Goodbye

Well, I finished illustrating my short story Shelf J-K and gave it to my little cousins. I also wrote another short story, though that only made me realize how much I miss writing novels. In four years, I will write another novel, but for now... it's short fiction, poetry, and plays--yay for creative writing classes! Which brings me to the topic of college. Two weeks from today, I will be driving down to PA. A good thing, too; I'm sick of waiting. After waiting for August 25th (orientation) since last November, you can see why I can't stand it anymore.

It's kind of weird, thinking that in two weeks I'll be at UArts. Goodbye, waiting for UArts to finally happen. Goodbye, hanging around YWO for hours and critiquing all the time. Goodbye, days spent writing novels and nights spent thinking of plots.

This summer ended with a bang. Saw Catch Me If You Can the Musical on Broadway a few weeks ago. Amazing actors. Amazing show. Fitting song (by Aaron Tveit, with his awesome voice).

Update: Writing

On 6/611 I finished my novel Mind's Prison.

Yeah, yeah, ten days ago I finished my eighth novel and didn't write about it. I was busy. (And I didn't feel like blogging.) I knew how the novel was going to end for a few weeks, and I suppose it didn't feel like a big deal when I finally wrote the final sentence. In the back of my mind I was worried I wouldn't finish it, or wouldn't finish it by August 25th (UArts' orientation!), so I kind of felt relieved when I finished Mind's Prison. (I don't know why I worried. I've written seven before, and I always finish them when they're so close to the end.)

Mind's Prison is 78,000 words, and is extra special to me because it is my last novel before I go to college this fall. It might even be my last novel until 2015, because I don't intend to write any more novels while in college. Yeah, I'll write short stories (all my liberal arts electives will be in creative writing... fiction, playwriting/screenwriting, and even poetry--how's that for exciting?), but I don't want to wreck my grades just because I was writing a novel. (Not that that would ever happen. When I have a paper due or something, I can't write my novel. I have to write the paper, even if it's due in a few weeks. I get it into my head that the paper needs to be finished before I write my own stuff. *shrug*)

I've been writing Mind's Prison on and off since December 4th, 2010. I took a month long break at one point, while I rewrote my very first novel, then picked MP back up, though I continued slowly, not wanting to rush it. Usually I finish novels within three or four months, so I'm actually surprised I could stick with MP for so long.

I kind of thought that--once I finished writing MP--I would take a break for a bit. But no. Now I've gotten it into my head to edit one of my rare short stories into a semi-children's book for my nine- and five-year-old cousins. I've even drawn four pictures to go along with the story (though I think I need at least two more). It's kind of fun. I also might write a short story this summer. I've got an interesting idea in mind, but I don't think the plot could be a novel--a bit complex if I had to go into detail like a novel would require--so I might be good. (Though, knowing me, I'll want to turn it into a novel anyway. Maybe eventually.)

So my plan for the summer: 1) finish illustrating a short story for my cousins, 2) possibly write a short story and have enough will power not to turn it into a novel that I won't have time to finish. That's the writing plan, anyway. The dancing and getting-ready-for-UArts part of the summer is going to be hectic.

Goodbye, SUCO.

I've been waiting for this day the entire year: the day I take my last class at SUNY Oneonta.

Being homeschooled, it sounded like a good idea to take some college classes before wasting so much money going away to college and realizing I didn't like it. Plus, some conservatories let you in without SATs if you passed college COMP 100. So I took a few classes, then applied to dance schools. I got accepted to the University of the Arts back in November/December, and so then had the problem of what to do during the second semester of the 2010/2011 school year. I didn't need to take any other classes, but I would be so totally bored otherwise. So I took COMP 200 (yay for more essay-writing /sarcasm). I love writing--as any of you who know me even the slightest probably realize--but this class was pretty hard. Not that I didn't like it--I've decided I like harder classes much better than easy ones. Yeah, yeah, an easy A and all that stuff, but I don't like easy As. I'd rather get a B and feel like I learned something from the class.

So COMP 200. I'd have to take First Year Writing I and II at UArts anyway, and composition classes are one of the few things that will transfer. So to make a not so long story shorter, I took composition 200; the final was today.

We had to write an essay about a quote the professor gave us--we saw it for the first time today. (I actually like the quote: "We all are born originals. Why is it so many of us die copies?" by Edward Young--I think. I'll check if that's the exact quote when I get my essay back sometime this weekend.) I don't like writing essays in class because I worry I won't be able to write enough, or have enough to say. I've never written an essay in an hour and fifteen minutes before--blame the homeschooling; it's one of the only bad things about having my parents teach me--so I had no idea how I'd do. Go figure, I had more than enough to say, wrote for an hour and fifteen minutes (pretty much nonstop, except to every once in a while do a bit of planning), and it was actually the best final I've done (this makes my fourth). I should have known I'd kind of enjoy writing for a final exam.

So now the day I've been waiting for all year has arrived (well, okay, the second day I've been waiting for. Number one is the day I go to UArts), and it doesn't feel the way I thought it would. It doesn't feel like any other day when I have COMP 200. It doesn't feel like I'm done and I'll never take class at SUCO again. I suppose over the summer it will start sinking in. UArts will start sending more stuff--like room and roommate info, class schedule, I'll have to buy that Mac they keep telling us we need, get things together like books and dance stuff, eventually pack...

Maybe by then it will sink in that I'm really done with SUCO and I'm going to UArts next year.

Rate My Professor

I don't really use the site ratemyprofessor.com. The comments are usually absurd, and the teachers that everyone likes I end up disliking. The teachers everyone hates I love. Still, I check the site just to see what others are saying about my professors, or professors who I might take classes from next year. I don't care about their opinions, but sometimes the comments are ironically funny.

When I go to the University of the Arts next year, I won't have to take their First Year Writing I and II classes, because I've already taken SUNY Oneonta's Comp. 100 and 200. SUNY Oneonta students all complained bitterly about my comp. 100 professor, and not too many more like my comp. 200 teacher, though I enjoy(ed) them both. So--being bored--I decided to take a look at the comments for the UArts writing teachers. Some teachers were loved, others hated. One student hated a professor so much he said:

"I've never been told more how horrible my writing was until I took this class. He corrects you on the most ridiculous things"

Ridiculous things such as "more how horrible"? Now, all right, "more how horrible" could be a typo, but it's a hilarious typo if it is. And you wonder why the professor corrected your writing if you says stuff like "more how horrible."

Another person said:

 "i would only take him if you had too."

 "Too"? Really? Basic stuff here, people. Basic stuff.

Comp. 200

My English Professor is too nice. At the beginning of the semester, his class was required to write six essays, a thirty page journal, and take multiple quizzes. We still had to do a thirty page journal. Fifteen for the first half of the semester, and fifteen for the last--minimum. That is, fifteen pages each if you wanted a C. If you know me well at all, you can probably guess that I did way over fifteen. Thirty pages each half. Oh yeah.

For Comp. 200's quizzes and essays, however, the professor was surprisingly nice. He canceled a quiz that was supposed to happen before Spring Break. Now, to make it even better, the quiz that we were going to have this Thursday is "optional." Everyone has to take it, but if you get a bad grade, my professor isn't counting it, so it's like extra credit. And instead of six essays, he dropped it down to five. The sixth essay is an optional creative writing essay, so of course I wrote it (and handed it in today, which is more than a full week before it's due).

And on that note: three more weeks and I'm done with my city's state university--forever. No more taking classes to make sure that I could do it after being homeschooled. No, I'm done with SUCO. Finally. Moving on to UArts. And I can't wait.

Killing Characters

I'm 65,000 words into my current novel, and I just killed my first character.

Well, no. I killed one in the beginning of the book around 16,000 words in, but she wasn't a big character. Obviously, she lasted less than 20,000 words in the story. But today I killed one of the main characters.  

I have four characters who are the focus of the story. One character--Seth--is the MC, and the story is told mainly through first person from his POV, though there are two others who get view points occasionally, and then the antagonist (who gets POV sections every once in a while) and one other character who I think got a section from his POV once. Other than that, there really aren't any other characters in the story. A few small ones, I suppose, but not even many of them: one aunt and a cousin, a woman who died in the first sixty pages, a queen, and that's really it. The main characters are Seth, Jason, Myra, and Gaven (the fifth is a side character). Compared to my other novels, this is a rather small cast, which is a nice change. Sadly, I had to kill one of them today.

When I first realized that one of the main characters was going to die, I had one of those moments where you think the idea is great. Then I thought about it in more detail, and realized that I really didn't want to kill this character. The idea of killing them still sounded good, yet that meant I wouldn't get to write about them anymore, because unlike my other novels, there is no reincarnation in this novel. I grew used to my trilogy The Otherworld Series which is about spirit guides, so needless to say, there was a lot of dying and reincarnation in those three books. Not in this book. Here, when you're dead, you're dead.

Of course, this character didn't just die in any old boring way. Neh. I had to make it interesting. Or so I hope. I'll have to ask someone if they read this story.

Funnily enough--or not; it's not really funny--I had no problem actually writing the death scene. I thought I would. When I get to the point where I have to kill a character that I like, I usually hesitate. I suppose I've been waiting to write this scene all week (because I'm a bit obsessive and had to finish my research paper before allowing myself to write my novel, even though the essay isn't due until Thursday). I'd gotten past the stage where I wasn't certain I wanted to kill this character, and so it was pretty easy.

This morning I woke up, sat down at my computer, and killed the first main character in my current novel. All before breakfast.

I think only a writer can say they killed someone today and not be totally insane.

Being a Writer

My English professor called me a writer today. I've considered myself a "writer" for a few years now--probably since 2008 when I finished my first novel and joined a writing forum to get critiques on it--but I never really thought others considered me a writer. Besides YWOers, my family members, and a few others, I have the creeping suspicion that not too many people read my Facebook updates, and I know not many people read this blog. So most people probably don't realize I'm a writer. Those who do must be tired of my talking about it.

Today in my COMP 200 class, the professor canceled our sixth essay and told us we could do an extra credit essay if we wanted instead. The essay would be creative, using first person from the POV of an object or a non-human. A creative essay? Perfect! Now if only essay number five would go away so I could write number six.

My professor is a bit obsessive when it comes to using fragments. Up until our fourth essay, he wasn't convinced that we knew the difference between a complete sentence and a fragment. Seriously? If you can't tell, Microsoft Word usually can. Or not. Half the time it's wrong. But finally--finally!--we were allowed to use fragments, though only if we bracketed them so the professor knew that we understood what we were doing and it wasn't "accidental." Yeah, yeah, okay, whatever. 

So today, after class, I asked if we were allowed to use fragments in this next essay, since it's creative. The professor pretty much told me yes, I could use fragments because I was a writer (which he knows from reading my personal journal, since it was filled with entry upon entry about writing). My advanced college writing professor called me a writer! I just kind of nodded, said All right, thanks, then got my bag and exited the room.

Fortunately, we'd gotten out early so no one else was in the hallway. I left that class and walked down the hall with a grin on my face. No one's actually called me a writer before.

Hello, world of Blogger

I've been converted to Blogger. All my Wordpress subscribers were leaving, so if I wanted to still read their blogs, I had to follow. Well, I didn't have to, but you know. Thanks to Lykaios, I transferred all my posts here, so at least I didn't lose anything. 

Hmm. This is kind of a boring post, and I am feeling little motivation to do anything about that. Huh. Odd.

Anyway, yeah. If I keep writing, my English professor says that something will start to come, because your brain doesn't want to be bored or write about nothing, so it will eventually come up with something for you to write about. But in this case, that's all I got, because I want to write my story. *goes back to novel writing*

2011 is odd, writers' ADD, and my last novel.

Note to self: Don't write two stories at the same time. It gets too confusing.

Now, will I take my own advice next time I want to rewrite an old novel at the same time as write a new one? Probably not. Maybe I'll reread this blog post and have an "ah-ha" moment right before overloading my brain with two novels at once.

I really don't like this post's title. But anyway.

In case anyone reading this post doesn't understand what I'm talking about, January 1st 2011 I began rewriting my very first novel (which I'll call LoZ, for now), the only problem was... Well, no. That's an understatement. There were so many problems with that novel, but I won't go into them atm. The only thing that had me overly worried was that I stopped writing something else when I began editing. I'll call that MP. At about 25,000 words--or something near that--I gave up MP for an entire month. (Doing this always scares me, because I've done it before and never finished the novel.) Then, because I think I've caught writers' ADD or something, I gave up finishing rewriting LoZ and turned back to my other story. So all was good from February 10th until today, when I decided that I really wanted to write the last two scenes of LoZ and be done with that novel for another four years. Or whenever I give it another look and another rewrite.

I stopped writing LoZ because I didn't want to figure out the last bit. Why any part of my mind concluded that it would be easier to write the ending after putting it aside for a few weeks, I have no idea.  

I always say that I'm trying something "new" with each novel I write. This isn't my usual style, I'm trying something new. So... I'm not sure what my "usual style" is, because it's always different. But 2011 is the oddest year for my writing so far. ("Odd" seems to have become my new word. I find myself using it all the time, which is, um, odd--as well as, you know, ironic.)

So far, my writing in 2011 has consisted of me jumping between rewriting LoZ and writing MP. Literally every month I switch stories. At least I know this won't go on for the rest of the year. Once I finish rewriting LoZ, I'm going to try to force myself to stick to MP, but the sad part is, MP is probably going to be the last novel I write for the next four years.

I can't help but think that I won't have time to write novels while I'm in college, and even if I have some free time, I don't want to overwhelm myself by trying to bang out novels in four or so months like I do now. Still, I don't want this to be my last novel for four years! That makes me very sad. It also makes me want to stretch out writing MP until August when school starts, though being that I'm already 48,000 words into the story, I don't think it'll last past June, if that long.

Yeah, yeah, just because I'm going to college doesn't mean I have to stop writing. But I'm going to a conservatory. I used to think that conservatories had less classes than regular colleges. Now, I've realized they have more. Yes, so if I go to this one school I might only have three academic classes, but add to that dance classes in ballet, tap, modern, jazz, rhythm/improv./partnering/otherstuffthroughtheyears, and any extra things I want to participate in, then that doesn't leave much time for novel-writing. 

That's a dance major for you. Too bad for me I also like writing and being in theater. It'd be so much easier if I only enjoyed doing one thing. But I could never pick between dance a writing. (That's why that creative writing minor looks so appealing, even if it would use up all my free electives. *sigh*)   

I've been writing pretty much non-stop for about four years now, so I can't imagine suddenly not writing that much anymore. In the back of my mind, I had this idea that maybe I would slowly go through and edit my novels. You know, whenever I had some time, just start reading and marking the manuscripts up with pretty colored pen. That would mean bringing my novels with me in the printed form (because I hate reading on the computer. Seriously hate it). I must've mentioned something about bringing my stories with me to my mom, because she was like, You're not bringing them with you, are you?

Well, I might? I can imagine myself packing up a big heavy box of manuscripts and sticking it in my dorm closet or something. I can totally see that. I can also see myself lugging the box from college to my house every time there's a school break.  

I don't know. All I do know right now, is that instead of finish rewriting LoZ, as I was in the midst of doing when beginning this blog post, I have written 800 + words here instead. Yay for anti-productivity.

Radio Music and Broadway Songs

Sometimes, I listen to song lyrics and can’t help but wonder what the songwriter was thinking when he or she was writing. Half the songs on the radio sound the same and are either about falling in love or heartbreak. That’s why I listen to movie soundtracks when I write, though those can get boring if I’m not trying to concentrate, so while I do turn on the radio occasionally, I’d rather listen to Broadway musical soundtracks. I think I like Broadway songs because they tell a story. It can be a love story, just like those songs on the radio, but the music is so much fuller, and the singers are actors or actresses, so they have so much emotion in their voices.

Some of the wittiest lyrics I’ve ever heard come from the musical Spamalot; some of the best musical accompaniment I’ve heard comes from Next to Normal. The worst lyric’s simile that I’ve heard comes from Katie Perry’s Fireworks. Her opening line is “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag, drifting through the wind,” and makes me wince every time I hear it. She’s probably asking if someone has ever felt ever felt as if they had nothing holding them down, but it sounds an awful lot like she’s asking if anyone has ever felt like a piece of garbage.

Essays...

I'm such a hypocrite when it comes to writing essays. Twice now I've had to write an essay on "how to write an essay"--the first one was confusing; the second annoying. Both times I had this section where I talked about how you don't. Ever. Ever. Start. Writing. The. Intro. First.

Guess what I just did.

Yuppers. I'm working on an essay (er... actually, I'm writing a blog post instead of writing my essay, but, uh, you get what I mean) and the first thing I wrote was the introduction. Actually, I think I might've written the conclusion first, but I'll have to see if I can circle the essay back around to include that paragraph.

So I keep thinking back to my other essays and wanting to force myself to start with the body of the essay, like I keep writing is what you're supposed to do. But I don't actually care that much (I care about a good grade, that is, but I don't care about going against my own advice).

The last four essays I wrote I started in the middle, and I just don't feel like it this time. I like my opening paragraph. The thesis is iffy, but I'll fix it up later. And I like my opening sentence. (Now let's just hope my professor does, too.) I got some nice quotes for the middle, and after that I've no idea. I hate planning anyway. So I'm going to start with the intro because I feel like it. So what if it's hypocritical. I have my own way of writing, and I'll stick with it. I hate forced writing. I hate forcing myself to write forced writing. So the answer is simple. I won't.

Intro... check. Conclusion... possible check. Body of the essay... nonexistent. I can deal.

Now back to writing this essay.

Books, libraries, and not reading fast enough.

I really hate it when I get a book from the library and then have to return it without finishing it. I dislike when I don't finish a book on my own (I just have this thing, even if I don't like a book, I feel bad returning it without reading it), but worse than that is returning a book that I want to finish.

Cinda Williams Chima's novel The Exiled Queen was supposed to have come out last September, but for some reason, my library did not get the book until three weeks ago. Come on, people--it's January! And guess what? I didn't get to finish it. I have to admit, it didn't start off as good as I had hoped (and after reading Catherine Fisher's Sapphique and not being able to put it down, it's not surprising I read the first few chapters of The Exiled Queen rather slow. Plus, I was editing my novel and then my writing class started up... But I'm just listing excuses here). 

So go figure, it finally started getting good about 100/200 pages ago and it's due at the library tomorrow. The obvious answer would be to renew it (or read super fast, though I doubt I could read more than half the book by tomorrow morning when I go into town), yet I can't renew it because someone else has it on hold. I hate when that happens.

Okay, okay, minirantover.

To Write a Prologue or Not to Write a Prologue

The day I heard that some people actually skip over prologues when reading novels, I was shocked. To my sixteen-year-old self, prologues always seemed like the most fun part of writing, and I had included them in every single story I’d written for the past few years (finished or unfinished). Besides enjoying writing them, I could not understand why someone would skip any part of a book. The author went to all that trouble to write the prologue, so it must be important. Now, I think I’ve changed my mind on prologues.

Someone said, in an online discussion about prologues on a young writers’ forum that I moderate, that an author should be able to put the important information into the actual novel, and so prologues are just a way of cheating, especially when author’s use it as an info dump where they tell their readers the entire history of their fantasy world. They forget that unless they’ve already got a following of avid readers, no one’s going to care about a war that happened five-hundred and fifty-one years ago.
There are cases where prologues do work, or else I would feel like a complete hypocrite writing about this because one of my novels still has a prologue in it, six years and four full rewrites later. I’ve decided that the occasional prologue is all right, so long as it’s short enough and to the point. A fifteen page prologue with a vague connection to the actual plot of the novel is stretching it in my book, yet I’ve seen this done (and it is part of the reason I never got more than twenty pages into the book).

I still find prologues extremely fun to write, though now when I begin a new story I try to limit myself when writing prologues. Most of the time, they’re unnecessary. Even for my rewritten novel, I’m considering cutting the prologue when I eventually reach a final draft, but then I remind myself that my prologue hooks up with the main story right away, and I’m still left undecided. To write a prologue, or not to write a prologue?

Dialogue Tags

Sometimes, I think that being a writer makes reading a whole lot harder. I constantly find myself focusing on an author’s sentence structure and description when I am trying to read for enjoyment. Of course, almost every author who has written a guide on writing (and whose guide I have read) says to read, read, read, so taking note of how a published novelist goes about creating his or her fantasy world is certainly helpful. I think back to before I considered myself a writer and the books I read at the time. Back then, I cared little about cliché plotlines and the ever-controversial prologue; now, I find myself mentally critiquing published novels as I read.

If an opening paragraph does not catch my interest, I will give it about a page or two before putting the book down if it is not by an author that I know I like. Even if a book I am reading is by one of my favorite authors, I still critique them in my head.

The book I am currently reading is a young adult fantasy novel, as with most of the books I read for pleasure, and the second in a trilogy. I have read another series by this author, and have been waiting for this book since September, yet I noticed a pretty blatant error about twenty or so pages in.

Sometimes I wonder about an author’s editor, such as in this case. I have noticed numerous places in this author’s work where a period was missing, or a dialogue tag was wrong. This was another such case with dialogue.

Normally, when an author writes “he said,” the dialogue tag is there to inform the reader which character is speaking. I have read guides on dialogue tags, where they say that the tags can be replaced with a character’s action, otherwise “she said this” and “she said that” can get a little dry. If, then, dialogue tags are there to help the reader distinguish between who is speaking, would it not make sense to only have one dialogue tag per dialogue?

I would say so, but the author and editor of the book I am reading apparently have a different idea. For three sentences of dialogue, they figure that three separate dialogue tags of “he said” are in order. It still baffles me as to why someone would need three dialogue tags for a single paragraph of dialogue. I remember what Kurt Vonnegut said when talking about excess sentences and think that it should apply to dialogue tags, too: "Never include a sentence which does not either remark on character or advance the action." (I have been trying to use this line of thinking while rewriting my novel and it seems to work.)

After cases like this, I wonder if I would have noticed three dialogue tags for one set of dialogue three years ago.

Everything happens for a reason... right?

I hate when you get yourself set on something happening and then it doesn't. Unfortunately, that's what today's been like.

Even though I got into a dance conservatory, I won't be going until Fall 2011. In the meantime, I've been taking classes at my local SUNY college. Only problem is, I'm considered a continuing education student, so I have to register last. I've taken three other classes, and it's never been much of a problem, registering late, that is. I've managed to get into each class I wanted. But there's a first for everything.

I was planning on signing up for advanced writing, being as I already took COMP 100 and composition classes transfer perfectly. There were about twenty spots open for COMP 200, so I figured I was good. Most people hate writing, don't they? So how many people are going to take advanced composition, anyway?

Apparently a lot. I never realized how many English majors there were at this college.

So I e-mailed the professor of the class I want to take. Still waiting for his reply, but I don't want to spend the next five months doing nothing--and not many classes will transfer and I don't want to take too many because it's best to take them at the university I'll be attending.

Things like this really mess up my writing. I can't concentrate and keep hitting the "send/receive" button on my e-mail. But I'm a fan of thinking, Everything happens for a reason. Funnily enough, an author whose page I've "liked"  on facebook (Neal Donald Walsch) posted one of his quotes today that reminded me of this.  And when I think about it, it makes me less angry/annoyed/upset, because it's one of those things that I find totally and completely true. 

I'm beginning to think that things actually do happen for a reason. (Okay, "beginning" is wrong. I know they do.) I mean, when stuff goes wrong if you try to figure out what the reason might be, I've found that it makes whatever has gone wrong seem less dramatic, less horrible, less "this isn't fair!"

So today when COMP 200 was closed, I kept trying to think of a reason why. The answer came a few hours later when my mom found another class that I could take (because I'd be completely bored out of my mind waiting to go to college in the fall. Writing novels is good, but there's only so many hours in a day that I can force my mind to concentrate before it decides not to listen). I don't know if this class will transfer, but I've already figured out that if I get a creative writing minor as I want, I'll be over the required credits by about two classes. And what better class to help me reach my goals of publishing than a course on editing and publishing. I mean seriously? In the class description, it even mentions a query letter!

So now I'm trying to decide if I even want to take COMP 200 if the professor let's me in, or do I just go for the publishing and editing class. I keep thinking that it would help my writing a whole lot if I learned about publishing, while COMP 200 is just more essay-writing. Yay for decisions that I have until tomorrow afternoon to make. (<--sarcasm.)

But to end on a positive note, this is the quote by Neale Donald Walsch: “Nothing can happen, nothing can occur in your life which is not a precisely perfect opportunity for you to heal something, create something, or experience something that you wish to heal, create, or experience in order to be Who You Really Are.”

Reading and Writing

(I'm too lazy to think up a better title.)

I've been waiting to read Sapphique by Catherine Fisher since I first heard that it was going to be published in the US. It took me almost exactly forty-eight hours to read the book. When that happens, I always think about how long it takes an author to write the book that I just sped through in less than a week. For me, writing a novel takes a good three months, and that's without editing, so when I read a book in under five days, I almost feel like I'm wasting the book. Like I shouldn't be allowed to read the book that fast when it took the author so much effort to write. Having written numerous novels myself, I now have more respect for books when I read. I can appreciate the amount of work they spent editing the pages I'm reading; I even pay more attention to the way a book is written, but that doesn't stop me from reading it in two days.

And speaking of writing, here's my transition into talking about my current novel. Yay for abrupt transitions, a lack of an actual transitional sentence, and starting a sentence/paragraph with a coordinating conjunction! But hey, my comp 100 professor said you can break the rules so long as you know that you're breaking them. Er, yeah. My novel.

It's actually the first novel that I ever finished (way back in 2004) that I'm rewriting. I finished my seventh story and decided it was time for some editing. This particular novel, The Legend of Zirannia, has been rewritten numerous times (I think I'm working on the fourth completely rewritten draft), the biggest rewrite being in 2008, so I figured, it's 2011 now, why not try again?

My single-sentence book summary:

When reincarnation brings a young ruler back to his kingdom, his return is not at all how anyone expected, least of all the king himself.

I thought up the idea for this story when I was twelve/thirteen, though the actual storyline and characters I'm working with now weren't created until 2007, perhaps? It's an interesting change, to know exactly what is happening in a story I'm writing, because usually I do hardly any planning. But it's also nice to finally fix this story up and cut all the pointless subplots and rewrite all the horrible sentences as well as add some characterization--which was very much lacking.

I've rewritten 20,000 words so far since January 1st (on New Year's Eve I decided I was going to rewrite The Legend of Zirannia--the next day, I started), cutting out about 15,000 of eck. With those discarded words went numerous characters. Two POV characters have been scrapped, another semi-main character has dwindled to half the character that it used to be, but I don't mind so much. Now I realize that those characters were just fill-ins. I thought my story needed more people in it (besides the three main characters, two "bad guys," and the few other smaller characters that are actually important to the plot), so it's actually a relief to cut them. It's a fun experience, rewriting my first novel and watching how the characters change and seeing how the plot kinks unwind. This story is finally narrowing its focus and its plot is becoming clearer. Finally. After about seven years.  

(As I write this post, I keep thinking I should write something about dancing next, being as my "about me" says I'm firstly a dancer. I guess it's easier to write about writing than write about dancing. :p Maybe my next post will be about dance, seeing as dance has started back up and I've got one last audition on February 5th.)