This is an archive and may contain old or out-of-date content. Check the date; things may have changed since the time of the original posting. Conversation is allowed on older posts, but be aware that they will not come to my attention as easily.
There’s less than a week until the beginning of November, and with it, NaNoWriMo. I’m really excited about participating this year, after two failed attempts, and I’m trying to do everything I can in the next week to get ready.
Some of this stuff seems silly, but if it works, it works! I’ll keep you posted!
I recently found a story I started maybe a year or two ago. After re-reading it… I realize it has a lot of potential. I think, if I have any spare time, I’ll work on it. Or I may make it my NaNo project, since there’s not much started on it.
Anyhow, it’s called Alternate, and the basic premise of the story is that a girl named Elsie Jordan wakes up one morning to find herself in an alternate dimension, where everyone 20 years old and younger has been born the opposite way. Her best friend Bethany is a boy, the guy that follows her around drooling is a girl, and so forth.
The thing I like the best about it is that Elsie has such a unique voice; much different than other characters I’ve worked with. The story is in first-person, a point of view I don’t usually work with, and she tends to ramble.
I have come to the conclusion that I live in a very backwards town. It’s not the fact that we have no mall, no theater, no Wal-Mart, or no McDonald’s. It’s not the fact that, though the town’s population is fairly large, they update it by hand every Friday afternoon, on every sign leading into town. It’s not even the fact that, instead of a normal school district, we have all twelve grades using an old college campus downtown that sprawls for blocks.
No, the backwardness of Everglade was given away by a smaller detail that not even the name (Everglade is in Pennsylvania, not Florida, believe it or not) could convey: the ice cream trucks.
Winter in Pennsylvania is no laughing matter – at least in Everglade. It generally involves a few feet of snow, some ice, more snow, a weekend of melting, and then a grand finale of three-foot-deep frozen slush.
But through wind and rain, snow and sleet, blizzards and stock market crashes, the ice cream trucks are there. Everglade has a legion of yellow and white ice cream trucks, very much on schedule and very much all year round.
The truck that comes through my neighborhood does so between six and six-thirty a.m., without fail. At a quarter after six, the truck passes in front of my house, thus waking me up in time for school.
Who needs alarm clocks? Nobody in Everglade.
And my truck, just like every other truck in the ice cream regime, has a very distinctive (read: obnoxious) tune. It starts off sounding quite a bit like the “little Indians” song from preschool. But right before it gets to the tenth little Indian, it hiccups and blurts, “Pop! goes the weasel.”
After seventeen years, though, you get used to Indians popping weasels in the head. It becomes an ignored fact of life.
At six-fifteen on Monday morning, the fifth of October, the tenth Indian and his weasel woke me up, just in time to get ready for school… just like every morning.
This is, by the way, the very beginning of the story. It comes in five parts, Monday through Friday. I can’t wait to get really moving on this. You know, in all my spare time.
Happy New Year! And Happy New Blog, too!
Last year I made two New Year’s resolutions, and it was the first time I seriously attempted this. The first was personal, but I’d like to say that it was a partial success. In fact… not a bad job.
The second one I did share last year, and it was a wish to get my life moving again. Specifically, go to college. My first, knee-jerk reaction is that I failed on this completely, but the more I reflect back on it, the more I realized that I didn’t completely fail. No, I’m not in college. No, I’m not really any closer to going to college. No, I haven’t even taken another online class.
But it seems like the more that I push for it, the more I feel something pushing back. I know it sounds like a cop-out, but I’m starting to believe that I’m not supposed to be there just yet, for whatever reason. I’ve been focusing a lot on my job, and you know what? In the last year, I’ve gotten a major promotion and a three-dollar pay raise. For my first job, that’s not too bad. I’m management now, working full time. I have insurance.
This leads me up to next year’s resolutions.
So, six things. We’ll see how this goes, okay?
I’ve been hearing about this NaNoWriMo thing here and there for about a month, and I’ve finally figured out what it is. It’s National Novel Writing Month. I read up on it, thought about it for a few minutes, and then I thought… What a perfect opportunity to get in gear and finish Seasons Past!
The deal is, you’ve got thirty days (the month of November) to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel. I’m sure the general idea is an entire novel, but hey, I’ve got a job and a life and I’m really not all that far into Seasons Past.
I’ll try to keep you posted this month as to how it’s going. I’m excited!
Some of you may know Shawna of Eruantale.net and Linda Belle of Autumn-Sky.org. If you don’t, that was a not-so-subtle hint to go check them out. They’re two of my best online friends, and we’ve all got blogs. Recently, Shawna and LB realized that Meli (of ALL people) was blogging way more than them. Sad, no? They naturally got jealous, and later competetive, and finally devious… and apparently, while I was busy having a life (you all have permission to laugh), they started this Blogathon.
The three of us have all of August to blog as much as we can, getting a point for each post and extra points for (very fuzzily judged, I’m sure) “OMFG!LONG” posts.
I’m supposed to warn you before I spam your RSS reader. This is your fair warning.
I want to know what the winner gets.