Ambition

Ambition is a strange thing. I always value ambition in other people. By that I mean, I like people who clearly want something and work to get it. A lack of ambition is terribly unattractive. 

But when it comes to my own ambition, I admit, I'm a little shy. I mean, some of my ambitions are fairly common and I have no problem talking about them: own a house with an office I can cover in bookshelves, always have a dog (I can't decide if I want a husky or a German shepherd first), drink coffee, etc. All of those are achievable.

My big ambition is to publish a book. Sometimes, it even occurs to me to dream about that book doing well. The biggest pipe dream is that so many people will buy the book I don't have to have a job to support my writing habit.

I don't like to think about that because it seems so arrogant. Who am I to think I can write a book anyone besides me would want to read? That's the thing about the stories I write- I write them because I would want to read them. 

A few days ago, I was revising Black and Gold, listening to Disney music because that's the playlist I listened to when I wrote it over the summer. I reached the end of a section and just sort of stopped. And then I though Why not this book? 

God knows it's nowhere near ready to be read by anyone other than me and maybe my mom (because my mom is awesome). But it could be ready. I could make it good enough. That is an incredibly arrogant thought, because I am haunted by all of the bad writing that I have done. The amount of bad versus good words is still heavily skewed toward bad, trust me. But I couldn't shake that thought.

Ambition is a strange thing. It makes me want to hand my book to a stranger in the hopes that they'll fall in love with it, even though I know they're more likely to throw it back at me.

But maybe, just maybe, one of those strangers won't. 

Revision and Christmas

Congratulations to those of you in college who, like me, made it through the semester! I'm pretty excited to be done. Honestly, until yesterday finishing the semester was more exciting than the fact that Christmas is in two days. 

Now I have time to read for fun again. I just sat in one of the big leather chairs in my parents' living room yesterday and finished a book I did not have to write an essay on or relate to another book. It was glorious. 

In other exciting news (well, exciting to me), I have come up with a title for The Stupid Book: Black and Gold. Voila! Today, after I finish writing this, I am going to drink my tea and work on some back story for a couple of the characters. Then, probably tomorrow, I will begin revising in earnest before school starts again and homework eats away my time. In my perfect world I'd be finished with one complete revision before January 11 (when I head back to school) but more realistically, it'll be more like a 75% revision. Still, revision is going to happen.

But I have a title and I have time and I miss my main characters. It will be fun.

I hope you all enjoy spending time with your family and friends. To my fellow students, I hope you enjoy sleeping in and being lazy as much as I do. Eat good food. Laugh. And have a very merry Christmas.

Elizabeth

Updates

Hey there, those of you who are reading this. It's been a little while since I posted anything. School, NaNo, the usual distractions. 

I am only three days behind on NaNo due to more school related writing I had to do. So not that bad. It'll be easy to double up over Thanksgiving break. 

Today I wanted to write about something specific and not related to NaNo at all, though. I don't know about the rest of you but sometimes, I get something in my head and I can't let it go. Not just like I think about it and obsess about it but like I can't let it go on in my head so I have to say it out loud, either to someone or by writing it down.

I'm of the belief that this is a particularly writer-ly trait but correct me if I'm wrong. Because it feels like when I have a scene in my head that I simply have to get out because it is driving me mad. Only this is different because it's about my life and I can't just let it sit.

The problem with it being real life is that I have no control over how the other characters react. I don't know what they're thinking. I just know what I'm thinking and what I think they're thinking (that was a lot of thinking for one sentence). And I don't want to say it and have anyone look at me like I've lost my marbles. 

So do I write it down? Maybe. But it's much harder to admit uncertainty/doubt/worry/guilt when it's mine than when it's a character. But do I say it?

I haven't come up with an answer, so I guess I'll do more of that thinking thing. I've heard it works. Usually.

Four Days Left

NaNo WriMo is almost here and my big goal for today is to figure out how my story should end so I can finish up my outline for it. It's called Out of the Ashes. I wrote the first two of this trilogy the past two Novembers. This is the last one and it's going to be the best. How do I know that without having written a single word of it?

Easy. I am a better writer now than I was last year. I wrote The Stupid Book, which taught me a lot. Every story does, of course, but I learned a lot this summer. Besides, Ashes is the finale. The dramatic ending to the story of two sisters. *does excited squealing happy dance. It involves a lot of hand flailing.*

My friends, I am sorry in advance. The unique madness that comes from writing in a mad dash amid school and not being a hermit can be frightening. Especially towards the end of NaNo, when I inevitably fall behind and end up writing in a mad dash to finish before November 30. I temporarily lose the ability to think things all the way through before I say them. While it can be funny, it can also be mean. So I am sorry.

But it is a wonderful feeling, to be consumed by a story. I am never happier than when I am writing and it is going well.

Still, living with a writer who is in the midst of writing can be a challenge. Give us our space, lend a half-attentive ear when we need to vent and when we try to avoid the writing, tell us to stop being stupid and go write. Seriously.

Because the only thing harder than NaNo is not getting to 50,000 words. Trust me.

Dragonslayer

Let's talk about dragons. Yes, the great beasts that show up to wreak havoc on unsuspecting villages and kidnap damsels and end up getting slayed by the knight in shining armor.

I myself have a childish love of dragons. The basis for starting The Stupid Book was I wanted to write a story without cliched dragons in it. Whether or not I succeeded in that is for my hopeful future readers to decide. But my dragons are cool.

Actually, today I am more interested in the metaphoric dragons. The dragon that needs to be slayed by the knight or the peasant farmer, depending on your view of yourself.

See, we all have dragons. A project at work, a really frickin' busy day, an essay on the Puritans (yes it is as bad as it sounds), some class called Differential Equations, or midterms. (Can you tell school's been dominating my brain recently?) You get the idea. Metaphoric dragons are the things that are difficult and require time and energy to get through. Usually, it isn't fun.

National Novel Writing Month is starting in fifteen days. Writing 50,000 words in 30 days used to scare me. Then I wrote The Stupid Book over the summer and thought I was better than that. But November is different. November has school. And essays. And studying. And a set amount of time I am required to do things other than write. So I am beginning to realize that 50,000 words in 30 days is still a lot. Enough to be considered a dragon.

But I love dragons. I have not written a story that makes dragons the villains. So I am looking at NaNo in that respect. I don't have to slay the dragon.

I have to tame it.

This is the NaNo website, if you're interested: www.nanowrimo.org

And here are dragon pictures

.

http://dragonkatet.wordpress.com/
http://amxgraphics.com/Dragons/Black.html

Just a Poem

I thought I might share something that I've written, instead of just writing about writing. So, below is a poem I wrote last night and revised today. It's still not finished but now at least I don't feel like I'm leading you on.

Anyway.

"Here"

Let's sit here, then,
under the blotted sun
clouds gathering behind
the old battleground

Let's sit here, then,
as the air rises and falls
ruffling your hair,
tangling mine

Let's sit here, then,
where the northern road
crosses the southern river
and a leaf dances in the rain

Let's sit here, then,
and let the rain and
the clouds and the wind
stay in between.

Strength and Heroines

For a long goddamn time, women did not get their due in life or in literature. Damsels in distress abounded. Oppression was (and still is today to varying degrees) a real problem.

In the past few years, there have been quite a few stories that have heroines who do more than fall in love with the hero and get themselves into trouble. Which, don't get me wrong, is a great thing. The Hunger Games, Divergent, Game of Thrones, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are just a few. Each of these has a female character who plays a major role and breaks the damsel in distress stereotype. They are strong female characters.

But it seems to me (that means this is MY OPINION which I am entitled to just as you are entitled to yours) that this is not the best way to describe female characters.

What makes a character strong? Do I mean 'strong' as in physically, mentally, emotionally, or written well? 

Good characters, again in my opinion, do not necessarily have to be 'strong' in any way except that they are written well. When it comes to female characters especially, it is difficult to have them fail at anything (physically, mentally, emotionally) because then the writer runs the risk of having them appear 'weak'. And that is not something people are in the mood to accept about a female character right now.

Real people aren't always 'strong'. They aren't able to continuously defy expectations with their physical strength. They don't always have the answer right away. They break down and cry when terrible things happen.

Before a character is strong, they should be believable. We should be able to look at them, imagine them, and relate to them. We should root for them even when they fail, we should cry when they cry. We should feel for them before we admire them for their strength.

My character does not have her shit together. She's seventeen. What seventeen year old actually has their shit together? How many adults really have their shit together? 

She's smart but she has to think and she makes mistakes. Lord, does she make mistakes. She has a heart that can be and has been and will be broken. She will fall down and she will fail and I am not afraid for her. 

I will also not describe her as being strong. She is brave and she is selfish and she is afraid and she is selfless and she is generous and she is uncertain of herself. Tell me if you haven't been every one of those things. 

Her strength is not the absence of weakness and the darker places in her heart but rather her ability to keep in the lighter places in spite of the darkness.

Backwards

There was a time when the thought of completely restarting a story would have made me cry and give up. It is kind of sad to know I've written twenty pages and probably won't use any of them. But the story has changed.

So I am choosing to look at it as a rather long character development that I did backwards. By backwards, I mean that I wrote about who my character would be after the events of the story it turns out I am going to write. 

Fascinating, I know. But it can be useful to imagine who you want a character to be years after the story ends because it can tell you how they are in the story and how they need to change. And stories are about the opportunity to change or to take action. Even if they choose not to act, the character can't be the same at the beginning as they are at the end. 

My character (and this is very secret writer thinking) will be calm, collected and in control seven years after the end of the main story. So for her to be able to become that, she stars off as uncertain and a little afraid. 

Some of you are probably wondering why on earth I've named two traits that could bring to mind weakness (and if you hadn't, I just handed it to you on a silver platter). 'Strong female characters' are very popular right now and I think my character is amazing. I have very firm ideas about the nature of strength and characters in general, so I plan on addressing this in a blog all its own.

Okay, enough for now. I am very sure this is only interesting to me and other writers. 

I Don't Believe in Soul Mates

I don't believe in soul mates. 

Imagine that there was really only one other person on the planet for you. There are roughly seven billion people alive today. Most of us prefer one gender over the other, so that leaves 3.5 billion people we could be attracted to. And that's just of the people who are alive. What if your soul mate died a year ago and  you never met them? Or what if you or your soul mate can't ever afford to leave the country you were born in and so you never meet each other because of that? 

And how do you know if someone is your soul mate? Popular TV, movies, even some books, would have us believe that first love is the be all end all of existence. Usually it's not. But say you marry someone and then find your soul mate. Does that negate the love you feel towards the person you married? I hope not. 

The problem I have with the concept of soul mates is that it implies there is one way and only one way to find someone you can love and commit to and go through life with. 

I loved writing The Stupid Book. I loved my two main characters, I loved the world I got to build for them. I did. But last week, I stopped working on it because a new story with a new character popped into my head. And I couldn't ignore her. 

I don't know if I will ever circle back and try to get The Stupid Book published. But I love it and it taught me something about writing and about myself. I don't know if this new story will become a book at all, let alone one I feel ready to publish. 

I hope I write more than one story worth publishing but I know I'd be lucky to publish one. Maybe this new story is the story, the one I want to give the rest of the world a chance to read. I don't know. 

I do know that even if it is, it won't be the last book I write, let alone the last story I love. But I love it already, like I love The Stupid Book, like I love my Butterflies stories, like I love my Elemental stories 

Like I said, I don't believe in soul mates. Not even when it comes to books.

A Couple Things

I can't say I've been thinking a lot about writing the past few days, what with moving in at school, being sick, and actually going back to school. 

Being back with friends I haven't seen in three months has given me the opportunity to show off my printed book. You should see their faces when I tell them how long it is, or even when they just see it. It gives me no small amount of satisfaction. 

Is this because I like showing off? Probably a little bit but more of it has to do with the fact that until now, people just had to take my word that I was capable of writing that much. Now I have proof. This is my talent. I was not making it up. 

In other news, I have decided that the official working title will be "The Stupid Book" until such time as I can actually think of a title. I have a couple titles for sequels bouncing around in my head but that doesn't do this book much good. 

A couple of other things I feel like divulging about The Stupid Book: it is fantasy, it is written in limited third person and the perspective is split between two characters. 

That is all. Survive going back to school. I feel your pain. 

Some Character Thoughts...

So, I was listening to "I'll Make a Man Out of You" from the Mulan soundtrack and it got me to thinking about all of the female characters, both in books and movies, that influenced me. I don't mean as role models (because let's be honest, characters don't always make the greatest role models. Just look at Juliet) but as a writer. This is my personal list. Emphasis added so no one gets in a huff about who I haven't included. Also, these have a few (vague) spoilers. You have been warned.

5. Mulan. First of all, she's a Disney princess who is not actually a princess. By the end of the movie, she's the hero of China. She was motivated by love of her father to join the army in his place, which is awesome and refreshing in that a lot of women seem to be motivated by romantic love. The downside, though, is that she spends most of the movie pretending to be a man and earns respect that way.

4. Hazel Grace from The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. (I hope that is enough of a citation. If not, I apologize.) She has cancer but she's still funny and smart. Which I love, given that so much of the plot deals with death. John Green is amazing and I'd probably lose the ability to speak coherently if I ever met him. And then ask him why he is so good at making people cry.

3. Elsa, from Frozen. I know, I know, people need to shut up about Frozen. I'm not sorry. Elsa spends most of her life terrified that she is going to kill someone and then once she's free, she's able to take control of her powers and be herself. I can't get over what it must have been like to be her, growing up, afraid of touching anyone or anything. It must have been incredibly lonely and then to find freedom in being alone. But she's not a typical 'strong female character' in that she still needs Anna's help in fixing the winter. Talk about character development. Oh, and she's a queen for most of the movie. 

2. Hermione, from the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling. The Harry Potter books were the first real books that I read on my own. I even wrote my senior paper in high school on the theme of fate presented in them. But Hermione is smarter than Harry and Ron, which definitely made it easy for me to think of girls as smart. But she's also got a really big heart and doesn't sit by when the three of them get into fights.She's not perfect, which makes her human, which is the best thing that anyone (in my humble opinion) can say about any character. Love her.

1. Liesel Meminger from The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. If you haven't read this book, get it and read it now. It is amazing. I don't even know where to begin with Liesel. She ages well in the book, she makes mistakes and learns from them, and feels like a best friend. Of course, given that The Book Thief is my favorite book, she might just be on this list because it is impossible to separate her from the rest of what I love about the story and the writing. 

Now, I am not implying that I was not equally influenced by male characters, because I was. Maybe I'll write about them later. But all of my narrators and main characters have been female and I suspect they will continue to be. Not because I don't think guys are awesome but because I don't think I could accurately capture a guy's voice or how they interact with the world, seeing as I am a girl. But maybe one day.

Ode to the Coffee Shop

August is a hard time for me to write. It is the hottest month of the year where I live. Often, it is accompanied by a smoke fueled inversion in the valley, which makes breathing a gross activity. I hate writing when I am hot (my mom hates to be hot almost more than anything else, so I suspect this is a watered down version of that) and I hate that everywhere I go, it's really freaking bright. Which means glare. So I have to wait till it gets dark to tolerate sitting at my computer and then I have to go to bed because work in the morning.

But I need to learn to deal with these things, so I went to a local coffee shop this morning to work on my story (still untitled. Frustration levels are at maximum on that front). Rembrandt's, on Eagle Road. It's wonderful. Anyway, it got me to thinking about how amazing coffee shops are. So here is a  list of the reasons I personally love coffee shops.

1. They have coffee. Lots of it. That I don't have to make. That they make into a latte with a pretty heart pattern in the foam.
2. It requires extra clicking to get on the Internet, so I can easily convince myself that I can't get on the Internet. Which means I stay in Word. Open Word document=writing.
3. They have really cool tables and chairs. For conversation, they usually have some really comfy couches and chairs. For actual work, there are tables with enough space for a computer, a mug, and maybe a stack of papers.
4. White noise. Other people chatting and enjoying themselves is the perfect backdrop to whatever I have blasting in my headphones. It's amazingly helpful.
5. Having made the trip to a place with the specific intention of writing, I actually write. For quite a long time. This is of course helped by the consumption of caffeine.
6. Coffee shops are super cool. It's just a universal truth. People who sit in coffee shops tapping away on computers are cool. So when I am doing it, I feel cool. Which is nice.
7. They have cool art to look at when I need a break. You can also people watch, but it's creepier to do that when you have a computer, because you are obviously supposed to be looking at you.
8. Mostly though, it's the coffee. Coffee is wonderful. Yes, I know I have a problem but give me some credit. I only had one latte. That, my friends, is self-control. Well, that and not wanting to spend the money.

All in all, it was a pretty good morning.

Writer's Block Type: Avoidance

Many, many things have been written about writer's block. Some claim it does not exist, it just a nicer name for laziness. Others claim it is very real and spend a great deal of time trying to figure out how to cure it. I find both of these ideas amusing because the solution is the same: START. WRITING. NOW.

Which is, of course, easier said than done. 

I am of the opinion that writing every day is not necessary (but then I haven't been published, so what the hell do I know) Well, I know that some days writing just has to wait because I have to go to class or study for a test or go to work folding bills to stuff into envelopes. Occasionally, it's for something slightly more fun (ie camping, going up to Table Rock, seeing a movie). But the point is, not writing every day is not the crime some people would have you believe it is. 

But lately, I've been doing everything in my power to avoid sitting down to work on my story (still untitled, which is endlessly frustrating to me). The operative word is that I have been avoiding it. My particular brand of writer's block is avoidance. 

It's not that I don't know what I want to write, or what I want to fix in my story. I have certainly spent a lot of time thinking about my characters and my plot. But I am having trouble with that whole 'sit your ass down and actually type words' bit.

I admit, it might be out of laziness. It is much easier to watch reruns of Sex and the City than it is to figure out how to redo dialogue. But really, if I am being honest with myself, it is because I am afraid. 

Having figured out that is the reason behind my avoidance, I sat down this morning and finished rewriting the opening scene. Is it great? No. Is it better than the original? Oh, dear God, yes. 

http://saraflower.wordpress.com/tag/writing-memes-writer-memes/

I found this amusing, because it's kind of the opposite of my problem. My imaginary friends never shut up....is that a problem?

Bridge Jumping

This summer I have developed a fondness for leaping off of tall things. The first was on the Boise River, when my friends and I jumped off of one of the bridges. To do so requires climbing over this tall-well, tall to me-metal railing and then jumping. I wasn't going to do it the first time and then I told myself to stop being such a chickenshit. Then when I climbed over the railing, I thought about how bad an idea it was. But I was already over and my friends would never have let me live it down if I didn't jump. So I jumped.

I am terrible at estimating how far down the river was but it was pretty far. And except for the fact that the Boise River is always absolutely freezing, it was not bad at all. So I jumped again. Then we did a rope swing farther down. And when we floated the Boise again, we did both again.

When my family went rafting with our neighbors this past weekend on the Payette, the teenagers climbed out of the raft and up the bank to a rock. We then jumped off and swam through the small rapid below.

I am not an adrenaline junkie. At all. But ever since I did a Tarzan jump in Costa Rica (which involved walking out on a bouncing metal platform and being pushed because there was no way I was going to jump of my own free will), jumping off of high things has become less scary. Like I said, I have developed a fondness for it.

There is no guarantee that jumping into a river won't end badly. A lot of things can go wrong and if you suddenly have a desire to go bridge jumping, BE CAREFUL. Don't be stupid. I mean it. People die in rivers. Don't be stupid.

I have no way of knowing if this story will amount to anything. Once, that would have bothered me. I know now what I did not know in junior high. I can write many stories that are not bad, some might even be good, and they will all teach me something. I will learn those lessons. And when I write the story that I think is strong enough to survive in the world, I will know that the bridge I've chose to jump off has deep water beneath it and I will make it back to the surface in one piece.

Revision Challenege

I was planning on writing this post next week after we got back from camping on Tuesday but through an unfortunate series of events, we are not going camping, so here I am. And I am jumping from beginning a story to what happens after it is finished. Or rather, what happens when the first draft is done.

This is called revision. (I should mention that I have not ever gotten past this stage, meaning none of my stories have been published. But anyway.) 

So, I finished the first draft of a story a few weeks ago. I got around to printing it on Thursday, all 205 pages of it (in Microsoft word, 1.5. spacing and 12 point font). I talked about how pretty it was and thumbed through the pages, marveling at this thing that I created. I am sure I was obnoxious.

Then I sat down with a blue pen and started reading it and the marveling came to a screeching halt. It was my intention to go through and only mark large edits. That meant making sure the beginning matched the ending as far as world-building went and adding some scenes I realized I needed. 

One of the tricks to writing a story is to ignore the voice in your head that tells you that you're stupid, that all of your ideas are stupid and choosing to use 'said' for the umpteenth time is stupid. This is the voice that you have to listen to when you revise because it helps make it better. And my voice sounds like this:

Okay, well, you obviously have to take that whole paragraph out, it's just unnecessary. And the reader also doesn't need to know every time that character looks at someone. Get rid of that dialogue tag, there are only two characters talking, how dumb do you think your readers are? And please, please with the similes. That word doesn't need to be there. You should add a scene with these characters here. Oh and-WHAT DO YOU MEAN THAT WAS ONLY ONE PAGE?

The kicker to this is that I am only 35 pages in and I have only marked what needs to be changed. I haven't actually changed anything yet. But I will, because once I do, that voice will be wrong. And I want so desperately for it to be wrong.

No First Sentence is Perfect

Let's talk about beginning. The act of getting off of Reddit, logging out of Facebook, closing Minesweeper, and opening a new document to write, be it a story, a poem or an essay. 

For me, it takes about a week of mulling my idea over while running with my dog before I actually create the new document. You know, after I've done the above mentioned acts about two hundred times. I am sure everyone can relate to the allure of procrastination. Usually, it is related to not wanting to do something like homework or some other equally heinous activity. But this is writing for fun. So, why do some writers (myself included) do everything they can to avoid beginning a new project?

Because there is nothing more intimidating than that flashing cursor on a white page. The moment you commit words to that page, it doesn't match what you have in your head. (At least that's how I think it works for most of us. If you're not among us mortals, just be quiet and go write your perfect first draft. No one likes you.)

But here's what gets me to start typing that first terrible sentence time after time: I DON'T HAVE TO KEEP IT! When I was younger (seventh grade-ish) I had this idea that I could not ever change the beginning. In high school, learning how to write essays for the AP tests only reinforced this idea. In that case, it was a little more true because (for those of you who don't know) you have to write it in pen by hand and they don't let you use white out. 

Obviously, that is not true. There is one beginning I rewrote four times before it did what I wanted it to do. Surprise surprise, this actually applies to all writing. *mind blown*. 

Whatever you are avoiding writing, stop. Just write the damn thing.

A Slightly Longer Introduction

When you go to college, it seems like for the first two weeks all you say is your name, your major and where you are from. I said Elizabeth, English and psychology, and Idaho. Many people correctly made the jump between 'English major' to 'writer'. Then they got this look in their eye, like my dog does when we try to give her eggs-which she hates. 

This is what I imagine people in general think when I say I am a writer:

You know lots of big words and like to use them. You are a grammar Nazi and love punctuation. You are addicted to caffeine. You possess superhuman abilities to type 5,000 words in a single sitting and enjoy it whereas I can barely scrape together a 2,000 word essay the night before it's due. You stay up really late typing for fun. You actually enjoy Jane Eyre, Edgar Allen Poe, and William Faulkner. 

Well. You get the idea. I should start off with what is outright not true about those (perceived) ideas.

I am not a big fan of any of the above authors. I know, I know. What girl doesn't like Pride and Prejudice? But for the love of God, Jane, I would love to introduce you to a period. You and commas are in desperate need of a divorce. I also do not like to write late, late at night because when I get too tired I start typing things like "and then Daniel called her stupid" which is fine except that I want Daniel to rage at her for forgetting their son at daycare. So 'stupid' doesn't quite cut it and it's time for me to go to bed. On a side note, one of my big tells for when I am too tired is when I start typing 'hesistitation.' I am aware that is not a word. I am also nowhere near as articulate in real life as I am on paper for two reasons. One: I have a backspace key when I write. Two: no one likes someone who says words like scintillating in real life unless they are being very ironic.

This is what it is really like, for me at least. I love Shakespeare and Tolstoy but I also love J.K. Rowling and John Green and Markus Zusak. Usually when I sit down to write a story (read: story NOT essay) I write around 2,000 words. The most I've written in a day is close to 7,000 but that was an exception. I am not superhuman: after said writing marathon, the tendons in my arms ached. (I am also now certain I will get carpal tunnel). I do love punctuation and grammar, because when they're there, no one notices them. I am currently involved in a lengthy love affair with coffee. 

I have a feeling this has gotten long-winded, so I will end there but I hope you get the idea. 

Note: I will not usually post twice in one day and I will try to make my posts much shorter than this in general. Please don't leave me alone, dear reader(s). If you go, it'll be like I am talking to myself.

Again.

Page One

Why on earth am I writing this?

That is the question that bounced around my head for a good ten minutes once I actually sat down at my computer to give this whole blogging thing a try. I have come up with a lot of reasons why I shouldn't try but I am going to do it anyway. 

There are two good reasons I have come up with to answer that question that I am hoping will be good reasons for you too, dear reader, if you are out there. First is that I have spent a great deal of time thinking about writing and how to do it. I decided I might as well write it down somewhere and a blog is as good a place as any. The second is that I have noticed when I tell people I am a writer, they either look at me as if I have something green between my teeth or ask me how/why I can voluntarily submit myself to do something most of the world despises. 

I can't do anything about the former reaction and answering the how/why I write is such a complex, confusing, maddening answer that it does not fit into conversation at dinner parties. Not that I go to dinner parties but if I did, the answer wouldn't definitely belong there. So that is why I am going to write these blog posts. I have no clue how many of you will actually be interested enough to keep reading but I hope if you do, you learn a little more about us crazies who call ourselves writers.

It is my opinion that the beginning of a story is the hardest part (except for the middle, the end, the revising, or whichever sentence I am struggling with at the moment). The first page can certainly feel the longest, unless you've been struck by the Magical Madness of Inspiration and are typing so fast you misspell words like 'must' and 'the'. Both of which, yes, I have done. But every story starts off with that blinking cursor on the blank page. There is nowhere for those page numbers and word count to go but up.