Normal is Boring...

Update on Camp NaNo

2012-10-02T07:26:00.001-07:00

Wait a minute...ok, so I know I haven't updated/posted in a while...but I swear that I wrote an entire post on the outcome of August Camp NaNo.

I quite distinctly remember announcing to the world (i.e. everyone I could get to listen) what had happened, and that included writing a very excited blog post. I don't know where that post went, as it is not published or in drafts that I can see...

Hmph.

Well, this will not be nearly as exuberant as the original, since the excitement has worn off after a month.

But I won! Just barely! I reached 50k with approximately 30 seconds to spare, on August 31st, after writing for all available hours between 5:30 AM and 4 AM of September 1st. Ashamedly, I moved my time zone back to give me the extra 4 hours - however, 4 hours is a small amount compared to the two weeks during which I wrote nothing.

On that single waking day (I've given up on defining days as midnight to midnight - a day is from when I get up to when I go to bed), I wrote a grand total of 37924 words. I believe. The camp stats are a little wonky right now so I can't check that exactly. But it was a lot.

Granted, approximately 30k in, the quality of the story started going downhill, due to my severe lack of enough brainpower to work that fast. I reached the limit of plot that I had thought about and gone beyond a few times already, so I was just picking something to happen, even if it wasn't something that I liked or wanted to happen. By the end, the story was a disaster. So if/when I do go back to finish it, I'll be scrapping the last 10k or so. Majorly scrapping the last 1k (it was a hodgepodge of scene-y stuff just for word count, because I had less than an hour to finish and I didn't know what was happening next because I'd written myself into a corner).

Still, I liked the story until I made the wrong choice and led myself into a corner. Parts of it were even really good I thought. Obviously not great, since it's a first draft, but they had the potential to be great. So I wouldn't mind revisiting that.

Of course, the day after that I was exhausted, both physically and mentally (besides writing 38k words, I'd stayed up for over 24 hours). So I didn't write after that. And then school was in full swing, and I was immediately swamped in hw. How fun. Hopefully I'll have a chance to post and write more, even though it seems like my classes all collaborated to make sure I have an exam every week. So now I'm off to study for the statistics exam! :)

What's the largest number of words you've ever written in one day?

Camp Woes

2012-08-29T13:03:00.002-07:00

So as you may know, it is August 29th. The August session of Camp NaNoWriMo is ending in two days. I am at a grand total of almost 16k. Or I will be in a few minutes.

.....yeah. Besides that, school has started for me, and while it's been interesting so far (although we haven't covered much yet and not a ton has happened) I can tell that this semester is going to require a bit more time in terms of homework and such. However, I am still going to attempt to finish 50k!

That's a far cry lower than what I had originally planned. June Camp went really well, with me finishing off 50k in the first 11 days, so I figured I would shoot for 75k this August. Obviously, that's unlikely to happen at this point. I'm already well over 10k per day left to finish just the 50k. This is a short post, but I felt like I should put something on here, since I've been neglecting my blog. I'll write a proper post sometime soon-ish. Probably after August is over and I've either won or failed miserably, since in the mean time, I will probably be writing in every spare minute. TTFN, ta ta for now!

Road Block

2012-08-13T22:52:00.002-07:00

So...it's been a long time since I posted. I know. I'm lazy and procrastinating and generally not very productive. For instance, today I was supposed to mail a package, write some of my Camp NaNo, watch a history lecture, and probably a couple other things that I'm forgetting at the moment. I succeeded in *drumroll please* mailing the package.

Yeah.

School starts in two weeks, and I'm kind of freaking out about it. Not because of the school part, which I'm not fussed about either, but it's really not a big deal. More because school starting up again means that the summer is gone, and I'm that much closer to graduating and all the other things that are seeming to happen ridiculously fast.

Oh yeah, I was supposed to pick out colleges. Shoot.

I'm also not feeling particularly good about the things that I'm spending my day doing (marathon Pretty Little Liars? Who, me? My friend loaned the first season to me.). That's not completely true. I love ~~watching Pretty Little Liars~~ doing *cough* other things. But I wish that I had enough time in the day to do other *cough-Pretty-Little-Liars-cough* things AND all the other things that I not only need to do, but also the things that I want to do.

Like write a novel. Camp NaNo has been somewhat of a struggle for me this time. I'm sort of consistently-ish writing most days, or at least thinking about it, but I haven't been able to really just dig down and write. I think it's partly because my mind is drawing a blank on this story. There's a road block telling me I need to figure out some technical things before I can really write. So I'm probably going to go on to the other novel that was actually going to be for Camp (the current one was one that I wanted to finish from last month), and hopefully take a detour around the road block, so that when I do eventually come back to it, I will know what to do with the story.

Pshew. There's a lot more stuff going on in my life right now, and while it is definitely fun, there's that impending sense of doom looming over me which takes away from the experience and is trying to get me to do all the things that I need to do that I don't really want to do and all the things that I do want to do, but somehow just don't have the drive to do. Where's my drive? Normally I'm so intense people can't stop me from doing things. It's weird without it. Is this how normal people feel?

Well, we all know normal is boring. Maybe I should make my life more exciting. Anyway, that's it for me for now. Hopefully I'll have a better post for you sometime soon. TTFN, ta ta for now. :)

Editing, otherwise known as Author Torture

2012-07-01T22:59:00.001-07:00

So during Camp NaNoWriMo, I was asked about how I edit. I had just finished my novel and was in the process of editing it during the later part of the month. I figured other writers might be interested in hearing how I edit, since it could be either different from what you do or something that you've never tried before. Anyway, I figured I'd give a general overview of how I go about editing.

First I go through and read my first draft (which, btw, is a terrible thing to make an author do) and make a little outline of what happened in each chapter, marking what the major problems were along the way. Once I've gone through and fixed those problems, I'll read through again, crossing my fingers that it'll be better. Only once I've finished the major problems (inconsistencies, any plot holes, strange character motives/reactions/developments, etc) will I go through more carefully and fix awkward things like dialogue or description or whatever. After that's fixed, I'll read through once more, polishing (i.e. Is that really the word I want there? etc.).

Obviously, the three phases I just laid out there take more than one try each. For example, the novel that I'm currently editing (or was - I'm taking a break from it so I can look at it with fresh eyes again) received a pass where I fixed a bunch of inconsistencies in primarily changing character motives. But at the end of that pass, I realized I wanted to change a certain character's motive again, so that required another pass at it.

As I edit, I often find other things that need to be fixed or changed, even after I've outlined the major problems I knew to begin with. That's why I find editing to be rather torturous - even though you're fixing it, you keep finding parts that need more repair. Eventually you get to a point where it all seems like it's falling apart, even though you've been editing like mad. That's when I stop, let it sit for a while (a week, a month, whatever), and come back to it later. I'll read through it once to get back in the story, and go on with editing.

Now that you know how I edit - how do you edit? Does it differ from what I do? I also know that some people love editing, and prefer it to writing the first draft. That's not me, so I wonder why? If you're one of those people, enlighten me please?

Motivation

2012-06-13T11:26:00.002-07:00

Unfortunately, I'm not providing motivation today. I'm looking for some myself. With my novel done, I really need to edit. I let it sit for a few days while I worked on finishing up my 50k for Camp (oh, did I mention I won? Still so excited), but now I need to get back in and start editing. I already know that's going to entail some more writing, because I kind of forgot half my characters from the beginning, then realized it and stuck them in again at the end, so there's a big chunk in the middle where they really are in desperate need of character development to get them to the point where they can act the way I made them act at the end and have it make sense after the way they acted in the beginning.

(I'm not entirely sure that last sentence made sense itself. I mean behavior at first is inconsistent with behavior at end, and I need to add character development in the middle so that it flows. There we go.)

Problem is I tend to be rather social when I write. When actually writing (by that I mean putting the words down), I do word wars and sprints and Write or Die by Dr. Wicked to get the words down. But I haven't had very much experience editing, so even though I know exactly what I need to do, I just can't seem to make myself actually DO it.

So, what do you do when you don't want to do something? Any tips are appreciated. :)

A novel? Finished? I must be dreaming.

2012-06-09T11:13:00.002-07:00

Yes, you read that right. And since it's been almost twenty four hours now, I'm fairly sure that I'm not dreaming. Or at least, if I am, I'm perfectly happy to stay dreaming. Allow me this fantasy! Stop the voices! They're following me!

Ok, perhaps I haven't had quite enough sleep.

But maybe I should back up now. Yesterday I finished my novel - yeah, the one I've been doing for Camp. I can't remember if I already posted this part or not, but I'm, or I was, rebelling for Camp and finishing a novel I'd already started. 30k added, and I'm done. Which is great!

Except that now I have to edit. If you did NaNoWriMo last November and won, you also got a CreateSpace code - it's for 5 free copies of your book. That code expires at the end of June (that's this month, for people like me who lose track of entire months and maybe even years at a time). I would really like to have this novel that I just finished, A) get a title, B) get edited, and C) become physical. A whole five copies! So awesome.

I still am planning on doing a short story to get me over 50k for the month, but I'm going to be editing and rewriting and revising and everything to frantically get this novel ready for my public humiliation. I.e. showing the novel to my family and/maybe friends. Scary.

Oh yeah, and I still need a cover...hmm. Maybe I should look around and see if I can figure out how to use GIMP - or maybe I can edit a picture I have because it might be kind of perfect...we'll see.

Where do you get covers? And how do you go about editing? I'm pretty new to the whole "actually have something to edit" thing. Tips for me? As I go along I'll post what works for me to edit as well under the label Writing Tips.

Hoping I don't go mad from hard core writing...oh wait, I already am.

Camp NaNo?

2012-06-05T14:42:00.002-07:00

So, I haven't posted in what seems like a really long time - I don't actually know how long it's been, but in any case, it feels like a lot has happened.

Camp NaNoWriMo started on Friday! June 1st and I stayed up way too late to write. I found out that I didn't actually want to start a new novel, so I'm rebelling this month and finishing a novel that I started last August during Camp last year. Actually, I'd kind of expected to only need another 20k in this novel, but I've written almost 20k and it's nowhere near done. Now I think there might be another 20k left.

My estimates could be very wrong though, since I don't use outlines when I write most of the time, so I don't actually know how the story is going to end. But it's fun in any case.

Did you know that the Arabs attacked the Egyptian empire, and when the Egyptians fought back and held an impenetrable border, they ended their rule themselves? They spent so much manpower and money and whatnot into keeping their borders safe that they didn't have enough people to farm and make food and trade and everything that made them rich to begin with. And then when they didn't have money or food, their border broke and they were overtaken.

I just researched that. Mostly because I've got a fantasy story that has people (vampires that aren't called vampires - they're Ilthibar) from the Egyptian era and I thought that the fall of the Egyptians might help me figure out how the "good guys" are going to defeat the "bad guys". Well, there's actually only one bad guy, but he's so powerful that he almost counts as bad guys. Anyway, I'm not going to say any more because not only do I suck at writing synopsises (synopsys? Synposi? I dunno.), but I also don't know what's going to happen in my novel yet.

So moving on. Camp NaNoWriMo, as I mentioned, has begun. It is day 5 - I haven't written anything today yet, but on the 3rd I wrote 10011 words from the time that I got up until I went to bed...which may have actually been quite late and past midnight. Yesterday I wrote 6k, and today I'm hoping to write 7k, but if I don't get on that, it's not going to happen.

Actually, I almost didn't write 10k. But just as I was about to go to bed (it was like, 3 AM) I realized I only had 600 more words before I'd reach 10k for the day. I couldn't pass that up - I figured it be a lot easier to write 600 right then than to write another 9,400 words on another day. So I got up from my inviting bed and wrote another 600 words, then went to bed happy. :)

Are you doing Camp NaNo, and if so, what has your writing endeavor brought you? Great word count achievements? Accidental history lessons?

10011 in one day

My unedited script!

2012-05-28T14:58:00.001-07:00

So a while back (it might have been a long while...I'm not really sure) I posted the beginning to the script which I am still calling "Memory Script". That post is here. I recently realized I never actually showed you guys the rest of that script - oops. So although I don't really have much to say, I thought I'd let you see that now.

If you have any criticisms or critiques or comments or anything at all, please let me know - no matter how trivial or important. I will try to get to editing this, so any feedback would be helpful. Anyway, hopefully you'll enjoy it!

Script!

Inspiration - or lack thereof

2012-05-25T22:31:00.001-07:00

So right now I'm trying to finish a novel which I started ages and ages ago - this was actually my Camp NaNoWriMo novel from August of 2011. While I made it over the 50k line there, I never actually managed to finish it. Not because it wasn't any good, or I didn't want to, but because I have no idea how to bring it to a head.

Currently, I need to throw everybody together, but I can't figure out a logical way for that to happen. I think it would help a lot if I knew how my "villain" was trying to destroy nearly the entire human population, but unfortunately, I'm missing a little in the master plan department.

I actually went back and read through the entire thing so far, and it's not nearly as bad as I expected. I figured it would be a good idea, since it's been so long since I worked on this novel that I'd pretty much forgotten what was happening. I know for sure that if I'd just tried to start writing without reading it again, I would have forgotten to bring back in two characters that I set up earlier. But I'm still stuck on what actually happens next...

Not only that, but the furthest I've gotten on the ending is that good guys triumph over bad guys. Inspiration is extremely lacking in this girl's brain.

Normally I come up with ideas while taking a very long, hot shower. But I still haven't come up with anything that seems suitable. So I have a very important and necessary question to ask - how do you find inspiration, and what do you do when you're stuck?

Projects

2012-05-19T19:44:00.003-07:00

So right now, I'm juggling projects. I don't normally do this. It's quite strange. Normally, I'll have one project that I work on, and then when it's finished, I move on to the next project. Right now, I have three novels in the works. Two have rough drafts, one is unfinished. A couple weeks ago, I had two scripts on top of that. This is so weird.

But really. There's some good points and some bad points to having multiple projects, at least for me. Because I'm such a happy person (:P) let's start with some good.

I do like how I can choose which project I want to work on. If I ever just don't want to do one project, I can go to a different project and still be productive, even if it just isn't flowing with the first project. For instance, if I want to edit rather than write, I can go to one of my completed novels, whereas if I want to write (by write I do mean rough draft, even though writing includes editing) I can go to my unfinished novel. The con here is that there's potential for me to never go back to a project. I might start and never finish.

The other side of this con isn't so much that I'll never finish, but it'll take me so long to get back to a project that I'll have forgotten how the story goes. I've already committed this crime - my unfinished novel is from last August, and I just finished reading what I've already written so that I could remember what the heck is going on. There's a ton that I'd forgotten.

The good part about going back to read is that I surprised myself - my very first draft of my very first novel was HORRID. Worst thing I have ever read. And that includes the excepts of very awful self-pubbed books I've seen. (In no way am I bashing self publishing - it just happens to allow a lot of books that should never have been published to be published anyway.) I suppose I might be slightly biased because it was my work as well, but anyway. This currently unfinished project was much easier to read, and while it's definitely not polished or anything - since it is a first draft - it wasn't unsalvageable.

(Firefox and google are telling me that unsalvageable doesn't mean what I think it means - I mean the opposite of salvageable. Gosh Google.)

Anyway, on a different note, June is coming up, and that means Camp NaNoWriMo! If you didn't get the memo, it's changed months from last year, so instead of July and August, it's June and August now. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, Camp NaNoWriMo is the same thing as NaNoWriMo except in summer (or I suppose it could be winter depending on where you are in the world - I get confused where exactly that is). Also, CreateSpace codes expire at the end of June from NaNoWriMo 2011, so if you have a code but haven't used it yet...well, should probably get cracking - that's a reminder to me too.

I want to have my unfinished novel finished and at least partially edited by the beginning of Camp NaNo in June - let's see how much I can do in the next two weeks, shall we?

Do you usually have one or many projects at any given time? (Notice there is no option for no projects, you lazy writer folk. :D)

Why do you prefer your answer to previous question?

And are you doing Camp NaNoWriMo this year?

Update and Script Preview

2012-05-09T11:53:00.000-07:00

Finals are over! And grades are in - I got As (or Os for Harry Potter world, 4.0 GPA, Very High Achievement/High Distinction in Australia etc.) in all my classes, which is good, since I studied more during that week than I have in my entire life. Even history went well, which is the one I was worried about.

Anyway, after finals, my grandma came to visit with my step-grandpa. The Sunday after finals, we had a recital, which my mom ran because she's a music teacher. It was held at a nursing home in town, which we've done before. This time...it had a bit of a nasty twist to it.

Not long before we got there (My mom and I go early to set up the equipment because there isn't a good piano at the home, so we bring our keyboard and amp), one of the residents had an accident. It was supposedly all cleaned up, but...Let's just say that moving the tables involved me encountering some of the "stuff" that was(n't) cleaned up. I.e. feces. Not fun. Fortunately, we weren't wearing our dress clothes yet. When we went back to perform, I did not sit down or touch anything for the entire time. ;)

On Monday we went to see the Avengers, since it was my brother's birthday - excellent dialogue, impressive special effects, not so great on the character development. I won't say anymore lest I spoil it for someone. But if you haven't seen it yet, don't waste your money (unless you have a lot to spend) and just wait for it online/DVD/Blue-ray/whatever else there is.

And now finally, as requested, here is part of my first script. It isn't finished yet, so I may or may not be able to tell you what happens later - it depends on if I've written it yet or not. This also has not been edited - feel free to tell me which parts need the most editing, or give me pointers on how to do it better. This is my first screenplay, so I'm very open to critique/criticism. I don't have a title for my script(s) yet, so I've been referring to this one as "Memory Script". Descriptive, right? Without further ado (well, maybe a little), the first twelve pages or so of "Memory Script"!

(Oh, and sorry for the rather long post - there's been a lot going on.)

Beginning of Memory Script

Script Frenzy Win!

2012-04-30T15:22:00.000-07:00

It is April 30th! It is also the end of Script Frenzy, sadly. I won - currently I'm at 135 or so pages - but I plan to keep writing until the last minute. My goal at this point is 150 pages and/or to finish one of my scripts.

I was planning to write this post when I actually won, but I validated during a write in and didn't want to take time out of writing to write this. In addition, I haven't been able to post for the past week or so (easily) because my laptop had a slight encounter with a water balloon. To be specific, the contents of the water balloon.

It is fine, after a week of drying, but it has once again reminded me to ALWAYS BACK UP. I had 74 pages of script on my laptop, not backed up anywhere, and no way to get it back until my laptop dried out. At that point, I panicked and nearly cried.

But my indomitable (and humble) fighting spirit reared its head and told me to buck up and not be a baby. I started on a new script, typing frantically and making great strides each day, regardless of the limited access to a computer that I had. I had almost reached the halfway point when a week was up and I could finally see the true damage to my laptop.

Fortunately, my laptop was fine and I was pleasantly treated to a nice page count boost with the pages I thought I might never see again. But at this point, I was already prepared to write 20 pages a day for the last three days of April to finish my second script. So I said to myself, "Why waste such a productive attitude? After all, it's not often that I feel so determined to be productive." And I answered myself, "What a good point. I will keep writing like a madman - or madwoman."

And so I did.

~~~

On a not so fun note, I also have finals this week - I just finished my first one, calculus. So yesterday I spent doing the entire semester (that was fun) and writing my script when I started to feel like banging my head against the wall. Ah well.

Do you think if I slept with my textbooks under my pillow, I would learn it through osmosis? *chemistry is tomorrow*

Grab Your Quill - Let's Write! Point of View

2012-04-24T09:40:00.000-07:00

Point of view, or PoV, is the perspective that the story is told from. When a reader picks up a book, they are looking through a camera at the story. The location of this camera is their PoV. A couple definitions before the full discussion on PoV: First person uses "I". I did this, and I saw that. Second person (which is almost never used in fiction, and is really only used when writing how-to/self-help kind of things) uses "you". Third person, the most common for fiction, uses "he", "she", and "it". He looked out of the airplane window, trying to ignore the girl snoring next to him. The majority of fiction is classically told using third person, although recently, there has been a surge of first person books.

All the different points of view can pretty much be summed up into four types. The first of these is internal, main character. When a book/story uses an internal PoV, that means that the camera the reader is watching through is located in the head of one character. The reader sees what the character sees, hears what the character thinks, but unless that character is a mind reader, the reader can't tell what other characters are thinking. All internal PoV use first person, but this also limits what can be written to show the reader. First person anything is often hard to pull off well, even though there are more and more books in first person that are being published nowadays.
The second PoV is internal, secondary character. Again, the reader is being shown the story through a single character, but in this case, that character is not the main character, but rather a secondary character. Nice how the names of these PoVs correspond with what they are. I have yet to see this PoV succeed (that I remember), although I'm sure it can be done. In fiction writing at least, this PoV isn't used very much.

After internal PoVs, there are external PoVs. The two types of external PoV are limited narrator and omniscient narrator. Both use third person, and both place the "camera" in the world instead of in a character's head. The primary difference is how that camera is set up. In external, limited narrator, the camera is stuck. It's placed on a tripod somewhere and it can't see everything that's going on. In the classic good versus bad story, the camera is often stuck with the good side, preventing the reader from knowing what's happening with the bad side.

External, omniscient narrator. This one is a lot easier to understand if you know what omniscient means (I happen to like this word). Omniscient means "all-knowing". Contrary to limited narrator, in omniscient narrator, the camera is no longer stuck on a tripod on the ground, but rather flying around up in the sky where it can swivel in every direction and zoom in on anything at all. This might seem like it would be easier to write in, since then the author can show the reader anything that he/she deems necessary. However, sometimes it's better to keep the reader in the dark to make them keep reading.

There's only four of these PoVs I've talked about, but deciding which one to use can make or break a story. So how do you choose? There's a few questions you can ask. First, consider each choice of narrator individually. Beginning with the main character, for internal, main character, ask what the narrator (main character) will be able to know that other characters won't. Also consider what the reader can learn about the main character and the other characters from inside the main character's head. Finally, ask yourself if you can effectively write the story. This means considering if you can properly convey any emotions or tension necessary, as well as delivering the build up and the climax of the story in a way that will hook and keep the reader. Ask yourself these questions about all four PoVs (main character, secondary character, limited narrator, and omniscient narrator), then decide which one will be most beneficial for your story. Good luck!

What is your preferred PoV for your own writing and for reading? What do you find easiest to write in?

Grab Your Quill - Let's Write! Mary Sue and Gary Stu

2012-04-17T20:47:00.000-07:00

Once again, the writing advice that I've been writing for Shelfari - if you know me on there, you probably already know this. If you don't, then this is for you. :)

You’ve probably heard of them. Mary Sue and Gary Stu go hand in hand, as they walk down the perfectly picturesque avenue. Mary wears a perfect dress, is pretty, and happy, while Gary graciously courts her. Neither has a care in the world.

@#$%^&*&^%$#! Wake up! Why are you falling asleep? A novel has another 75,000 words of this to go. But have you ever actually read a book like this? I guarantee that no matter how perfect or idealistic a book may be, there is some flaw in your characters.

There’s a reason for this. Perfect characters, called Mary Sues and Gary Stus, are boring. The reader can’t relate to them, because nobody in the world is perfect. The term “Mary Sue” has also evolved to include overdone characters – like the princess oppressed who longs for freedom. Mary/Gary characters are clichéd.

To make a good story, both plot and character have to be original. Mary/Gary’s are the unoriginal characters. All good characters are believable – they aren’t perfect, and they make logical decisions and reactions. All characters that appeal to publishers (and any readers looking for fresh stories) are also different from any character that came before it.

There aren’t many tips for how to make a good character – I can’t tell you that your female lead should love raspberries and be terrified of lighting, because then it’s not your character. To make a new character, you have to make them. If you succeed, the character will come to life. Until you experience this, it probably won’t make any sense; I thought it was ridiculous until I started writing. I also tend to really love the characters that work, and get bored easily with the characters that don’t. If you are not successful, it will be hard to imagine your character’s reactions, and hard to force them to conform to your plot. (Of course, it might also be hard to force them to your plot because there’s a problem with your plot.) Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to creating great characters. The only way to get better at creating and portraying characters is to write. Good luck!

Nearly Halfway

2012-04-08T00:20:00.001-07:00

Well, as it's Script Frenzy and that's pretty much the only writing thing on my mind right now, this post is going to be about that.

We have just passed the first week, and I am nearly halfway to 100 pages, hovering at 43. Unfortunately, I seem to have no motivation unless I'm writing with others. I've been to two write ins online and one in person so far, each for about two hours, and wrote almost the entire time for them, but other than that, I haven't written at all.

My stats graph has great jumps and then a few days with a flat line and then a big jump and another few days. And it's not from not updating. Oh well. Scripts seem to be much easier for me, since I go much quicker than when I try to write novels. If this were NaNoWriMo, I would probably barely be reaching 10k right now.

I am really grateful for whoever made the Open Office template for screenplays and put it on the Writer's Resources on the ScriptFrenzy site - it's made this really easy.

Oh, I suppose you guys have no idea what my script is about. (By the way, I'm thinking in this Brittish accent, since I've been watching House of Anubis for the past two days almost continuously, and now I can't seem to think in my usual American accent. But that has nothing to do with scripts.)

So far, I have a girl - high school aged - who has lost her memory, in addition to her best friend, because her dad is a scientist who was working on a mind device. The girl, Jasmine, unfortunately decided to sneak around the lab, and ended up unconscious. When she woke, she had lost a week of her memory. Her best friend also lost some memories so she wouldn't tell anyone. When daddy tries to fix Jasmine, he screws up and her mind is terribly twisted.

I believe the story is going to be primarily about Jasmine finding out what happened to her, but I did have this idea floating around that I can't seem to quite remember all of, about a bad guy who would love to take advantage of Jasmine's compromised state to do something to daddy's work. What exactly that might entail, I'm not sure yet. But it sounds interesting.

Anyway, at the current point in time, best friend is in the hospital because she's having headaches (well, she's in the hospital because she fainted and got a concussion, but the headaches are the important part) - Jasmine will soon start to also have headaches as both her best friend and her own minds try to heal themselves.

This has been a rather long post, so I'll sign off for now. Here's to another 57 pages!

If any of you are doing Script Frenzy, good luck! And we should write together some time. Probably more for my sake than yours. ;)

But Why?

2012-04-01T22:26:00.000-07:00

Ok, so today, I successfully completed my entire script! It was ridiculous! I started on the dot at midnight, wrote about 40 pages, then slept, got up, and wrote like a madwoman all day. It was exhausting, but fun.

April Fool's!

I wish...but sadly, I'm only at 15 pages. You may be going, oh, that's great! But the problem is that now I'm stuck. I have a mad scientist who's been playing with this high school girl's memories, but I don't know why or what mad scientist wants. Help?

I need a motive, but I don't know where to get one. What do you guys think? Do you have any methods for figuring out motives?

Screnzy!

2012-03-31T00:39:00.006-07:00

Script Frenzy, or Screnzy, is almost here! (If you haven't heard of it, check it out here.) I'm planning on doing it - which may be a disaster with all the school and stuff that I'm trying to not fall behind on. Yeah, forget about getting ahead to give myself lag time, just not falling behind would be good. :)

As far as my script goes, I know I want to write a feature length film. I do not know how that's formatted (I'll figure that out sometime in the first week though). I also do not know what this film is going to be about, where it's set, or...anything really. This'll be fun!

Sometimes I wonder if I'm insane. Other times I wonder if this is normal/should be normal, and everyone else is just lazy and lame. Oh well. If I am crazy, it's clearly too late to save me from the insanity. And if I'm not...well, then all the better for me. :)

I'm rambling a bit. Mostly because not only is it too late to save me from the crazies, but it's also nearly 2 AM. I just felt that I haven't posted in a while and I should post. I should apologize for the copious amounts of nothing that have been spewing from my blog as well. Did I mention I had rocky road ice cream today? It's been very warm.

All right, clearly I need to go to bed. Good night everybody - and are you planning to do Script Frenzy? If so, what kind of script are you doing?

How do you write?

2012-03-26T22:49:00.002-07:00

I'm technically supposed to be writing a couple essays right now. One of them is a particularly important history paper. However, that's not the interesting part. (Despite the effect it may have on my grade.)

The interesting part is how I'm writing this paper. Normally, I'll have a general idea of where I want the essay to go, with my three main ideas/body paragraphs and the supporting points. Nothing is very fleshed out, but I sit down, and I begin from the beginning and go to the end. Then I fix things (or not, as the case may be). But this time, I created my thesis first, as usual, then found all my examples (stupid history) and extras besides. Examples and me do not mix well. Anyway, said examples have been organized into paragraphs, each with a unifying topic sentence, to form the extreme skeleton of the essay.

Now I'm going through, painstakingly, reorganizing as I go to figure out how to segue into each paragraph and which order my paragraphs should go in. (I'm not exactly sure how I know how to say "segue" but had no idea how to spell it...normally it's the other way around.) As I reorganize and shift things around, selecting my examples from the plethora that I have at my disposal, I'm also writing sections about each example, which I plan to stick directly into the essay. This piecewise writing is totally new to me, in both essay and novel writing.

So I'm curious - do you jump around when you write? Either in essays or between scenes in fiction? Or do you write straight through, from beginning to end? And why?

gasp The horror!

2012-03-17T10:32:00.004-07:00

How many people like to be dramatic? Yes, raise your hands high and don't be ashamed of it. I, and pretty much everybody I know, likes to be dramatic at some point. Well that's brilliant (brilliant. Thanks Aussie friends for making me talk like you.) because I may have a job for you. This April, I'll be writing a movie. Yes, I know, I'm crazy. But, if said movie turns out to be animated or have significant CGI in it, I may need voices. Not for sure, but if it happens to turn out that way, then I'll put another post on here for anybody who reads this and might want to join.

Now, on to the actual Script Frenzy. Also put on by the Office of Letters and Light, like NaNoWriMo, this is a challenge to write 100 pages of script during April. (For those of you, like me, who have to do the little ditty every single time to figure out how many days there are in a month, that's 30 days.) These 100 pages can be anything, including but not limited to movies, shorts, comic books, graphic novels, web comics, tv scripts, radio scripts, etc. You can also do multiple scripts to reach 100 pages. Last year I wrote 6 comic book scripts.

But, and there is a but, last year, I thought this was great fun and relatively easy. I spent the first few days learning how to format (which was really important, because there's a lot of white space in scripts that makes it easier to reach 100 than if you just crammed everything onto one page like a novel). After formatting, it was fun and way easy to visualize how I wanted each succeeding panel to go. This was partly because I knew my main character like the back of my hand.

Blaze, a pyrokinetic, had already been created for a RP, so I knew her relatively well already. I pulled her out from my files (yes, I keep a basic log of all the characters I've RPed as), reworked her to make her a bit more optimistic (she was quite depressing before), and redid her past entirely (since we'd made that up on the fly in the RP, and I didn't want to copy the RP). In the spirit of not simply writing down in comic format the RP, I also entirely changed all the other characters - this was also because I didn't own the other characters from the RP.

In the end, I thought my comics were brilliant, and I'm afraid to go read them again to disillusion myself.

Well, this was a rather rambling post. I'm not sure I actually made any sort of point. Eh, hopefully it was semi-interesting anyway. Oh, and the title has pretty much nothing to do with the post; it was just the first thing I thought of when I thought of drama. :)

Do you ever ramble? And are you ever afraid to read your own work, for fear of spoiling its perfection? And most importantly, would you be interested in voicing a potential character?

Possible stories?

2012-03-12T16:28:00.005-07:00

This is a little thing I started - I'm thinking that I might try making it into a story about a girl who has issues but then eventually finds her way to a successful and happy life. Whether or not I'll go through with that I don't know. I might just decide to kill her. That'd be simple. What do you think? Oh yeah, and I don't have a title as of now, so I just put Story of a Girl - that's an awful title, but whatever. I don't know enough about the story to know what it should be.

Story of a Girl

Now, I also need another story idea, although this time, it's not for a short story or novel. I'm doing Script Frenzy - and hopefully it'll turn out better than FAWM did (can't remember if I posted on the results of FAWM or not, but it was a resounding failure, with a total of 1 song and couple fragments). So, last year I wrote some comic book scripts, which I was actually quite proud of and found extremely fun to write. That time I had no idea what I was doing as far as writing a script for a comic goes - I spent the first few days of April trying to figure out how to format. I'll probably do a post on that.

Anyway, this year I think it'd be fun to do a play or movie script. Actually I think I'll do a movie script. Or perhaps both. We'll see how many pages it takes (Script Frenzy is 100 pages of script in April). But before I can start writing, I need a story. Last year was easy - I took my character from an RPG, reworked her, and then used her as the main character. This year, I don't really have any ideas yet.

Where do you get your ideas?

Life

2012-03-05T23:11:00.003-08:00

All right, I have to apologize for not posting for what seems like ages. Life's been getting in the way, as it seems to like to do. However, it is almost spring break (one more week) so I'm hoping to do a lot more writing and such soon. I've started a bit of a story as well. Not quite sure where it's going to take me, but it's completely different from anything I've ever done before. It's more of a "in the character's head/life" kind of story, rather than a good vs. bad story like I've done before.

Oh yeah, and I have to come clean - I completely failed at 60k/60day, and FAWM. I didn't have the motivation for 60k/60day, probably because I feel like I already know what's going to happen, so why write it down? Plus, every time I tried, it was absolutely awful. I cringed. FAWM didn't happen, mostly because I like to record on the spot, which doesn't really happen in the practice rooms on campus. However, I did make the beginnings of a song that I quite like so far, and hopefully I will manage to finish that one. Anyway, that's all I have for now - can't wait until the end of the week!

Writer Fuel

2012-02-15T19:01:00.000-08:00

Free food. That's the best part about the writing center on campus. Ok, so I can't actually say that for sure, since the free food is the only reason I've ever gone in there. For instance, last semester, they were having an open house with lemonade and cookies. I had no plans to actually make an appointment or anything, but I wanted lemonade and cookies - so I went in.

Today, and actually, all of this week, it's International Writing Centers Week or something like that, so they have free food just about every day this week. So Wednesday (today) was Waffles for Writers Wednesday.

In other words, I went in there and hung out, eating waffles with butter and blueberries and whipped cream (yes, there was syrup, but I didn't use it) and sort of writing on my laptop. Waffles were delicious. And I was quite excited to hear that they'd like to make it a monthly thing. xD Writing...well, I didn't get past a page of new stuff I don't think...and the quality of my writing degenerated the further I went. Oh well - that's what editing is for.

I plan to visit the writing center on Friday too - there's going to be chocolate fondue. In the morning there'll be donut holes, and in the afternoon, bananas and strawberries. Yum. (I'm a great fan of chocolate.) Perhaps I'll ask if they'll help me with editing my novel. Since I'm fairly sure anybody who's seen even a corner of it knows it's...well, it leaves a lot to be desired.

Although waffles and chocolate fondue is all well and good - not to mention delicious - it doesn't really make for the best writing food, since both require at least one hand. This alone is not a big deal. It's the fact that both have the potential to be rather messy. I prefer to avoid splattering chocolate, butter, and syrup on my laptop as I'm writing, and I can not stand typing with messy fingers. So for me, food that I have when I'm writing is usually finger-food that isn't messy. So dry food...say, granola. Trail mix. Not chips though, much as I like them, because they're greasy.

I know some people have food and/or drink that they habitually have whenever they sit down to write. I don't have that, although I enjoy food and drink - even though it slows me down. Are you like me, and generally don't have to have food/drink when you write, or do you need something (a cup of coffee, a piece of fruit, anything) when you write?

Grab Your Quill - Let's Write: Overall Structure

2012-02-12T23:36:00.000-08:00

I know that some of you will have seen this on Shelfari, but for the rest of the people who view this blog, here is a bit I wrote on overall structure - these will come somewhere around monthly, and will probably be more continuous (maybe) than the other posts I do, which are just whatever I feel like writing at the time. Hope you enjoy!

~~~

As a writer, I have no fear of writing long passages - I hope you won't be afraid of reading this one. A lot of you will probably already know this stuff, but I figured it would be best to start at the beginning for this writing corner. And where better to start than with structure? Enjoy. :)

Everybody knows that in any good story, there's a beginning, middle, and end. A good beginning will hook the reader, the middle will keep their interest and force them to keep turning pages as fast as they can, and an end will satisfy them while still leaving them wanting more. Some people describe the structure of a story through what's known as the 3 Act structure. This is basically three Acts, like in a play, with two Plot Points in-between the acts.

The first Act is the beginning of it all, and the first Plot Point is what I call the trigger point. Some people include backstory in the first Act, but if you're writing a more lengthy work, it's actually better to work this backstory into the later Acts as needed, rather than dumping it all at the beginning – that's called an info dump.

Info dumps are characteristically very boring because they take too long to get to the action. As numerous little kids have said, "When do we get to the good stuff?"

The first Plot Point, or the trigger point, is the point where something happens that causes the rest of the story. Perhaps this is your main character deciding he (or she) is going to take a vacation in Egypt, but then the plane crashes in the middle of the desert, where he/she is stranded. Fortunately for him, he encounters a tribe of desert dwellers, who, although they don't speak English, take care of him. Unfortunately for him, these same desert dwellers who are so kindly taking care of him are also under attack by another tribe – then your main character finds out they want to use him as barter.

This brings me to Act 2. Although the reasons behind your main character's decision to go to Egypt might be in Act 1, and his actual decision to go, or perhaps when his plane crashes, would be the trigger point, all the stuff I said after that are additional problems or conflicts. Act 2 comprises of all the conflict and problems that your main character encounters. These conflicts will escalate through Act 2 until the final crisis comes. This crisis is the second Plot Point, or the climax.

As a note, when escalating conflicts, you don't want to simply throw the same thing at your character over and over. Having one dinosaur attacking your character, and then having twelve dinosaurs attacking your character won't escalate the tension in your story (you want to build this to the climax) nearly as well as if the conflicts change each time so that your main character has to adapt.

The second Plot Point, or climax, is the final push in the story. This is where everything is on the line. This is the point where something happens and suddenly, there is hope again that everything will be all right. (The exception to this is if you're writing a tragedy, in which case you should just kill everybody off.)

Finally, we have Act 3. Because it is nearly impossible to hold a reader's attention for very long after you've finished with the great crisis that your poor main character had to suffer through, it is generally a good idea to wrap everything up and finish. If you're planning a sequel, or just want your reader to keep reading, you can also throw in a question that you don't answer, even though all the loose ends of the story are wrapped up.

There's a lot more about structure I could say, but hopefully this wasn't too boring, and it helps – look for more about each of these (the three Acts and the Plot Points) in the future!

Award!

2012-02-10T11:12:00.000-08:00

First of all, thanks to Ella at Musings in Ink for giving me the Versatile Blogger Award! I was completely unaware there were awards like that. :) I'm also slightly amazed that anybody actually reads my blog. But anyway. Requirements for the award as follows!

Requirements

- Link to the blogger who gave you the award.

- Share 7 things about yourself.

- Pass the award to 15 bloggers recently discovered. (<--I can do this now!)

- Notify the blogger recipients.

So, I've completed the first requirement (thanks again Ella!) - 7 things about myself.

The first thing I thought of when I saw 7 things was the Miley Cyrus song, and I'm ashamed of myself. :)
The title of my blog, Normal is Boring, is a quote from my great-aunt. Who said it several years ago. Yes, I loved it, and hence it is up there in great big letters.
I have written *counts* three novels (ok, almost...two of them still need endings) and yet, none of them are fit for human consumption.
I just went to look up "consumption" because I thought, as I was writing the word, "Isn't that a disease?" (In case you were wondering, it is. Specifically progressive wasting away of the body, especially due to pulmonary tuberculosis. Don't ask me to define that...I'll just tell you it's something to do with lungs. But consumption does have another meaning, which is what I originally intended.)
I would love to be published - preferably a novel. Although I think traveling on a tour would be absolutely terrifying.
I believe my right arm is becoming/is stronger than my left arm, mostly due to the fact that I always lift my backpack with my right arm...and that thing is heavy!
I'm an incredible night owl. If I could, I would sleep from 6 or 7 AM to 7 PM, and then be awake for the rest of the night. Unfortunately, I have not been successful at getting the rest of the world to follow this. My plans for world domination have been stalled!

And now for my 15 blogs! Except...we'll just say this is 15.

Evergreena's Treehouse
Glittering Compositions
Living, Learning, Eating
Sweets Galore
The Writing Kind
Scribbles and Shorts

Woot woot! Off to let them know!

And Then and Then and Then...

2012-02-09T10:19:00.000-08:00

And then I suddenly disappeared off the face of the earth! And then I came back. And then I complained about school and whatnot to some friends who kindly listened to me. And then...wait, are you falling asleep? That's not a very polite thing to do when somebody's telling you a story.

And yet, that is exactly what we all tend to do when somebody tells a story. Any good writer knows how, whether consciously or subconsciously, to show a story. Heck, any reader knows how to tell between a story that is told and a story that is shown - mainly because told stories are boring. From this comes the Golden Rule of writers:

Show, Don't Tell.

This is one of the most basic fundamentals of story telling, and yet, it is often the one that many people miss. I'm sure you all either remember being a kid who tells stories with "and then"s the whole way through, or have at least seen a kid who did this.

(You all? What am I, Texan? A Texan with a northern accent?)

When an author shows, rather than tells, the story, it is much more vibrant to the reader. For example:

The rain was cold.

This is not nearly as effective, or image-inducing (no, you aren't supposed to slip hallucinatory drugs to your readers...just supposed to make them think you did) as:

The rain froze my skin.

Or:

I shivered, my body protesting the icy fingers that slid down my neck.

The second one here also uses personification, which is a way to create relatable, vivid imagery for your reader. (There are other tricks for this too, and I'll have another blog post on them some other time.)

As an author, it is your job to put me into your story so I can see it for my own eyes. I don't want a second hand account, seen through your eyes, I want to see it for myself. As a reader, you demand this from an author. Show, don't tell, and not only will your story be much more interesting, but everyone will be happy. :)