinand collects his 500 dollars from IE, since he won the bet, and as the muses and the authoress are getting ready for their own TGIO party, I.E. hangs out for awhile. And then, he pulls out a gun.

Yeah, remember a couple of blog posts ago, how I saw he was going to take a sinister turn?

So, as of right now, Katarina and Benjamin are wandering and hoping to hit civilization, Ferdinand, Eleanor, and The Authoress are tied to chairs and being held at gunpoint by IE, and the kingdom where the characters live is about to be attacked by enemy knights. Appearing within the next chapter or so - Plot Ninjas, the staff of the Offices of Letters and Light, and more from the Traveling Shovel of Death.

This novel is going to be....interesting when it's finished, if nothing else.

~blackandwhitedreamer

My Big, Fun, Scary List 2011

Hey everyone! It's New Years Eve, which means that across the country, people are coming up with lists of New Year's Resolutions. But I prefer to think of them under the name they are given on the NaNoWriMo website: "Big, Fun, Scary lists". It's not so much a list of resolutions, because I've noted that MOST lists are of all the bad habits people want to break. My BFS (Big Fun Scary) list is something different, I hope. It's a list of all the exciting experiences I want to have during the year 2011. Some things might be scary and some things might not be easy, but I hope that everything on this list will help me broaden my horizons, step outside my comfort zone, and become a better person.

So, without further delay

MY BIG, FUN, SCARY LIST 2011

1. See Coldplay in concert.

2. 10,000 hours.

My uncle read this theory that the secret to success is 10,000 hours of work. I want to try it, and although I KNOW I won't get 10,000 hours of time in one year (are there even 10,000 hours IN a year?) I want to get started, and make a dent. I want to put aside an hour or two each day to dedicate to something. It'll probably be writing, but who knows? It could be something else entirely. We'll see.

3. Submit a novel that I've written and revised to a publisher.

4. Make a list of songs to learn to play on the piano and/or guitar, and learn them. (I'll post this list later, once I've made it.)

5. Begin the awesome 365-day devotional book that my friend Katie got me for Christmas. Stick with it and finish it by next year. In general, become closer to God and figure out where He wants me to go.

Wishing you the best of luck with your own big, fun, scary adventures,

~blackandwhitedreamer

Book Review: The Book Thief

The other night, I finished The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, and it is one of the most exquisitely written books I have ever encountered. The prose gave me chills; the metaphors and imagery were beautiful. The narrator was amazing, and the voice of the book, although not entirely humorous, was still amusing in its own dark way. The emotion was raw and unfiltered, the scenes at the end so powerful they made me cry.

I want to point out that the last book I truly bawled over, like I did this one, was Aslan's death in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, which I read when I was nine or ten.

Markus Zusak is truly a master, and this book goes beyond all levels of a must-read.

Okay, now, for the less exciting stuff - ratings, because I know it's nice to have a heads up.

This book is definitely meant for upper-grade/mature readers, but that's mainly because of the subject matter. The book is set in Nazi Germany, and some really heavy issues are dealt with. War and death are main themes, and most of the books that the main character reads are pretty dark. There's also a suicide by a supporting character and a refusal to leave home during an air raid but another minor but recurring character. The main character has repeating nightmare's about her brother's death. It took me three nights to start the book because I didn't want to read it after dark, after I'd started the first page, but once I became familiar with the characters, I was fine. Still, a little creepy at first.

Violence - prominent. None of it's EXTREMELY graphic - some pretty gruesome things are mainly mentioned and not described in detail. Air raids, losing limbs/fingers (a supporting character); dead bodies.

Sex - a nonissue, really. A (somewhat detailed) description of a boy forced to strip down to be examined for Hitler's supreme race of Germans, and then later a character thinking about that boy, naked, but only once or twice, and not graphic. No actual sex at all.

Swearing - mild swearing, but mostly in German; a translation is given once or twice, but after that it's just the German version.

Overall - these things should NOT deter you from reading the book. They all fade into the background compared to the beautiful, amazing, wonderful story.

On Surveys

Before I begin, for the record - I won NaNoWriMo. Barely. But I did, and so now I get a 50% off coupon on Scrivener, the most WONDERFUL writing software in the world. Ever. Seriously, you need to go check it out if you're a writer. It's amazing. It totally aligns with the way I think - I plan on index cards and write in scenes, and it allows me to do that. Plus, it has setting and character sketches and folders for research, and scriptwriting templates that I know I'm going to adore during Script Frenzy.

Okay, now, onto the actual post.

I am freakishly fond of surveys.

I know that sounds weird, but it's true. I LIVE for the day when the NaNoWriMo survey goes live. I just completed it - and I'm sad, because there were only nineteen questions and now I have to wait until April - May, really - for the Screnzy survey. At the beginning of the month, the ML for my region sent out surveys for where the best places to have write-ins were, and I had a blast taking them. I also had fun taking the survey she sent out at the end of the month.

I don't know WHY I like surveys so much. I get excited to see all the new ideas that are possibilities for next year's NaNoWriMo, and I guess I think that by taking the survey, I'm doing my little part to improve the site. I want to let Lindsey and all the others at OLL know that they are running the most awesome event in the world, and they should continue to do so, and I'll do everything I can to help them.

Oh, and I like giving my opinions. So much so, that I've actually formed opinions on the survey. So, I think there should be a survey on the survey. Of course then you get into a downward spiral about whether there would have to be a survey on THAT survey, and it would be endless surveying and ticking little round boxes. Now, I would just have a BLAST with that, but I understand that other people might get bogged down. So here's the only thing I feel is important to say about the survey -

I think there should be a few more boxes where you can give original opinions about ideas - not just checking how strongly you want them. For example, a program that lets you do NaNoWriMo in other months of the year is great, but I think that, for THAT, you should be able to set custom goals. I also think that it shouldn't be as big of a deal as the actual NaNoWriMo - You should be able to set a word count goal, but you shouldn't have to validate and you shouldn't get winner goodies - it'd basically consist of a graph, statistics, and your winner bar turning green when you completed your own custom goal.

Of course, the only reason I want an alternative-month NaNoWriMo is for the graph. I haven't found a suitable alternative in any of the softwares on either of my computers - my current one, a Mac, or my old PC. The daily targets in Scrivener might do it for me, when I buy the actual version; or, I think my best bet would be the website where you write 750 words a day, but I wish there was a slightly higher goal than that - not as high as NaNo, something like an even 1000.

If I was a computer geek, I'd just write my own software that would give me a graph and a customizable goal. (Or, perhaps, it exists. If it does, alert me to this fact immediately, I shall go buy it. Actually, ask for it for Christmas.) But unfortunately, the only thing I can do is a bit of halfway-not-so-terrible CSS and HTML.

I've gotten completely off topic, haven't I? Oh well. Post can be summarized as follows -

Scrivener rocks, go buy it, now.

NaNoWriMo is awesome and I want to steal their wordcount graph.

I have an unhealthy obsession with surveys.

~blackandwhitedreamer

The Greatest Thing Since...well, the greatest thing ever. WRITE OR DIE!

For those of you not as deeply ingrained in NaNoWriMo culture, Write or Die (http://writeordie.drwicked.com/) is a way to force yourself into writing. You set a goal and a time limit, and then, depending on the mode you choose, it forces you to write by turning the background a very angry red, blasting an annoying noise, or - in the mode I have yet to attempt - begins to erase your writing every time you stop typing.

I come to you fresh out of a Write or Die session, in which I wrote 400 words in the ten-minute time limit. I set my goal for 200, since I was currently at 25,810 and enjoy seeing my little blue progress bar above the purple graph after so many days of being behind.

Need I tell you of my overjoyed-ness? I wrote DOUBLE what I intended. Considering that there have been 15-minute word wars where I've only managed 300 words, Write or Die is my new best friend. I used it a few times last year, during my first NaNoWriMo, at times when I couldn't find the motivation to write and needed something to keep me going. And I liked it. But now, I know I couldn't live without it. In my 2010 NaNo, I'm fighting to resist the sophomore slump, and Write or Die is keeping me out of it.

Plus, I wrote a hundred more words than I average in a fifteen minute word war. In less time.

The only thing I have left to do is to get my typing speed of something like 60/70 words a minute aligned with my brain-functioning-and-thinking-all-the-things-I-want-to-say-in-my-novel speed. If I did that, then ten minutes could mean 700 words, and I could get my daily wordcount requirement out in less than a half hour.

Well, I'll work on that. For now, I encourage all of you Wrimos out there to try write or die if you haven't already. Don't be fooled by the name - truly, it's a lifesaver.

~blackandwhitedreamer

Carrots. (Or "Plots, and the funny things they do in November")

I'm writing a humor/parody story. I always knew that things were going to be absurd. I even planned for the appearance of a carrot and wasn't all that surprised when a dare about an insane seer proclaiming my main character the "chosen one" screamed out my name. But THIS?

Let me backtrack. I had found a funny line on the Adoptables forum of the NaNoWriMo website - "Did you really think a carrot could save the day?" I knew I had to fit it into my novel somehow, but I had no idea how. Later, I saw a dare to include an insane seer who proclaims your MC "The chosen one" but is later seen as proclaiming that random objects such as a chicken, a fence post, or a goat was also the chosen one. There were various levels of bonus points, one of which was "cookies if the goat saves the world."

I have taken it one level farther into the insanity.

The seer was introduced in one of the more recently written scenes, where she proclaims my main male character, Benjamin, the chosen one, saying that she's seen it in the glass, and that he must go through "fire and water, stone and air." The entire prophecy sounds a little off-beat, but he believes it. In the next scene, I showed the insane seer proclaiming to a carrot, a goat, and a fence post that they are also the chosen one. My plan was to have these things be completely ridiculous and have someone say to the seer, later, "Did you honestly think that a carrot could save the day?"

But then I broke the scene down into three sub-scenes and began writing.

Sub-scene 1. My character Ferdinand is trying to locate Benjamin, and he visits the produce stand where he encountered the seer while he was buying supplies. While Ferdinand is grilling/bribing the person selling the vegetables to give him information, the insane seer, who frequents the alley nearby, comes up to Ferdinand and tells him that she has seen Benjamin. A few moments later, though, she lapses back into insanity and is vehemently declaring a carrot the savior of the world. She tries to take the carrot, but the vendor says he won't give it to her unless she pays. She accuses him of kidnapping the chosen one and holding him for ransom. To end the madness, Ferdinand pays for the carrot, earning the old woman's unending gratitude. He is now a hero in her eyes, and although he knows she's insane, he's flattered by it.

Sub-scene 2. My character Eleanor is searching for my other main character, Katarina, and she sees the insane seer, who fled the cruel produce man to take the chosen carrot to safer ground. The insane seer declares a nearby fence post the chosen one, and gets so worked up that she almost collapses. Eleanor prevents her from falling. The woman has a moment of sanity and confesses to Eleanor that once she was a great seer but is now losing her wits and going mad.

Sub-scene 3. Katarina shows a rare display of generosity whens she visits a shop selling blankets and socks (the socks are a result of a writing challenge also. Take your character's name, multiply the letters times ten, and then write that many words about their socks. I really should not have clicked on that thread.) owned by a struggling family. She buys some of their more expensive merchandise and pays more than the asking price. As she leaves, she passes the family's small flock of goats and sheep and sees the insane seer proclaiming that a goat is the chosen one.

The ramifications:

The carrot is, in fact, the chosen one - in a very convoluted way. Somehow, the carrot will end up going with the group on their quest and in a battle with the two wizards chasing Benjamin, which will likely form some of the climax, it will get hit with a blast of magic. This will alter it, turning it from an inanimate object into an animate one. It will save the day; it may be able to defeat the other villain, Inner Editor, simply through its sheer absurdity.

The carrot, extremely grateful to Ferdinand, will return home with him in the aftermath of the climax. Ferdinand, a retired author, will be inspired to write about the carrot, and one of the ending scenes will contain him presenting a children's picture book manuscript to Eleanor. The carrot will then, in a way, become HIS muse.

The seer will somehow regain her sanity, because in the scene where she's talking to Eleanor she made me sympathize with her.

When Katarina returns to her home - which just so happens to be the palace - she will tell her parents - who just so happen to by the king and queen - about the woman and her son selling the blankets and socks. They will either be given incredibly amounts of money or a job at the palace.

Yeah.

So are the affects of NaNo on my novel, I suppose.