...

I am so sorry. It was my sister's birthday this weekend (Happy birthday, Ella!) and I'm getting ready for school along with working on learning some songs for the worship team this weekend. Rehearsal is on Thursday, so I kind of need to have them down. It was a last minute hey-can-you-fill-in-for-someone-this-weekend kind of thing. I'm excited and just a little bit nervous, since I've never done this before. So, there are all my lame excuses. :)

And......*drumroll* I think I'm past the writer's block. Yahoo! Yay! And all that. I've got an idea of sort of where I'm going and I'm planning on finishing within the next 10,000 words. I'm itching to print it out and fix all it's plot holes, character inconsistencies, repetition, cliches and who knows what else is wrong with this story. It should come out around 70,000 words.

School starts on the 18th, so I'm hoping to get some writing in before classes slam me.

This song basically personifies what my character is feeling at the moment:

I feel like my life is flashing by and all I can do is watch and cry. I miss the air. I miss my friends...I miss it when life was a party to be thrown but that was a million years ago.
                                                                                   --A Million Years Ago by: Adele

P.S. I'm approaching the black moment, if you didn't figure that out by the song. :)

Nothing much to report

Still haven't gotten past the block from the previous post, so there's not much to say here. I'm going to try a few writing prompts in a notebook my parents gave me for Christmas and a brainstorming technique from James Scott Bell in his book Conflict & Suspense. There are a couple of ideas here that I thought were valuable.

One was to listen to a soundtrack and think of character movements for every beat, instrument and measure.

Another was to imagine your book as a movie. What would the character say next if you were watching this on the screen?


Another, which was more for starting out a new book was to start describing your house. Just describe. Work out to the places around your house. The weird neighbors next door. The park. Etc. Now add a desperate character who's alone and need help and describe it from his/her point of view.

Or start a bunch of first lines. Experiment with dialogue, actions, setting, description, etc. and expand them into paragraphs. That one more applies to a new book as well.

Now, finally, this one's kind of nerdy. Open a dictionary, place your finger on a random word and write a few paragraphs about whatever comes to mind. 

So...yeah. Working on it. Hope I have more to report next week! 

Every time that you wake up breathing. Every night you close your eyes. Every day that your heart keeps beating. There's a purpose for your life. So don't give up. Don't lay down. Just hold on. Don't quit now. Every breath that you take has meaning. You are here for a reason.

--Here for a Reason by: Ashes Remain