...

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. :)

The problem with kidnapping...

I have a perfectly legitimate excuse for not posting this weekend. Christmas celebration Saturday, as well as an after-Christmas sale mall shopping trip. Sunday, church and babysitting for six hour straight. Boom! There you have it. So. I apologize and here I am, posting, albeit a day or two late.

So, this week I let Annabelle's dad "kidnap" her, which isn't as easy as it sounds. When your character never leaves her house and can't barely walk, and the kidnapper isn't actually planning on committing a kidnapping, it's awfully difficult to form a situation in which it actually happens. But, hey, I did it. And now there's the problem of getting her unkidnapped again, which is proposing a whole new set of problems.

Why did I even need to kidnap her in the first place, you might ask? Does this have any sort of relevancy to the basic plot? And, in theory, yes it does. Because through the whole story she's had two main fears. 1) of never getting over Lyme and 2) of her dad finding her. And in every story the character, during the climax, should face his/her greatest fears, correct? So, I'm planning (let's see if it works) to have her face both of those fears simultaneously, hence the reason why I've conducted a kidnapping. (Plus, it happened in the first draft. The one that occurred before I even added Lyme disease in.)

Now my problems are: 1) I can't rescue her too fast, or that part would be useless. 2) I don't know quite what her dad's motivations are (that's always a problem) 3) I want some sort of fairy-tale typical rescue, since that's a reoccurring theme throughout the book 3a) this is sort of a problem since no one knows where she is and she happens to be constantly getting farther away by the moment. Anyone have tips?

In any case, I've started writing this story again after several week's break. Wish me luck!

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

Last race to the end!

I've got my music. I've got my milk and cookies. I've got my candle and I've got my prayers. I'm preparing for my mad dash to the finish line. My sisters have already crossed it and I'm plodding along behind, delayed by such roadblocks as schoolwork, finals, procrastination, writer's block and days when I didn't do any writing.

I'm tired, I'll say that. This story has been exhilarating and exhausting. Oh, it'll need major rewriting. I've developed this habit over the course of the last month of closing my eyes and letting my fingers fly without letting me know what they're typing. So, quite honestly, much of what's happened this month is largely unknown to me. I know for a fact though, that it's terrible. Terrible writing. Generic verbs. Adjectives galore. Whiny characters. Oh, heaven help us! In the words of Anne Lamott:

"The whole thing would be so long and incoherent and hideous that for the rest of the day I'd obsess about getting creamed by a car before I could write a decent second draft. I'd worry that people would read what I'd written and believe the accident had really been a suicide, that I had panicked because my talent was waning and my mind was shot."

I'll fix it though. All bestselling novels began like this. Climax is drawing near. Soon. Soon.

Don't be silly. I have a plot. I just need to
figure out how to execute it in an
 inspiring way. A way that does justice to
 the real story. That's my problem...

I want to put a couple quotes about writing on here, to inspire those of you who are like me and are putting everything in them toward that finish line.

"What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy." --Salman Rushdie

"The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about what the characters are going through  and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human." --Tim O'Brien

"For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed." --Ernest Hemingway 

"I am not a consecutive writer." --Dr. Seuss

"As a writer, one of the things I've always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that's what we're supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react." --Stephen King 

"The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn't go to his desk at all, there is nobody to scold him." --Roald Dahl

"A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer." --Karl Kraus

"A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch. --Michael Ondaatje

"A writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location." --Flannery O'Connor

"A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom." --Roald Dahl

"Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him." --Mel Brooks

"All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't." --Suzanne Collins

"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities." --Dr. Seuss

"To be a dramatic writer takes hard work, talent, and discipline. And that's why I just make up crap." --Colin Mochrie

"You can mope and cry all you want, but it won't help you write a better novel." --Gilbert Blythe 

 

 Come on! Let's do this thing! We can do it. 

First week of NaNo

So, first week of NaNo. This was interesting. :) I have 10,600ish words so far. That was a third of my goal for last year. It's been a really up and down first week. 

Midnight, November 1st: lit a candle, made some tea and cranked out 3,000 words. Later that day I got in another 1,000 words in a kickoff party my writer's group had. 

November 2nd: Fairly normal. I had a practical and school, so all of the writing I did, I had to do in the morning. 

November 3rd: Lost my head start. Only wrote 400 words. 

November 4th: Somehow I got 2,000 even though I had school that day. 

November 5th: Got another 2,000 be cause every Thursday our writer's group goes to one of our houses, sits around the table, drinks tea, eats scones or cookies or mini pumpkin pies (those were good) and writes their heart out. 

November 6th: Nothing

November 7th: I've gotten all of 500 words down. 

 This scene I'm writing is absolutely worthless, but if I discard it, I loose everything I did today. Blegh. So not in the writing mood today. Which is kind of weird. I'm being the procrastinator we all know me to be. :) See, I even won a procrastination badge!

I'll give you a sample of my thought process today: 

'Okay. Gonna write.' Opens document. 'Nothing's happening.' Opens NaNoWriMo. 'Maybe I can word war. Okay. Going in at :45.' Writes for fifteen minutes. 'Only 274 words. Seriously? That's the best I can do. This scene is useless. I need to delete it. But it's in my outline, so I can't. Dang. I need a shower. Ooh! I wonder how I can start a thread in the forums. I have something I want to post.' Spends the next forty-five minutes trying to figure it out. Spends fifteen minutes actually posting in the forum. 'Ooh, ooh. There's one of my old books. I'm going to read it.' Reads through the next hundred pages. 'I don't like this part. I need to go clean my room. It's a mess.' Goes upstairs and spends two hours cleaning the room. 'I'm going to organize my PJ bin. It's spilling out all over the place.' Organizes PJ bin. 'Oh, I should probably clean out my closet. Mom and Dad wanted me to bring my hope chest upstairs so it's not in the walkway.' Cleans closet and brings hope chest up. 'I need to do my sheets too.' Strips my sheets and puts them in the wash. Sits down at the computer again. 'I'll try another word war. Just five minutes this time. Going it at :25. This scene is useless, but who cares? Still churning out words. 95 words? That's pathetic. Oh, look there's my blog. And it's Saturday. I need to post.' 

And here you find me. Some how I managed 500 words, though I can't really see how...

Anyway. This story's chugging along. It's not the story it's me. I'm just not in the mood right now. Maybe I will go and take a shower. I'm babysitting in a half hour. I have time. Hmm.... I have an idea. I'll make this productive and brainstorm in the shower. That's an idea. Okay, well, I'm out. Wish me luck!  

 Sort of...

Book covers

Swing left. Swing right. Bruised and black-eyed. Half alive. Bleeding. Choking. But not broken inside. Somehow through it all I'll stand still undefeated...You can knock me down with body blows, but you cannot break my hope.                                                                                                                                                          ~Undefeated by: Daughtry 

I'm working on an outline for this story at the moment. My mom bought Scrivener, so...yay! I'm preparing for NaNoWriMo. I'm going to attempt to do the 50,000 word goal, which will only work if I can't get stuck. Thus, the outline. Last year I wrote half that, so....yeah. We'll see how that goes with college and all. Wish me luck.

I don't have a ton to post on, since I haven't had a lot of time to write. :'( Sometimes I don't like growing up.

A thought, before I go: One thing I've been noticing about writing this book is the power of names. The lies my character believes are solely based on names she's been called in her past. People tend to slap a word on your forehead before they've even met you. Everyone has been called a name. Whether it be good or bad. It affects the way we think about ourselves.

I'm going to post a bunch of book covers and you can vote on which ones you like in a poll I'll put to the side. I know a lot of them are the same-ish. Comment and tell me why you picked which ones you picked. :)

1. 

2. 

3. 

4. 

5. 

6. 

Lime-Aid

I don't have a ton to update on. Once Upon a Fantasy is at 7,000 words at the moment. I'm not much further in the story then I was last week when I posted. College and all that. :)

Okay, I need an opinion. Emma suggested changing the name to Lime-Aid or maybe Lyme-Aid. What do you think?

And, since, once again I don't have much to post, I'm going to post the lyrics to a song that totally personifies this story.

Losing friends and I'm chasing sleep. Everybody's worried about me. In too deep...I'm in too deep. It's been two years and I miss my home. There's a fire burning in my bones. I still believe...All those words I didn't say. The wrecking balls inside my brain. I will scream them loud tonight. Can you hear my voice this time?... This is my fight song. Take-back-my-life song. Prove-I'm-alright song. My power's turned on. Starting right now I'll be strong. I'll play my fight song. And I don't really care if nobody else believes. Cause I've still got a lot of fight left in me.                                                                                                                                                                      ~Fight Song by: Rachel Platten 

Dancing

So, I'm on chapter six of this crazy rewrite and loving it all the more. Just about to get to the part where Annabelle gets worse all the sudden. I'm loving this book so much more than any of my other books, so...that's good, right?

Also, good news: I got permission to use all the unique parts of Bekah's story. So it'll be a halfway based-on-a-true-story story with those little unique details.

Since everything is going smoothly and as planned, I don't have a lot to say. So, I'm going to leave you with a poem my character wrote.

I Just Want to Dance by: Annabelle Greyson

My knees give way
My legs are weak
Will you hold me?
Can you help me through?

Because although
my body protests,
I just
want to
dance.

First person

Okay, so sorry for missing yesterday. Apologies all over the place.

That said, let's get to the point. An update:

I haven't written all that much this week, due to growing up and having to do college and all that. Sometimes growing up stinks because you don't always have time to do things you love the most. But, I did get a little smidgen of writing done on Once Upon a Fantasy and, after reading three first person stories in a row and doing an interview with Brenden (last week's post), I've decided that I think I like the story better in first person present. So, starting to revise all 20,000 words...yeah, it's taking a little time. But I'm enjoying it, because I love Annabelle so much better now. And plus, like I said in an earlier post, I realized that I have a whole bunch to add about Lyme that I was starting to think I couldn't do without a rewrite. So...here we go!

What's your favorite POV to write in? Tense? 

And...will you judge and tell me which is better, before I do the whole story this way. :)

New: 

            Sometimes I wish I could disappear.

            Sometimes I wish I could cry without looking like a cowardly idiot.

            Always I wish I didn’t have my life.

            I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach by Dad, something he used to do frequently before he was arrested. I can’t breathe. I may as well have been running a mile, that’s how my voice comes out. “But he wasn’t supposed to be released until—”

            “I know,” Mom interrupts, covering my shaking hands. “They released him early. It shouldn’t be a problem.” She makes an effort to meet my eyes. I refuse to look at her.

            “He hates me.” My voice cracks a bit. I’m not going to cry.

            Mom pats my hands. “It’ll be okay, Annabelle. We’ll stay away from him and he’ll stay away from us. We have a restraining order. The police are protecting us. We’ll be okay.”

            I swallow against my closing throat. “You don’t understand.”

            “You’re perfectly safe, sweetheart.” She stands and grabs her briefcase from the tabletop. “I’m late for work. I’ll see you tonight, don’t worry about this. I love you.” She kisses my cheek and leaves me at the table, completely wrecked.

Original: 

            “Honey...your dad is...has been released from jail.” Mom made an obvious effort to meet Annabelle's eyes.
            Annabelle felt like she'd been punched in the stomach by Dad, something he used to do frequently before he was arrested. She couldn't breathe properly. She may as well have been running for a mile, that’s how her voice came out. “But he wasn’t supposed to be released until-”

            “I know,” she interrupted, setting the phone on the table and covered Annabelle's shaking hands. “They released him early. It shouldn't be a problem,” she said softly. The kitchen light cast shadows on her face.

            She wanted to cry. But she couldn't. Not here. “He hates me.” Her voice cracked a bit. She wasn't going to cry.
            Mom patted her hands. “It'll be okay, sweetheart. We'll stay away from him and he'll stay away from us. We have a restraining order. The police are protecting us. We'll be okay.”
            Annabelle swallowed against her closing throat. “You don't understand.”
            “You're perfectly safe, Annabelle.” She stood and grabbed her briefcase from the tabletop. “I'm late for work. I'll see you tonight. Don't worry about this. I love you.” She kissed Annabelle's cheek and left her at the table, feeling shell-shocked.