Of Writing and The Hobbit

I'm reading...

Perhaps I should begin with what I'm reading, as that is what is on my mind at the moment. Sorcery and Cecelia Or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer. Don't you just hate it when you reach the most absorbing and altogether interesting point in a story, and it's just at that point that you have to put it down? Now I don't mean to complain, but really. When you are forced to leave your heroine in the most horrendous of circumstances how are you supposed to put your mind to anything else? You may appear to be thinking about the many things you ought to be thinking about, but really you're just thinking of the book.
This is especially the case if it's a good book such as the one I'm reading right now. At first I was rather put off by the fact that it is written in letter form, which is really a difficult way to tell a story, you know. Because just when you're getting into the telling of the story, and you forget that it really is a story at all, you are reminded by the ending of one letter and starting of the next. So, yes, it's a harder style to write without loosing your reader's attention, but I think the authors of this book succeed at it. Now that I'm reaching the end I'm really hooked (I must admit that the letter styling did bother me till a good six chapters into the story.)
I was also a trifle unsure about the regency setting, considering that it was also a fantasy story (not usually a pairing one finds.) I do think that it sounds a trifle funny to be having references to Lady Jersey and talk of enchanted chocolate pots in the same sentences. It makes me laugh. No wonder the dedication was to Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer, and J.R.R. Tolkien.

I'm creating...

(Or, in other words, NaNoWriMo update!) Dear me, um, I do believe that I may possibly be starting over? *ducks head and hides from all bystanders* I know, I know, remember what I said, what was it two days ago? Keeping on with it and all that rot? Well, you see, I just can't stand my main character. It isn't that she's hate-able (I might be able to stand her if she was) and she isn't likable either. One can't connect with her. Then I started reading an old story of mine, about a character called Mary-Agnes. Honestly, she's probably my favorite character that I've ever written, and yet the story feels rather badly written I wrote it so long ago. So now I'm writing a whole new story about her. Starting NaNoWriMo over again five days into it? Bad done, Emily. Badly done. (Did I really just quote Mr. Knightly, there? Yes, yes I did. Changing Emma for Emily and there we are.) How shall you ever catch up on 8,334 words while still maintaining a consistent 1,667 words a day besides that? I really don't know. All I can say is I better get back to writing.

Also, on a slightly differing creative note, I just restarted my knit dress for my knit doll. (Dear me, that's a lot of starting again on things, isn't it?) but I dropped some stitches and I needed to unravel the whole thing so there we are. I do think it's going to turn out rather cute though.

I'm listening to...

The Brave soundtrack on youtube. I really like it. It's my favorite right now.

Outside my window...

Don't you just love fall? *sentimental sigh*

One of my favorite things...

Holiday coffee cups. They're just lovely. They make me happy.

A few plans for the rest of the week...

Having a smashing good week of school, work, and being generally productive (such as writing out some essays for my college application.) Other than that NaNoWriMo takes over.

I'd also rather like to go down to Barnes and Noble since I have a gift card (Is this a yes, Mama? Yes, please?)

I'm wearing...

Jeans, a cream sweater, and a grey vintage looking hat (I'm rather in love with this hat). Also, on the subject of hairstyles I've figured out this way to put my hair up in a bun and it's really quite lovely. You twist it all up with the cuff of a sock (that you have cut down for that purpose) and tie it off with a rubber band or two. It really makes me feel quite happy.

A picture thought I'm sharing...

Did I mention we carved Avenger style pumpkins?

 

Also, (because everyone needs to get as excited for The Hobbit as I am)...

 



EVERYONE. HOBBIT. THE HOBBIT. LESS THAN TWO MONTHS. EVERYONE. THE HOBBIT. ARE YOU EXCITED? I'M EXCITED. SO EXCITED.

MARTIN FREEMAN IS THE PERFECT BILBO. HE IS ADORABLE PERFECTION. AND RICHARD ARMITAGE. MR. THORTON. DO YOU SEE HIM?

Okay, sorry, capslock.

BUT THE HOBBIT, PEOPLE. READ THE BOOK. WATCH THE TRAILER. LISTEN TO THE MUSIC. DRAW LITTLE HOBBITS IN EVERY NOTEBOOK. GAWK AT THE POSTERS. WATCH EVERY MOVIE THE ACTORS PLAYING IN IT WERE EVER IN AND TRY TO ENVISION THEM IN THEIR PARTS AS CHARACTERS IN THE HOBBIT. THE. HOBBIT.

Basically, this is amazing. At the time the Lord of the Rings movies came out I was obviously not old enough to watch, but now I'm going to have that time of waiting for each new movie and properly hyperventilating the whole time. I expect to enjoy tremendously.

Breathe, Emily, breathe.

But, you do realize how amazing this is, right?

Anyhow, must start up on some math and SAT studying. Have a lovely Monday, dear reader!

NANOWRIMO

You may have noticed that it is now the 2nd day of November, and thus the second day of NaNoWriMo!  I have so far written 3,304 words into The Story of Living (I put up a little widget in the side bar where you can keep track of the word amount I am currently at.)

I'm really not sure if I've written anything of quality so far, but that's not the idea of NaNoWriMo. The idea is to write, write, write, for all the month of November. At the end of it we'll all have a first draft of a story, and first drafts are supposed to be bad. (No really, ask any published author and they'll tell you that their first drafts were terrible. It was only after they went about editing and going over their first draft, creating a second and a third draft that the real story began to appear on the page.)

I'm going to continue on with this story, knowing that my characters may change personality several times during the story, that the plot might change into something quite different from what it was to begin with, and I'm not going to edit a bit. Editing is for December. (Did I mention how hard that is?)

I'm going to let my fingers fly across the keyboard without hindering them, and see where I end up.

Now a bit of NaNoWriMo writing music.

"Emily, Awaken!"

The clock on the wall is ticking steadily on. Watch the second hand makes its round, now the minute hand is moving too, and now the hour is a thing of the past. A blog waits for promised posts, the girl who has promised to write so consistently? Nowhere to be found.

 

I beg pardon, this girl is quite easily found. It is true, however, she is not to be found with her fingers tapping away at her keyboard, but asleep on her bed.  She has gone off to have a long fall nap, a winter hibernation, and as she is properly bear like, she is not to be woken easily.

There she goes, hiding from the sunlight in a mountain of blankets, a fan roars like a hurricane, blowing the icy winds about her. The covers move, out pokes a bare foot, testing the open air. Will she awaken? Is the sunshine enough to open her eyes? Your question shows how little you know of Emily.

The door to her chambers is opened, her mountain of covers has been destroyed by a merciless hand. With a swift twist of a knob her hurricane has been silenced. “Emily, awaken!” comes a voice, much too cheerful when used in such a purpose. Oh cruel world, that wakes one with no true loves kiss to soften the blow.

On second thought, even true loves kiss is most definitely not worth waking up for. Sleeping Beauty and Snow White must have been awfully nutty.

 

 

As for Emily, she sleepeth on.

 

 

I’m listening to…

 I have just discovered how much I love listening to poems put to music. For the past week my favorite station on Pandora has been the Loreena McKennit one. I think it’s so beautiful because besides being lovely to listen to, each song is a story. Well, that can be said of almost every type of music, but it’s like reading a classic in comparison to a recent bestseller novel. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but listening to beautiful ballads of brave knights and fair ladies is quite delightful. I have to say, when simply reading poetry my mind sometimes wanders. I have a harder time of slipping into the story and living and breathing it like I do with prose, but with a musical accompaniment I find it easier to imagine out the story and enjoy the meter and rhythm to it. I'm not entirely sure why this is, but all I know is I find it much easier to sink into the tale when hearing it sung to me, rather than reading it myself. Though, I do like having the poem on hand if I miss a line or two.

 

 

 

I'm reading...

 

 

 

 

Emily of New Moon: Oh, my dear L. M. Montgomery, you know I can only survive being parted from your books for so long. I remember a time when 'Emily of New Moon' was one of my least favorite, actually, but with each reading I love it more.

 

 

Common Sense 101 (Lessons from G. K. Chesterton): Again, a post due soon. Again, really a must read.

 

Party Shoes: NOEL STREATFEILD WROTE A BOOK THAT I HAVEN'T READ YET? MUST READ.

 

 

Decline and Fall: After reading Brideshead Revisited I've always wanted to read another of Evelyn Waugh's books. I'm excited to start this one.

 

The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: I'm only about a hundred pages away from the end of this book. I've really enjoyed these. There's a couple that I've liked especially. My favorite are the few where he bamboozles you (isn't bamboozle an interesting word?) with some outrageous happening which turns out to be all the work of the character's imagination, and trickery of some other character. (The Offshore Pirate, Rags Martin-Jones and the Pr-nce of W-les) I also quite like Bernice Bobs Her Hair. I just bought the movie Midnight in Paris which has Scott Fitzgerald as a character, so it's been fun to read some of his stories after watching that movie again.

 

Brideshead Revisited: I just really want to read this book again.

 

The Fault in Our Stars: I just finished reading this one and honestly I haven't really sorted out my thoughts on it entirely. I felt like the book captured the characters very well, without my ever feeling precisely fond of them. Perhaps simply because they and I would not be "Kindred Spirits," if we were to meet. We would have different life-styles, values and what-not. That doesn't make me not appreciate them, as characters I felt very much as if they captured a very real sort of person, and also exemplified the author's main focus of questions on life and death. I got rather tired of the amount of sentences begining with 'and' or 'but' (which really ought to be an exception to the rule rather than the rule itself) and fragment sentences. (I feel rather guilty writing this as I know I'm a far from perfect writer myself...but...) Anyhow, I'm still deciding what I really think about it, so enough for now.

 

A Picture thought I'm sharing...

 

 

I just felt like taking a picture of some crayons.

 

 

 



 

 

 

New School Year's Resolutions

Most people start thinking about their goals for themselves come New Years.' They start thinking about what they feel they need to improve in themselves; what are their good qualities, and what are the things they don't really like about themselves and want to work on. For myself, (I think perhaps this is common for students period) I find that my mind is much more full of those thoughts come the beginning of the school year, rather than January 1st. It is at the beginning of the school year, as I'm sorting through last year's books, wading my way through the dishevel of my desk, still in the exact state it was last June when I closed those books.

By the by, I was thinking how one's desk has a queer feeling of time standing still through the summer. It always seems like one of those enchanted castles from fairy tales, with everything about it suspended in time from June to September. Perhaps the calender on the wall has something to do with this, reading "June" all through the summer till you go to change it come September. (At least this is what happens to me. I never touch my desk during the summer, there are much nicer places to go to write or draw during the Summer- places that don't have that ominous schoolwork feel to them.)

So here we are, September 3, 2012, dusting one's spaces and writing up a post on goals for the school year. I don't quite want to say 'resolutions' as the word resolution rather has a distasteful ring to it of things incomplete hanging over your head, don't you think? This mostly has to do with the fact that most of us set our resolutions much too high and then give up as soon as we slip once. This is why I'm not going to say anything about keeping my desk/room in states of perfection, as I know this to be quite an impossible task for myself. I'm not saying I couldn't, but doing that would, I fear, drain all the creative energy out of me and leave me unable to write, draw, create, or think even, due to a little too much perfection for comfort. I need a little bit of scattered paper and stubs of pencils lying about to be comfortable. I will say that I shall try to keep things in a better state of order, but I shan't strive for perfection, merely organized chaos.

I am going to lay out a few attainable, workable goals, though.

1. Blogging. This is my blog for the coming year, and I'm planning on creating frequent posts on all matters of things. I shall say nothing about making each post a work of art, but just that I shall post regularly and put into words those many posts that I'm always coming up with in my head, but never writing.

2. Writing. I want to write a little every single day. Whether this is writing in my new journal book, or fiction writing, or blogging, I want to get up each morning and sit myself down with a cup of coffee and really truly write.

3. Going to bed at a decent hour. (This will, of course, be the hardest for me.) I'm going to turn off my Internet at a reasonable hour each night, and if I stay up a little later I want to be able to spend that time in reading. This means not getting lost in the many corners and paths of the Internet.

4. Getting up in the morning.

5. Walking. I want to walk a little each day, and when I say walking I don't mean the necessary walking I do anyways, but going on long rambling (or of course brisk purposeful) walks.

6. Drinking more water. (Might I just add that while 5 and 6 may not seem strictly relevant to getting school work done, I assure you they are. A healthy, energetic me is going to be more happy and productive with her day, rather than the slothful me who can't keep her eyes open.)

I think that's all I shall say for now. Of course getting actual school work as a goal goes without saying. Also I shall just add a link to Victoria's post Homeschool Tips from Setonite, which I thought was very good.

Also. The Lady of Shalott, because I love that poem and this is beautiful.