Babies and Books

  Well hey there!

  So, this post is going to be kind of odd, but you'll catch on soon enough.

  Recently my mother gave birth to the sixth edition of our family (excluding parents). His name is Ryker and he is four months old.

  Isn't he adorable?!!! I love him to death! He is the smiliest baby I have ever met!! But sadly, he cries, Ryker cries a lot. All babies do, and my brother is no exception. So, at times my Mom is doing things around the house, and needs our help. We are happy to give it up. Though Ryker can be the sweetest thing on earth, he is still a baby and has needs, and when we have him he can cry.

  Rephrase, he will cry.

  Recently I discovered a trick that helps calm him down when he is crying. For some reason, walking down the stairs with him in your arms shushes him. Not walking around, not cradling him. Walking down the stairs. Emphasis on DOWN. To go down the stairs you need to go up the stairs, but Ryker does not enjoy up, he only enjoys down. So, this puts me in a predicament. While I am walking up the stairs he cries, while I am walking down, he is calm. And in the process I am burning in sheer pain due to my case of authortitise which is a disease that occurs when you spend hours upon hours of sitting on you butt typing.

  I came to a realization when I walked up and down and up and down the stairs with maybe ten pounds slung in my arms.

  Writing is a lot like that process.

  Ryker is your book, you love him with your whole heart, you adore him, he makes you smile and laugh, and you would do anything for it/him.

  Going up the stairs are the bad parts of your book. The parts where you feel like shooting something in the face because your book needs something and won't stop crying. Character development, slower pace, better descriptions, less descriptions, and sometimes over all just better writing. You get overwhelmed at all you need to do, at all the flaws you see. And all the while your legs are burning for going up hill.

  However, going down the stairs are the happy days. The parts that just flow easily, your book is at peace and cooperating. It's the days where you pop out four chapters in just twenty four hours! You felt so excited you couldn't stop your hands from swallowing the keyboard.

  It's an on going process, if you stop your book will continue to cry, cry for need of more writing, cry for need of editing, cry for need fixing errors. And do you want your books crying? Crying out for their parents but no response and they end up dying from exhaustion of screeching so hard, and you have to suffer the pain an guilt of knowing you killed your own child for the rest of your life? I thought not...

  The process only ends when you've been published, or when you feel that your book is as good as can be. Your children will have grown and would be able to fend for themselves, and you'll look at them and think all those years filled with crying were worth it.

  And then you pop out more babies! And the process keep on going.

  I guess what I'm trying to say is that, you can't just give up on your writing, just like you can't just give up on a crying baby. You have to keep climbing those stairs to get the sweet climbing down the stairs days, and you have to suffer through the tired feeling your getting. Suffer through detachment. Because in the end, your book will be off to college and married, and all grown up. Savor climbing the stairs.

  Besides, were writers, climbing the stairs is what we live for.

Watch me as I shudder *shudders*

  Hello again my beautifuls!

  Ok, so today's post is about something I stumbled upon when looking through random files in my computer, and I found *shudders* an old story. All I have to say about that is... oh my goodness gracious. I wrote it when I was ten. The sad thing is, I remember writing the story, I remember thinking to myself, this is such good writing for my age, I thought I was so deep and emotional.

  Now as I read through this monstrosity I realize how untrue this was. I was terrible (proof that practice makes perfect.) It was like the awkward moment when you see the Wizard of Oz put on by a bunch of fourth graders and Dorothy clicks her toes instead of her heels... Except in my case I wasn't the one watching.... I was the main character..

  Off topic! This is no the time to discuss what a stupid fourth grader I was. Anyways...

  I want to give you a slight teaser in to this extremely "dramatic" story that I wrote when I was ten years old...

My head hurt a little so I decided I would stay in bed. My mom brought me breakfeast in bed, my dad had gone to work. She never questioned why I came home early from the sleep over that night. I was thankful for that. The day dragged on and everything bored me. I tried reading, no help, I tried going to sleep. That definetly didn’t work even though I was exhausted. Finally night came and I  decided I would have to go to sleep sooner or later. I looked at my clock, it said ten thirty. I closed my eyes but as soon as they dropped the same cold but warm feeling that I had neer the gravel road appeared. I opened my eyes and sitting there on my bed was Derek. I gasped. “Don’t be afraid” he whispered. I wasn’t, I was delighted. “I’m sorry for disappering on you back there.” “No, no that’s fine” I lied. “Do you know who I am” he asked me. To think about I really didn’t, but I knew who he was, I could see through him. It’s like from the moment I saw him in my dream he stunned me. Then I suddenly knew everything about him, he was sweet kind, loving, and brave. Just by one look. “No, but I do know how you are” I stated. He laughed. “So do I” he whispered. “ But, you don’t know who I am” and just like that he disappered right before my eyes. “I’m a ghost”. I heard somebody say from no where. “We barely know anything about eachother, yet I know everything abou you, and I love it” went nothing. “I know it sounds complicated, but I love you” he suddenly appeared again and his eyes looked like they were full of sorrow. “I’ve been watching you your whole life, I know who you are I know what you are, and I feel like I need to protect you” derek said so silently. “What are you really?” I questioned him. “My name is Derek Edwards. I was born in 1917 and died in 1933. I’m sixteen and I live in your house.This news surprised me, but I didn’t care he was here with me.

  Like I said, oh my goodness gracious! This is the most terrible piece of writing my eyes have ever beheld! Notice how nothing is indented, the first of many flaws...

  Just from this example you can see how much of a terrible writer I was back then.

  Now, let's fast forward a couple of years. I am twelve, and I think, maybe I could start  actually writing a book, maybe it won't be so bad... And so my first novel exploded in my brain! It was titled A Room For Lost Souls. Oh, how I loved that book, I worked on it hours upon hours upon hours. My writing had improved slightly, but not by much. Here is an excerpt from that book...

   “Kate?” I asked her softly. She looked to me her face ashen.

  “Where are we?” Kate didn’t answer but a different voice echoed off in the distance.

  “I’ll tell you where you are” the voice said. It was a woman’s voice; it rang high and confident in the pearl like room. The voice was sweet, but mysterious and misty at the same time.

  “You’re in a room for lost souls” the voice stated. Suddenly a girl about eighteen was standing in front of us. She had wavy red hair and big brown eyes that stared at us, she looked tough but at the same time she looked nice.

  “Where are we?” Kate asked the girl again puzzled.

  “I said you’re in a room for lost souls” the girl stated a little harsher.  A room for lost souls, what did that mean? The girl must have understood our confused faces because she continued.

  “Basically, your dead” she stated with no emotion in her voice, and no sympathy. Dead, but that couldn’t be true. The word dead rang in my ears. Death was something that I expected to come when I was much older. I didn’t expect for someone to come along and murder me. I felt a sinking sensation enter me. I couldn’t breathe; it felt as if somebody had just punched me straight in the stomach. I couldn’t be dead. My life couldn’t just be over like that. My face fell to the white floor and I tried to hold back tears. Kate’s face was also staring at the bottom cloud we were standing on. She looked like she did the time I found her in my room crying after the water slide accident, torn apart, though she wasn’t crying her face was sunken. Her eyes were squinted shut, she held her hands behind her back trying to look brave and her mouth was pressed in a thin straight line. 

  As you can see; better. Notice there's no, I've been stalking you my entire life, oh and by the way, I'm in love with you, scenario. So, that's got to be and improvement for something!

  But alas, more years rolled by, and I grew, my writing grew, and I looked at this and (appropriate play on words for title) shuddered. I moved on to bigger and better fish, leaving lost souls unfinished, and now fourteen, I began Manipulated. Everything just seemed to flow naturally with that book, I loved it so much, still do, and I feel that novel shows my strongest writing yet, I've grown... here is an excerpt. 

 

  Just like that they were on me.

  Thrashers.

  Pain hit, an intense blinding pain. I keeled over from the impact and crashed to the ground in a heap, the pain even more intense as the dirt smeared my bloody back.

  I had never felt anything so torturous. It was like being lashed with fire, my flesh burning on the surface, and then the fire doubled as the thrashers looped around my arms and legs and then tightened.

  The hidden Chasers stepped out of the mist then. My eyes were blurred with tears and my vision was foggy from the night spent having my brains battered against a cliff, but I could see their boots shuffling towards me, crunching the ground underneath them. I wanted to scream, but when I opened my mouth I could feel the thrashers tearing in to my skin, deeper and deeper.

  “Don’t try struggling; it’ll just increase the pain.”

  You see? Not perfect, but pretty good, at least I think.

  So, the point of this blog post you may ask? Well, it's to show how much we grow. We start out as cheesy fifth graders who want to write stories about stalker ghosts! And then we evolve, we transform, and most importantly, we learn. We learn from our mistakes, what to do better next time and what to add and what no to.

  You may be saying to yourself, I want to be the best writer I can be! And that's great, I do to, but you don't have to be the best writer you can be, now. I mean, if you were a superfantabulous writer right now and you were so good you could never get any better, what would that say about you when your thirty and your writing the same old stuff.

  So, what I'm trying to say is that it's OK to inexperienced, I mean, just look at me when I was ten, and look at me now, four years later! I'm a completely different writer. Though I still have a lot of learning to do, and I probably won't become a best selling author before I leave high school, I've improved, and that's something significant.

  Keep faith in your writing, you'll get there someday!

Catching Up

  Well hey there!... Yeah, I know, I should be shoved in to a wall and then kicked repeatedly in the stomach, then slashed upon with a whip, then brutally stabbed in every visible part of my body until I'm close to death, but not complete death, and then left bleeding in the corner for the crows to come and eat my eyeballs out. Well, maybe a little less gory punishment would work, but that still doesn't excuse that I haven't blogged in forever. Anyways...

  So, you may be saying yourself. What has Giselle been up to? Well... I recently printed off my first draft for my newly named novel Manipulated. Love that name by the way... off topic! Trust me, there is no better feeling in the world than feeling your hands, gently placed under the monolithic stack of papers, your eyes darting down towards the word scrawled out on the pages, and the warming feeling you get when you realize, hey I wrote a book.

  And then you start reading it.

  Your life is screwed by then, you catch mistake after mistake after mistake after mistake until you feel like you want to shoot yourself in the face! It's not necessarily that the writing isn't good... it's just... yeah, the writings bad. I don't know, there's something about seeing the words printed on the page that can bring a tumultuous whirlwind of emotions, happiness, excitement... depression, anxiety... you see the range?  

  At the moment, I'm waiting on more feedback from friends and family about the book so when I actually go and sit down and start editing I'll have things in mind to change and fix. So, the printed manuscript has been shoved in a drawer, (open, upon request of my family) and never sees the light of day.

  So, where does this leave Giselle? What adds meaning to her life now that what was once the sole purpose in it has been shut from her vision, leaving her with the absence of her one true love?! Well, between schoolwork, church, and play practice what else could I be doing, uh... Writing! Duh!

  I started working on two new novels, which both have completed first chapters, and I write whichever I feel like when I find the time. One is called Fading. It's set in a dystopian society (I don't know why I love to write about dystopia so much) and it's about this girl named Rayn. In her world, seers are the rulers, or men who can see the future. Whenever a child is born, that child is given an aura, a prophecy telling that person exactly what is going to happen in said person's life. For those LDS/ Mormon people out there, it's basically has the same set up as a patriarchal blessing, very discreet. This story was actually inspired through a patriarchal blessing (not mine.) But, it's not like a patriarchal blessing because auras are bad (and patriarchal blessings obviously, aren't) Crap! I don't want to give too much away so that's all I can tell you about that for now, but it turns in to the whole, my whole life is a lie kind of thing, and now I have to tell everyone I know, but none of them will believe me scenario, sooo, I'll see how that works out.

  My second book is titled Daughters of the Ocean. It takes mermaids to the next level. In a way it's kind of dystopian (what's wrong with me?!) But I really like the premise. Under the ocean, mythical creatures have existed, but not only do they exists, an oppressive society is developed between the creatures living there, otherwise known as the daughters of the ocean. Syrians (or sea witches) have taken control over all living things under the ocean, including the daughters of the ocean, the mermaids, sirens, and nymphs. A human scientist finds out about this and is like, guys I found out mermaids, sirens, naiads, and sea witches exist! They of course, shun him and a ton of other stuff happens.

  I'm hoping to get somewhere with these two blooming ideas, but I know they'll be destroyed with plot holes and grammatical errors soon enough and I'll want to rip both of them in half. BUT, for now, I love both ideas and I am perfectly content with writing both whenever I can. So, to end this catching up post, I'll leave a little teaser for you on the book that I consider my favorite of the two, Daughters of the Ocean. And don't worry, I promise from now on I'll be a good little blogger and update when I find time between schoolwork, church, play practice, and writing. So, without further ado, here is the teaser:

The light of the world above reflected in the clear water beautifully, beams of sunlight splashing our world below, dancing in the deep blue waves above us.

  I almost felt happy.

  But today wasn’t a day to be happy.

  I had heard myths about creatures that, when they were sad, had water drip from their faces, like they were leaking. It was called crying.

  Though I could not cry I imagined that I would if I could have.

  The aching feeling in my chest gnawed at me and the sunlight streaming down from the surface wasn’t even something that could cheer me up, like it normally did.

  I glanced down, the body laying there, curled up inside of herself like she was still trying to protect her life with feeble attempts.

  Her ebony hair still flowed around her head, the wreath tangled with seaweed and colorful flowers decorated the top of it. Her eyes were closed, never to reopen and see the light shimmering from the world above and create pillars for us that reflected beautifully in the water. Her emerald green tail was still blood stained; the water around us couldn’t bring out the red liquid tinted on her scales.

  I had to look away and choke down the lump in my throat that wouldn’t go.

  Mele.

  My sister, not yet thirteen.

  She was everyone’s sister, but mine especially.

  The others hadn’t shared their entire life with her, they hadn’t had her by their sides wherever they went, they hadn’t shared the many laughs that only Mele and I could muster, they hadn’t had Mele as a best friend.

  Yet, they weren’t with Mele when the terror hit, they hadn’t witnessed the attack.

  And they hadn’t let her go.

  I thought of tears again, what they would feel like, streaming down your cheeks, stinging your eyes. I wanted to feel them, to know what it would be like to let out all the emotions I felt in a flurry of sorrow.

  The voices began then, the high soprano voices lifted high in to the air, melodic and serene. Everyone around me was singing, their mouths opened in O formations, beautiful notes ringing through the water. They were hypnotic, capable to put anything at ease.

  Except for me.

  I opened my mouth as well, ready to hum a quiet lullaby as farewell for Mele, but when I opened my mouth no sound escaped, I couldn’t do it.

  I watched as her fragile body was dropped, and the waves dragged her away, her dark hair still flowing behind of her like a stream of night.