Snow day

Ever wish you were stranded at a cabin in the mountains with snow piling up around you with only your computer and nothing better to do than write? That's basically the situation I'm in right now and let me be honest, I haven't gotten any writing done. But I am curled up in an overstuffed easy chair next to the dying embers of a fire we built earlier today, aspiring to write.  Here's a picture outside the window next to me....

I went for a walk and it was higher than my knees in places. Don't ask why I was going for a walk in the storm.

It's such an inspiring atmosphere and everything. So, I've decided to talk on inspiration. I am known to get inspiration from everything. From well-done movies to preschool TV shows to pictures to lyrics to quotes to a single word.

I'm going to tell you my secret to constantly having story inspiration. Take things out of context.

For example, in a preschool TV show called Peep and the Big Wide World there is an episode in which there is a beaver. He's having a ceremony, a coming of age ceremony of sorts, to chew down his first tree. He invites his friends and he's so excited. He doesn't listen to his parent's instructions on how to chew down the tree and begins to gnaw at the trunk. He does it in a non-methodical way and nearly smushes his friends and family. He runs off, discouraged. Hours later, he comes back and offers to try again. His parents don't think he should because of the result of last time. But, he tries again and gets it right. So, take it out of context here. Pretend this character isn't a beaver and that what he's trying to overcome is not a tree. What if it were a person who had tried multiple times to overcome this one thing and when it finally came down to it, and things were at stake and he was the only person available to do it. Everyone told him he shouldn't do it, but he did it anyway and this time succeeded.

So...find little things to be inspired in. Look specifically. Take things out of context and imagine what might happen if it was somewhere else.

This'll be short...

As always, right? Well, this time I have a good excuse. I didn't get any writing done this week. Okay, maybe that's not so good of an excuse. I've got an excuse for that too. Finals. Yes, they're finally over and I can now focus on my writing. Wish me luck! Hopefully I'll have more to report next week. :)

Oh, and I've got a passage to share with you. Observe this and find the symbolism. Isn't it good? She talks about, in previous paragraphs, how her sisters were born at extraordinary times and were named things like Celestial Heavens and whatnot, after the times they were born.

There was the day that I arrived. At noon, on a day in September that could have been either spring or autumn, judging by the blueness of the sky. Or by the temperature, which was neither too hot nor too cold. A quiet, peaceful kind of day. The kind that, at its end, makes you wonder where the time has gone. A day that doesn't feel like a gift until it's done. For it’s only as you're drifting off to sleep that you realize how happy you are, how happy you'd been every moment you were awake.
It was on just such a day as this that I was born....My father bestowed a name he had long cherished: Annabelle, after his own mother...Then, mindful of my mother's feelings, he gave me the name of her mother as well. In this way, I became Annabelle Evangeline, and no sooner had my father proclaimed his that my mother... [announced] that she wished me to be known as Belle. I could...have a...name that...would match the Beauty I would surely become.
Allow me to set something straight at this point. There's nothing actually wrong with the way I look. I have long brown hair that generally does what I ask it to, except on very rainy days when it does whatever it wants. I have eyes of a deep chestnut color that are not set too far from each other so that I appear to look over my own shoulder, nor so close that they appear to be trying to catch each other's glance across the bridge of my nose. And there's nothing wrong with my nose, either, thank you very much. In fact, I have a face that is much like the day on which I was born. It contains neither too much of one thing, nor too little of another. A perfectly fine face. Just not an extraordinary face. 

From Belle by Cameron Dokey