Blog @ Melilyn.com

Gearing Up For NaNo

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.

1. Cleaning up my room and my desk. I try to be an organized person, but I don’t always have the time to be. It’s hard to be creative in a messy space, so I’m going to do my best to get everything organized. Seriously… my desk is a mess.
2. Finishing the book I’m currently reading. I can read three books at once without really getting them mixed up, but throw my own novel into the mix and I start either getting confused or subconsciously copying things I’m reading.
3. Adding to my “Writing” playlist. I don’t know what it is, but the best music for noveling is soundtrack music. No, not the singing and dancing soundtrack, but the actual score from some of my favorite movies. The best for writing is Hans Zimmer (Pirates 3, to be exact) and Murray Gold (Doctor Who and Torchwood). Currently my playlist is five hours long; I need it to last a month.
4. Constantly thinking about the story I want to tell. I can’t work on the actual writing yet, so I just do a lot of planning and thinking. I  have to keep asking myself questions about the plot of my store… like, why did the whole thing start out this way, what causes this character to react a certain way, how can I bring it all together at the end? I put myself in the shoes of my characters and ask myself how I would get out of certain situations; this helps a lot when it comes time to sit down and write.
5. Downloading an app for my iPhone. Yes, don’t laugh. My iPhone comes with me even when a purse or a notepad may not, and so I find myself wanting to write a couple of paragraphs out when I find myself with a few extra minutes, or on break at work. “Notes” just wasn’t doing it for me, so I downloaded “Notebooks,” which not only has more features, but allows me to sync my .docx file to my phone so I can see exactly where I left off in the process of writing. Nerdy, but true!
6. Keep hyping myself up about it. I know myself, and I know that if I don’t get excited about something, I’ll forget about it. I’m planning on keeping you posted the whole way through; not necessarily for your benefit, but for mine.

Some of this stuff seems silly, but if it works, it works! I’ll keep you posted!

Dot Points

• I went to Texas at the beginning of September with the other managers from work. We helped a crew in Richardson train all their new employees and open up their new store. It was pretty fun, for real. I learned a lot and am now way comfortable with what is involved in this new store craziness. Plus I got to hang out with James and Zak.
• Oh! I got my management position at the new store. Same position, more or less, which I’m totally cool with
• I got too busy to reorganize my room.
• My leg still isn’t all the way healed, which is kind of gross.
• I’m seriously considering doing NaNoWriMo this year, depending on how much free time I have on my hands post-store-opening. I threatened to do it two years ago and never even found the time. But I can do it, right? RIGHT?
• My store opens in like a week and a half. A WEEK AND A HALF. Last night was orientation, so it feels official. We met a room full of new employees that are soon going to be working with us. It’s weird, but it’ll be fun. An adventure, right?
• I kind of miss Sukkot this year, due to aforementioned new store. I’ve never missed Sukkot before; I’ve always been able to get at least three or four days off work (my manager is awesome). I may get to spend one night down there this year. Sigh.

I think that’s all. I have WordPress on my iPhone now (heh heh heh) so my blogging should come WITH me from now on.

Are You Okay?

I really hate when people feel sorry for me.

Today I was doing a bit of rampaging. There was a couple of things that were really bugging me, and I was getting through it by just putting my head down and working hard today and not letting anything else get to me. I had two people notice that I was in a bit of a funk. One kept, every time I went past, asking me what was wrong. “What’s wrong? Are you okay? What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

The other just tried to make me laugh, and you know, it worked. By the time I was done working with this particular person, I was laughing and talking and I wasn’t really worried about what had been bothering me before.

Would you rather someone try and find out what’s wrong, or just help you treat the symptoms?

On Beginnings

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.

Brave New Me

The last time I went to an amusement park, it was Hershey, and I was about thirteen. It was a school field trip (thank you, whoever linked roller coasters with physics!!), and I was completely a party pooper. I rode exactly two roller coasters: the Trailblazer (turn your sound down, people are screaming like idiots) and the Comet. I cried the whole way through the Comet. I’m deathly afraid of heights and, with my vivid imagination, could imagine all the possibilities of the cars falling off the track in vivid, gory detail.

I’ve since told everyone that there is no way they’d ever be able to drag me on another, no matter how convincing they are.

This year for Leigh’s birthday (happy birthday, Leigh!), she and Tegan and I ended up going to Frontier City, which is Oklahoma’s only theme park. It used to be owned by Six Flags, so it’s not too lame. I informed the other two (who are 13 and 17, respectively) that I would not be going on any rollercoasters, in any way, shape, or form.

Frontier City has four coasters: the Steel Lasso, the Wildcat, the Silver Bullet, and the Diamond Back. Not insane coasters, but better than the previous two I’ve ridden. I’ll have you know I rode every single one. At least twice. And I rode the Diamond Back three times in a row without getting off, right before the park closed, and left with an insane headache but not scared.

Brave New Me is now a monster that has been unleashed. I. Love. Roller coasters. Bring them on!!