NaNoWriMo Madness!

November is almost upon us! (Celebrates.) All together now: "Winter is coming." No? Just me? Huh.

Anyway, November is almost here, and you know what that means! NaNoWriMo! (National Novel Writing Month.)

I'm SUPER DUPER CAJUPER excited! (And yes, I did just make up a word.) Now, if you don't know what NaNoWriMo is, then 1) shame on you, and 2) what are you doing on this blog? Go look it up!

NaNoWriMo, for me, is one month of complete madness and frantic typing. I often bribe myself with little treats in order to get through my word count for the day. Such as leftover Halloween candy.

 Last year my WCG (word count goal) was 30,000, being 1,000 words per day. That's about two typed pages. This year, my WCG is 40,000, making it about 1,334 words a day. That'll be interesting, considering each day I have enough homework to keep me working until dinner. But, NaNoWriMo is all about that: finding time to write no matter what, with no excuses. It's the month to block out your calendar. As shown here.

I've spent the day filling out character forms and going through knots in my fuzzy, planned-out plot. And cleaning off my desk. 

Of course, this is probably futile, because last year my desk filled up with empty pens, pieces of scratch paper, lip balm tubes, half-full tea cups, candy wrappers, staples, sticky notes, the odd headache pill and pretty much everything else you could name. Such is NaNoWriMo. 

Hope you guys have a fantastic Halloween, and an even better national novel writing month! Remember, reach your word count goal no matter what! Even if you must turn into a writing zombie! 

Good luck!

Oh, and as a random thought, I'm totally obsessed with this song right now. It's just so pretty and epic. And it's from The Hunger Games, so of COURSE I love it.  (Credit goes to the Taliesin Orchestra.)

 

Books on my To-Read List

It's been SO LONG since I blogged!
Basically here's my life right now: go to school, come home, do homework, listen to music, tell myself that I really should work on my story, put off working on my story, mess around on the internet, eat dinner, spend time with my family and go to bed. So, I haven't really written that much lately... I've been too distracted by the internet... (cough). Yeah.

But! I DO have a list of books I want to read soon. Here it is.
-The Maze Runner by James Dashner
-The Beautiful Creatures series by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl (have you seen the trailer for the movie?! It looks awesome!)
-The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (Also because of the new movie coming out. Looks sweet. And it's got Emma Watson in it, so what's not to love?)
-The Twilight series. Wait, wait, I have an explanation! I want to read it because there are so many people who say it's bad, AND so many people who say it's good. I want to be able to form my own opinion. Plus, I hear the last movie is coming out soon, and I want to be able to watch all the prior movies after I read the books. (Never judge a book by its movie).

Hmm. Looks like I read a lot of books because of their movie counterparts/trailers. Well, I guess that's a good a method as any!

Here's the trailer for The Perks of Being a Wallflower

"Be! Aggressive! Passive! Aggressive!" That made me laugh so hard.

And here's the trailer for Beautiful Creatures

Aaaand here's the latest trailer for Breaking Dawn part 2.

Even if you don't like Twilight, you've gotta admit, that looks EPIC. Eh? Eh? Am I right?

What can I say? I'm a sucker for trailers. 

Just Some Random Stuff

I've been on a sketching kick lately. Not that I'm any good at it. Still, a few drawings have been added to my  Wall of Random Stuff (which includes ticket stubs, postcards, pictures, drawings, a giant feather, a wooden butterfly, sticky notes, poems and whatnot).

For the past few weeks, I've been working on my new novel. I'm fairly excited- every time I finish a book I learn a little bit more about style and plot and characters, so, naturally, this new one is the best so far. I really hope to get it published (once I'm done writing and editing, that is).

There's this TV show (or, I assume it's on TV... I just get it off Netflix) called Destination Truth. It's pretty awesome. A group of people, led by Josh Gates, go out to all corners of the Earth, searching for mysterious creatures that have been reported. They occasionally look for ghosts, too.
BUT! It isn't like most shows like that where they're like, "I heard a noise! It's the ___! Evidence!" They usually rule out the "monsters" by looking at the facts they have. Like, they'll say, "Okay, people here think they've been seeing a werewolf. They're probably seeing a wild dog, and letting their imaginations run away with them."
So, when they actually find a piece of evidence that they can't rule out as something else, I am more inclined to agree with them.

Also- I am somewhat obsessed with Katniss and Peeta as a couple. Don't ask why- I don't know. I finally convinced my mom to read Mockingjay and ever since then I've been completely obsessed. I just noticed it the other day when I realized that I had been scrolling through miles of Katniss and Peeta fan art on Deviantart.com. Yeah...

See, I told you this post would be random. 

So Many Books, So Little Time

SO. I finished reading Insurgent by Veronica Roth. The Divergent series is now my favorite series. It's like the next step up from The Hunger Games. Don't get me wrong- I love The Hunger Games. I love that series with an obsession bordering on insanity. Kinda like the How to Train Your Dragon movie. (Random thought: if Hiccup existed in real life, I'd totally date him.)

Anyway, this book left me speechless. Veronica Roth obviously has a huge amount of talent. Huge. And I'm guessing she's had a lot of practice, too. Her books, or at least the ones I've read, are perfectly crafted. Every single event in the story- every single paragraph, sentence and word- is effortlessly flawless. And by flawless I don't just mean in the way of grammar and spelling. I mean that her writing has soul. Don't worry if you're a little confused by that sentence.
I'll try to explain a little better. Every single one of the characters seem like someone you could meet at Starbucks or pass by on your way to school. They never say anything corny, or anything that you roll your eyes at. You know what I'm talking about. When you're reading a book and a character says something like, "We have to go back! It's our duty to save our friend!" I don't know about you, but when I read something like that, I just have to roll my eyes. I don't think I would ever say that in real life. It's just so... cheesy.
The settings in both Insurgent and Divergent felt real, even though we don't have like them in real life. (I hope. I mean, Amity seems okay, but holy cow... The Erudite headquarters would scare me to death...) The author knows just how much description to add with the dialogue, action and thoughts.
The vocabulary fits both the story and the target audience.
The plot is fast enough that it never gets boring- there is not a single page where nothing is going on- but not so fast that you can't keep up.

All in all, this book blew me away. I cannot wait for the third book (Rumored to be titled Convergent, since we've had Divergent and Insurgent so far). The level of excellence established in the first two books will be hard to beat in the third, but I'm confident that Veronica Roth will find a way to blow our socks off once again.

EVERYONE IN THE WORLD NEEDS TO READ THIS SERIES. 

Seriously. It's that good. Yes, better than The Hunger Games. I would even say it's better than Harry Potter- or maybe HP and Divergent are of equal rank. That's the first time I have ever said that. A million thumbs up to Insurgent!

I'll add in my book review video once I have it uploaded. 


Also, here's a book review of Insurgent by CassJayTuck, a youtuber I'm subscribed to. She does really good book reviews. Definitely go check out her channel. 

The Finished Book Dance

You can thank Ally Carter for this post. As an avid reader of her blog, I just found out that she finished Heist Society Three, Perfect Scoundrels (I cannot wait for that book!). So, here's a link to her blog so you can see  what Ally (Ms. Carter?) said.

http://allycarter.com/blog/

And here is the video:

And now, whenever I finish a book (I don't know if that means just finishing writing it or finishing the editing process- maybe both) I'm going to the The Finished Book Dance. And everyone will think I'm crazy- er... crazy-er.

Realism in "Powers"

So, earlier this Summer (or was it late Spring?) I went to see The Avengers.

That put me in the mood for writing about superheroes. So, a while after I saw the movie, a friend and I started to coauthor a story about superheroes. It didn't last for too long- guess it just didn't spark out imagination- but it was fun to write.

It also got me thinking. While I was writing and editing one of my novels (which is on its last round of editing, by the way! Whoo!) I gave my characters "super powers". The reason for the quotes is that they aren't so much "powers" as enhancements. The characters could technically do everything they do in real life. For instance, one character is very strong. Not strong enough to catch a falling plane, but way stronger than the average tween. I tried to keep the "powers" as believable as I could.

Why? Because there are already so many books out there where the characters have some special ability. Inkheart by Cornilia Funke, Gone by Michael Grant, Harry Potter by JK Rowling, Maximum Ride by James Patterson, Wings by E.D. Baker, Percy Jackson by Rick Riordan... They all have main characters that have some sort of super power. Don't get me wrong- I like books like that. I'm a sucker for stories like that. They're fun to read and were no doubt fun to write.

(Side Note: I love, love, love the movie The Sorcerer's Apprentice because of the magical powers the main character has. It's, like, what every kid (and teenager, and adult) dreams of!)

Anyway, the point is, while writing my story I tried to keep their "powers" believable. Like it could happen in real life. I hope it doesn't, because my characters' lives get pretty messed up, but it is possible within the rules of our world. 

A while ago I had a debate with one of my friends over how believable a story has to be. She argued that if she wanted to have, say, blue knockout gas in her story, she could. After all, there were plenty of less likely things going on in Harry Potter, and look how well that did. She said that anything at all could happen in her story because that was the point of a story.

Okay. I get that. But within that, the things in a story need to follow the rules of physics, and the rules of whatever world the story is set in. For instance, if Harry decided to bring back his parents from the dead to help him defeat Voldemort, that wouldn't be very realistic. Sure, Harry goes around casting spells and making potions and encountering giant monsters, but all of that follows the rules of the Harry Potter world. Raising the dead does not follow the rules of the Harry Potter world. 

However, if Percy Jackson decided to raise someone from the dead to help him defeat Kronos (maybe he'd get Nico to do the dead-raising thing with Coke and a Happy Meal), that would be okay because, in the Percy Jackson world, you can do that. 

Okay, I'll stop rambling. To sum up: to make a story believable, you need to follow the rules of physics (which, sadly, rules out the possibility of blue knockout gas) and follow the rules of the world the story is set in.

Blog Of Random, Speaking To No One

So, I don't expect anyone to read this blog. Literally- I expect zero traffic on this blog. Why? Because I'm not published yet. Basically, this is me starting a blog so that when I do get published (hopefully within a year or two), I'll have something on here to precede my unintelligible ramblings about how long it took to get an agent to decide to publish my story/stories.


Yep. So... Hello, no one!


Of course, if you're reading, this, you're someone. In which case, hello to you as well.

Bananas!

Yellow!

Bulldozer!

42!

I like trains.

See, I told you I'm random.