Dear Diary Blogfest

  I am back from camp, and it was awesome!

  So Katie over in Fiction Diaries is doing a blog fest. Basically you are supposed to list 100 random things about yourself... Well (cracks knuckles) Here I go!

1. I love Sesame Chicken.

2.I am Mormon, and I love being it!

3.I am the second oldest in a family of six kids, ranging from seventeen to ten months.

4. I have braces.

5. I never change the color of my braces. They will stay blue!

6. I go to an arts school for Drama.

7. I love acting (if it wasn't obvious from the drama program I'm in)

8. I am writing a series.

9. I have been writing since I was twelve.

10. I just started writing a new book about human plant-hybrids... and I couldn't be more excited.

11. I have misophonia, which basically means I want to punch anybody who chews loudly.

12. I am part Hispanic.

13. I am part white.

14. I have waist length curly hair.

15. The longest I've ever stayed up writing was until five in the morning.

16. During the summer I am a bum.

17. I am addicted to the show Avatar The Last Airbender!

18. I have created four Cosplay costumes for the character Katara, all were hand sewn.

19. And yes, when I was ten I cut pieces of blue fabric, tied them to my wrists, slashed my siblings back and told everyone I was a waterbender.

20. I recently spent three days in the woods, dressed as pioneer, pulling a hand cart, with no showers.

21. I have also recently spent a week in the woods, not dressed as a pioneer but having an awesome time at camp. 

22. I am afraid of manatees. 

23. I love lemon doughnuts.

24. I used to write plays.

25. I discovered writing plays isn't as fun as novel writing because you only get the dialogue.

26. I have tons of cousins.

27. I am typing right now on this laptop.

28. I am now discovering writing 100 things about yourself is harder than it looks.

29. Oooh! 100 years ago the Titanic sank, and I love that movie. 

30. I have not seen Avengers, though I want to badly.

31. My favorite song right now is "Set Fire to the Third Bar" by snow patrol.

32. I am fifteen years old (can't believe I didn't think of that one earlier.)

33. Hunger Games is my favorite series.

34. It is also my favorite book.

35. I share a room with six year old little brother and four year old little sister. 

36. Due to this my room never stays clean for long.

37. I speak Spanish.

38. I also speak English.

39. You are now realizing that, that was obvious.

40. My mother also grew up in a family of six.

41. I feel like a criminal reading the books at Barnes and Noble because I haven't payed for them. 

42. Reading the books at Barnes and Noble is oh, so tempting though.

43. Did I mention I love sesame chicken? Well I also love any Chinese food.

44. I have discovered editing is a crap load of work.

45. So is writing.

46. I wouldn't be writing if I cared about the work load.

47. I'm almost half way to the half way mark!

48. I once watched the LOTR trilogy on the way to Nauvoo.

49. I fell asleep and missed most of the second movie.

50. I've reached the half point line!

51. On that same trip to Nauvoo I rode there in a care with no air conditioning.

52. Because of this we had the windows down half the time

53. Remember what I said about my hair being waist length? That came as a problem when my hair started whipping people's faces. 

54. I eventually decided to stuff my face under a pillowcase to cover my hair and I looked like this...

55. And no, Nauvoo is not a planet from Star Wars. 

56. That trip was particularly big because it involved all our family, cousins included.

57. I am now moving off of the topic of Nauvoo.

58. I hate make up.

59. I never carry around a purse.

60. In short, I am not a girly girl.

61. I recently read the ending book of the Maximum Ride series. 

62. The ending was horrendous.

63. I still haven't gotten my school summer reading book.

64. I love gummy bears.

65. I love gummy worms just as much.

66. I eat them even if I do have braces.

67. I eat a lot of things I'm not supposed to eat while on braces.

68. My dream role is probably Carlotta fro POTO.

69. I would want to play her because she has an amazing vocal range and her character is so funny.

70. "They lov-ed me! Love-ed me, lov-ed me!'- Favorite quote from Carlotta.

71. I recently watched Love Never Dies, which is the sequel to POTO.

72. It was amazing!

73. I am realizing for the second time how hard coming up with 100 things about yourself is.

74. If I could pick a cartoon character to marry it would be Sokka.

73. I would pick him because he is so funny.

74. "This drink, I like it. ANOTHER! *smashes cup on ground*"- Thor. Favorite movie line right now.

75. I like wearing flip flops.

76. It's a pain in the butt finding socks.

77. I almost always wear mismatched socks when I do where socks.

78. I also wear knee length mismatched socks that I roll down to my ankles.

79. I think fluffy pillows are amazing when you are tired.

80. I love the Gallagher Girls series.

81. I love the book Matched and Crossed.

82. I love Divergent and Insurgent.

83. Now I am just naming books I like. 

84. I have an obsession with plums. 

85. I also have an obsession with grapes. 

86. I have too many inside jokes with too many friends to count.

87. I love the musical Wicked. 

88. I love eating s'mores year round.

89. If you didn't know, s'mores are a year round snack.

90. I know almost every line from Nacho Libre.

91. I love love love orange juice, I could drink that stuff by the gallon.

92. I could eat breakfast items for lunch and dinner. They are the best!

93. I hate ice in my drinks.

94. Right now I am in fuzzy pajamas. 

95. I have discovered my brother's laugh is the cutest thing in the world.

96. I have always wanted to have a Hunger Games themed camp where everyone wore flags, and if your flag was pulled you had been killed. I have this game plotted out in my head.

97. It bugs me when people say, oh your writing a book. Are you going to publish it? Well... I want to, but that may take years...

98. I only have two more things to say about myself left!

99. I try to keep up a journal, but I always fail. Though right now I've been pretty consistent. 

100. I love running around the woods pretending I am Katniss.

*Whew* Imagine me wiping my brow and then collapsing on the floor from utter exhaustion.

Well that's it! Don't worry I haven't actually died. Head on over to fiction diaries if you want to see what other people are participating.http://thefictiondiaries.blogspot.com/

I'm Off to Camp!

  I'm going to camp, guys!

   It's a camp I've been going to yearly since I was twelve and love it dearly. I'm super excited to go, packed up already and could leave in a second's notice. I'll be leaving tomorrow morning!

  However, that also means I will have vanished from the blogging world for a while. I will be back soon, I promise! Also with new writerly advice! I'll come back with a fresh view of the outside world, considering I haven't done much outside of my little corner where I write. The mountain air of Hanging Rock should do the trick.

  Hope you guys have a great time in your writing endeavors, I for one will be enjoying time spent trying not die while white water rafting.

Letter to my Novel

  Writing a letter to your novel is a fun thing to do! Even if it is a dear John. It's a book I started writing when I was twelve and now I can't stand to look at it. So here it is, you guys ought to try it sometime.

 

Dear A Room For Lost Souls,                                                          

  Life is tough with you. 

  I remember you started off as a dream, literally. I woke up and wrote down the idea that started you on a random old bill sitting in the house and eye liner (for lack of a better writing utensil.) I was too excited to get started, I was immature, and I didn't know any better. I started off with you, and I didn't see any flaws, you were my first novel after all. I wrote and wrote and wrote, we had such good times.
  

  I remember that flush of excitement I would get when a new idea for you sparked, every time I was with you, you were what seemed like my soul mate (see title above, hint play on words ;) )
 

  I began to grow too attached to you, still too young to see your flaws. But, my ideas seemed to grow longer and longer and because they grew I began to grow as well. When I reached thirteen I was slowly starting to realize that I was sorely inexperienced. And when I took a better look at you, began to see what was wrong. I worked through it though, told myself we would come out of this rough patch. 

  We never did. 

  I began to see every one of your flaws, from the sloppy inexperienced writing towards the beginning, and the odd ending beginning to start. Not to mention when we started this whole ordeal your font was 18 (don't know what I was thinking), and when I tried to change you you were suddenly 200 pages less, leaving me with a measly 100 pages.
 

  Many months passed, I told myself I just needed time alone, time to think about you. I dabbled in some short stories, but never returned to you. I tried to give you one last shot and pulled up the dusty file you were under in my flash drive. When I saw you again after so long I'd thought I'd be happier to see you, but you had grown even more odd. I could have fixed you. But that would have been a long lengthy process that I just wasn't ready for.
 

   And then I met Manipulated. He came along in the June of 2011, a bright day, I was trying to get over you, his new shiny idea was too much to overlook. I'm sorry A Room For Lost Souls, but it's time to say goodbye. I won't dispose of you, I may even return to you one day, but don't get your hopes up. Manipulated is just so much more attractive. He's flexible, compatible, something you weren't.
  

  And so you lay in that dusty old file, unfinished, unedited, unreliable. 

  I am sorry for this harsh Dear John letter but it is true. Don't lose self confidence though, you have a good premise working out for you. I might rewrite you, if I ever feel like it. Remember the good times we had together, and don't think about what we could have been, it will only make the separation harder. Goodbye! 

Aaah... the imaginary world we writers live in where we send break up letters to our novels. It's a pleasant place isn't it?

Nobody's story is your story

  I keep scrolling through writing blogs, looking at random advice from professional authors. I can't tell you how many hours I've spent reading the archives of my favorite author's blogs.

  I've seen a pattern though.

  I like reading about authors stories, how they got published, where they got the idea for a certain book I liked of theirs, and I realized, no author has the exact story.

  Some of the authors spent years writing books they've never published. Others had only written one book, and that was the one that got published. Rick Riordan had gotten an adult's novel published before Percy Jackson came in to view. Christopher Paolini, J.K Rowling, and Stephanie Meyer all had only written one book before they were published, the one they published, and look at what wild successes those stories were.

  Then you see many authors, like Ally Carter, Suzanne Collins, Ally Condie. They had other books out before they really had a huge hit with specific ones.

  But then there are the other authors who've written a plethora of books before they were published. 

  I sometimes look at how an author's life has turned out and try to match that up with mine. I find myself thinking, so, if they had written three books that were never published, but then got a bestseller on the first one that was, then that means the one I'm writing right now will never get published, and I have to write more. Or, they tried to get published in high school, but didn't and were eventually published when they were in their twenties. That means, I won't get published until I'm at least twenty-six or something... 

  But then I snap myself out of it. 

  Because their life isn't my life. 

  It never will be.

  I don't know where I'll end up in the publishing industry down the road. I could strike up luck with the series I'm writing now, or maybe I won't. 

  I could be a bestselling author by the time I'm twenty-one, or I could try my whole life and never get anything published. 

  There's a world of possibilities out there. 

  So just because one author did one certain thing, and another author did another, doesn't mean that's how every author's story is going to turn out. 

  My dream is the same as theirs and countless others. 

  I just have to be patient, write my best, and find out where it leads me.

The Things We Writers do for Our Writing

  I had a wow, this is really strange moment the other day when I typed in to the google word search, "can you eat raw fish?" 

  I'm not very informed on the whole raw vs cooked thing and pathogens and what not. 

  And then I realized, how many times had I looked up very strange random questions like that on Google? The answer is many, many times. I've asked Google questions like how far is the trip by boat from Hawaii to California? Can a person be stabbed by a knife in the stomach and survive? What happens when someone gets blood poisoning? 

  Not the average every day search people put in. 

  We writers do strange things for our writing. I think I've mentioned on here before how I walked barefoot around the forest because I wanted to know what it felt like. I needed better descriptions. As it turns out it is very painful.

  It's also happened that we were having a nice family dinner when someone brought something or another up, and I just got this glassy stare in my eyes, pumped my fist in the air and shouted "Inspiritation!" 

  I've heard stories about people who've taken trips to places like the alps and the jungle to get a better view of the scenery that takes place in their books. 

  It really is crazy.

  What kind of crazy things have you ever done for your writing?

How Much Crying is too Much Crying?

  My main character is a cry baby.

  I just realized that.

  She cries too much, but she has reason to when she does. She's sees people die, people she knew, people she cared about. But sometimes I worry she cries too much. I can't have a good epic climactic crying fest because I feel like every other chapter she has one.

  I tried to build her up strong, and she mostly is, but she just cries a lot.

  Like a girl on her period. I don't care how strong of a girl you are. You can be Wonder Woman for all I care, but when you are one your period you cry at least twice a day. I am slowly starting to wonder if my MC is on it 24/7, and because there is not chocolate in the world she lives in, she is succumbing to the dark abyss.

  She just cries too much!

  And most of the crying occurs inside of my lead character guy's chest.

  I mean he never cries, but then my main character is just like *boo-hoo* I need a shoulder to cry on, oh here's this hunky guy, let me just soak his t-shirt, I haven't done that in a few hours. 

  Bah!

  So, how can I, when my characters won't stop their wailing, tell you how much crying is too much?

  Simple, I cannot.

  But at the same time I can!

  Crying is different for all of us. You may have never seen your Mother cry, while some people see her cry every day. You may cry when you got a C on your math test, but some people smile and say, at least I'm not failing. (Don't have that kind of attitude by the way.)

  I can tell you I'll cry at appropriate times, weddings, funerals, the end of the Harry Potter series...

  But do you? Do weddings really make you tear up a little? Does the end of the most epic series that ever walked the planet make you feel like you are slowly spiraling in to a bottomless pit of nothingness??!!

  It comes the time to ask yourself. Does your main character really need to cry here? Based on their personalities would they cry their guts out and hack up their lungs in the process, or would they shed a little tear and shred on through? So, now that you understand what crying is really about, ask yourself. Is your character cold and hateful? Then why is she bawling to the movie The Notebook?

  Now on the other hand if you have a ditsy blonde, let her cry to whatever chick flick she feels like! 

  Like the first world problems lady, would your character really cry because the remote was on the other side of the room? 

  I know my character is the strong type, but she's the strong type that ends up strong through their trials. She tries to take on things that eventually break her, but as Kelly Clarkson would say while pumping her fist in the air; What doesn't kill you makes you stronger!!

  So she has a reason to cry so much. She really can't handle what is happening to her. At least not yet, and she lets it out the only way she knows how to. Crying. And that's just how it'll be because she's who she is. And I can't change that. (Well, technically I can, but in the world of books let's pretend I can't.)

  Now if you came up to me and told me my main character was crying her guts out because someone ate the last brownie, then that would be odd.

  That kind of crying belongs to the world of characters in the their toddler years.

  But, please, listen to me when I say this. Even if your character does cry a lot, don't write unnecessary long descriptions about how much their chest ached and their breathing was rapid and the tears fell like waterfalls.

  We get it, your crying really hard. Now shut up so we can get along with the story!

  So, to cry or not to cry?

  That is the question.

  I guess you and your character will just have to figure that out yourselves.

Moving the Story Along- or for Short, Pacing

  All right, as you can see from the title up there today's topic is about keeping a fast pace, or moving the story along.

  So, how does one do this kind of thing? First off, you need a good and steady plot. The plot is the thing that drives the story, it's the very essence of what your book is about. It's the thing that brings conflict and the thing that makes your reader hungering for more. Without a good plot your basic story would look like this:
 

  Once upon a time there lived a little girl. The end.
 

  Ok... what did that have to do with anything?

  Absolutely nothing. 

  There was no story, no conflict, no hero saves the day, no meaning. Nada. 

  Now, if you want an example of a story with an amazing plot take  The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I know you've probably all read it, so bear with me when I explain this.

  She has the perfect set up, immediately describing what life is like in District 12 and she doesn't waste time by delving right in to the story by having Katniss volunteer as tribute in the first chapter. The story continues with fast pace and there's no lagging. There's a perfect amount of conflict that evens itself out as the story continues, and then leaves you hungering for more when the story's over. 

  Make sure your plot is tight and you know what's going to happen next. Writing is all about looking ahead. To move the story along you must have some plan for how things are going to work out. That's why plot plays such a big part in the pacing.

  Once you know your plot, roll with it! Here's where the major part of pacing comes along. You have to make sure your explaining the plot evenly with no lagging. That means no side stories! The events in a book should all help move the story along. If it doesn't, then cut it.
 

  Oh, but, Johny and Susan are my favorite couple in my book! I should write another love scene between them and add it somewhere. 

  No, you don't. If you already have it set up that Johny and Susan are together don't add unnecessary love scenes. The same goes for everything else. Don't just write little day to day things the character does. Don't write a whole chapter about how Susan did her laundry. That's boring. Now if Susan was doing her laundry when BOOM, the phone rings and it's Johny calling about he wants to break up with her, then yes, add that, it moves the story along. Even if it is heart breaking. 

  Also, don't add unnecessary long descriptions. That's how you lose readers and it keeps the pace of the story down.
 

  But the trees looked so beautiful that day. Their leaves seemed to shimmer under the bright summer sun. They danced with the wind and shimmied through the air. Green blurs filled the sky as the leaves fluttered down and.... 

  No! You start to lose people. I bet I lost half of you in that little description of the trees leaves.

  I know some of you will protest when I bring up the next thing that helps the pacing. 

  Having an outline. 

  If you have an outline of the story you'll know what you need to write, and you won't write yourself in to corners, where you don't know what happens next. That also leaves people uninterested. I've done that before... and that's where disasters come in to play. 

  Trust me, outlines are very useful and they keep you one your toes. I could go on and on about them, but I'll save them for another blog post.

  So, that's the insiders edition to pacing. I hope it'll help you move your story along without all those sappy Johny Susan moments.