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Obviously, this is a problem. I'm working on it, but it's not easy. I wouldn't really be able to explain why, either. It's definitely not a lack of motivation. A lot of the times, I'm teeming with ideas, but I just don't write. Trust me, if that's weird for you to read, it's even weirder for me to experience.
But the questions is for you. How often do you write? Do you know why you write certain times and why you don't at others?
What motivates you to write?
Whoa, it's actually Tuesday this time! Hahaha. This is also an excerpt from Chapter 1, like the last one, and it almost picks up where it left off, but I left out the exciting stuff. Lol. Totally backward, I know, but here you go!
Continue Reading“Callie?”
A voice sounded and then feet started running toward her, but she didn’t move. There was no danger of anything happening now, and putting her cold hands on her face was the only thing keeping her awake.
“Callie... what are you doing?” The voice sounded like it was right next to her now, and the footsteps stopped.
“What does it look like I’m doing, Anselm?” She said, still trying to catch her breath. “I’m sitting in the snow!”
“Well I can see that…” He said, circling her body. “What I meant was… what were you doing running for your life out of the forest just now?
Without notice, Callie pulled herself up out of the snow and started walking away from Anselm.
“Wow, I can't believe you,” She said, trying to walk as fast as her legs would let her. They felt flimsy under the weight of her body. "You basically force me to go in there for you, and you're asking me what I was doing?"
"Oh, so you actually did it?" He said, sounding surprised. "What did you find?""Eh, it's not really important," she said. "But something crazy just happened in there Anselm... something... unreal."
"Who-o-o-a... what was it?"
"Guess you'll just have to wait," she said, laughing.
“Come on, Callie, you tell me everything,” He said, increasing his pace to keep up with her. His strides were much longer given the size of his legs in comparison to Callie’s.
“Well… as far as you know,” she said. A small smirk crept onto her face.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Anselm said. He sounded upset, but Callie knew that it wouldn’t last.
She ignored his last comment and stopped. She looked straight at him with a stern look on her face. “All right, Anselm… I’ll tell you.”
“Oh, thank you,” he said. A sigh escaped from his mouth and his expression changed from vexed to satisfied.
“After we get off work for the day,” she said, walking again.
“What!?” He said, struggling. “But that’s hours from now! And I haven't even picked any berries yet...”
“If I tell you, I’m gonna have to tell Joelle, so I might as well just wait and tell you both at the same time.”
“All right, fine…” Anselm said sounding defeated.
“Actually, I should probably tell Roger too, and he doesn’t get back until tonight…” Callie said.
“Are you serious?”
“Aww, Anselm, cheer up, I was just joking with you,” Callie said, shaking her head. “Joelle went out early this morning, so she'll probably get to go to lunch by the time we get back to Athalka. Let’s see if she’s at the café. I can tell you both there.”
I'm am in an enormous slump right now. It's draining me from the coooreee. I want to slash it with an axe, but I don't think I'm lucky enough to receive that honor. Definitely not that privileged.
I'm starting to wonder whether or not I'm actually a good writer, or just a good story-teller. That's even a stretch. I wouldn't really say that I'm a good anything. It's just strange to me, because most times, I know exactly what's going to happen, yet I sit there with the word document open and that little cursor blinking away. That's all it ever does. It's like it's laughing at me or something.
So what's really causing this sudden lack of ability to write? I honestly can't answer that. All I know, is that I get this way sometimes. That document just looks like a bunch of words that I stringed together. And I don't even know why.
Luckily it's just a phase, but still, it lingers for far too long, in my opinion. Hopefully this next week will see the death of it.
BECAUSE IT'S MAKIN' MEH ANGREH.
/rant post.
=]
So, it's a little later than expected, but it's still February, so I think I'll be okay! I don't know, haha. I figure, since this is the first teaser I've ever done, I'll give you guys a glimpse at the beginning of the book, because anything else I post seems to confuse you. Lol. I don't even know if this is the right format, but here goes! Also, I like pictures.
"Her feet flew in front of her as she dashed through the brush of the forest floor. Her bare legs scraped against the thick bristle of the growth, but the grating on her legs and the blood dripping from her wounds was not enough to distract her.
She peered into the dark snow-covered canopy above, making sure to look back at her destination to avoid colliding into a tree, but she saw nothing. She shook her head, realizing that she still had a ways to go, and increased her pace by a little.
Even though her feet were making a substantial amount of noise against the ground and fallen branches that continued to snap under her weight, she could sense that something was watching her, and she suspected that something probably was. She heard a loud cracking noise from behind her, and almost instantaneously, she turned her head. She couldn’t stop it. Her body was moving in a way that she almost couldn’t control. Her head wasn’t turned long enough to catch more than a small glimpse of whatever was chasing her, and the forest was dark from the thick awning that the trees produced. Her strides became longer and they accelerated to a particularly swift fear-driven pace.
She continued to run even though her breath was beginning to shorten and her legs beginning to tire. Her chest was heaving, but she glanced once more up into the canopy, and noticed what she had been looking for. She saw a large break in the otherwise overgrown roof of the trees and knew that she was close. She clenched her fist in front of her chest, gasping for breath as she continued to run even faster than before. She could see the opening of the forest just a few feet in front of her, but she wasn’t fast enough.
She couldn’t have been more than fifty feet away when something vaulted in her line of direction. The light from the snowy day outside of the forest produced a silhouette of the creature, but she did not recognize what it was. It stood there, as if it were staring at her, moving its limbs all the time. Its legs looked like a thick cloth waving in the wind, only backward since they were holding the creature up. The arms were much the same, and she couldn’t even spot anything that resembled a head, not in the dark, at least."
So, I basically need to stop being a lazy person and start blogging more. Because I realized that out of all the twifities, you guys all probably know the least about me out of everybody. That's just kind of how I am, I guess. I don't know if that's negative or positive or neutral or whatever.
Today, however, is a good day indeed, haha. I'm feeling under the weather just a little, but that's not gonna stop me from being happy, especially when I receive an award from another twiftie.
I guess I should follow-suit and do my ten things, so here goes.
- Writing. Okay, that's totally cliche, but it's like... what do you expect! I don't know if I ever feel better than when I write something that I can be proud of. Not like that happens often, but still!
- Music. I really wonder sometimes whether I would rather be blind or deaf, and I've found that's it's an absurdly hard question to answer. God forbid I would ever have to choose... because music is an absolute necessity in life, even if you don't realize, haha.
- Movies. Now I don't enjoy the fact that TV rots your brain and everything, but I think that a really good movie with a life lesson can be just as valuable to people as books, especially since they're a quicker way to get things across. Okay, well maybe not AS valuable as books - but still, there's an art to film-making that's really amazing to me.
- Reading. I feel bad; I definitely do not do as much reading as I should. I'm a writer, so I shouldn't expect people to read my book if I'm not going to do the same. I'm one of those patience people; if I can't get something done right away, I basically write it off and never come back. Recently though, I've been setting aside time for myself to read, and it is really one of the most enjoyable things there is.
- Like a Star. I don't think I've ever been more in love with a song.
- Fantasy. I think fantasy is one of those things where, you either understand it or you don't. Which is really sad because, while magic is amazing and everything, that's not all that fantasy is, and whenever I hear some random Joe in my school bashing my genre... I get a little indignant.
- Actually Blogging. The feeling I get when I actually blog is kind of the feeling I get when I finish a chapter and click on the big red X on the top of the document. It's really satisfying. Just a feeling of... completion. I don't know. Like it's all not a never-ending process. There are oases along the way.
- Health. You don't really appreciate it when it's there, but when it's gone you're like, "WHY!!!?"
- Cookies and Cream anything. There is ice cream sitting in the freezer right now and I am about to jump off a cliff because I can't eat it. THAT'S HOW EXTREME IT IS.
- Absolute Write. Unfortunately, I don't really have time to get on AW every day, but when I do, it's always a better day. I can't believe how much it has helped me as a writer even though I'm hardly active and have only been around for a little under a year. This includes you twifties! TWFT is like the only thread I post in, hahaha. =]
So, now I pass the award on? Um... I would definitely pass it on to Bailey at Abyss, but giving it back to the person who sent it to you is a little redundant, isn't it? You definitely deserve it though.
I guess I have two people in mind at this point.
Karla, over at Creative Blossoms, and Emilia, at punk writer kid.
Both of you guys are really, really great writers and I know you're going to make it one day. We all will.
=]
The other day I had like a miniature mental breakdown because of what someone said to me online on a site called Gaiaonline. I know, sounds pretty pathetic, but seriously, it has impacted my life in a really, really nice way.
Basically what the person told me was that I try to hard to seem like I don't care. She was right too. I try WAY too hard sometimes. I don't even know why I try so hard. Is it to impress someone, or what? I guess it was, but now I can't be sure.
That night, I basically told myself that I was going to speak out for what I believe in, essentially, and stop letting people influence how I want to behave. It's not like I'm going to be rude to someone who deserves to be bitched out, but in the general sense of the phrase, I really am going to "do what I want, when I want." I have been since then, and it's working out pretty well. You do feel bad sometimes because people don't necessarily always like the decisions you make, but that's not on your conscious if you're not doing anything bad.
All right, to the purpose of the blog post, haha. Umm...
Do you think that you're the kind of person that's less likely to voice your concerns because you're afraid of someone putting you down, or are you likely to speak for yourself?
I'm not gonna lie to myself, or you, and say that it's easy. It's not. And I do fail sometimes, but just the fact that I'm trying and that I'm being myself in the process is reassuring.
Is it for you? Continue Reading
So, the other day, I was reading around Absolute Write, like I do sometimes when none of the other Twifties are online, and I stumbled upon something that troubled me pretty greatly. With all the excitement about actually making headway on the writing of my book, I forgot that, at some point, I'm going to have to start querying. You know, appeal to people other than myself.
Basically what I discovered was that I'm not supposed to be writing a series in four seperate parts, I'm supposed to be writing a stand-alone novel that has series potential. Immediately my heart sank a little and I was kind of discouraged. I mean, I've been planning this series for quite some time now, and especially in the first book, I was planning quite the cliffhanger ending. I don't know how much people like cliffhangers in the first place, but it was going to be pretty cool, let me tell ya.
I thought a bit about it after talking to some of the twifties and realized that I wouldn't have to change my book that much. I would just basically have to add some sort of story arc or arcs that could be resolved in the first book so that I would be able to market the thing.
The more I think about it though, the more it upsets me. I don't want to change my book just because a publisher or an editor wants a stand-alone novel as opposed to a series. Somehow, that just seems cruel to me. I know I'm probably over-reacting, but it's something I can't control, not this soon.
I also realize that, of course, people need to see at least some sort of resolution at the end of the first novel. And they will, I'm certain of that much. The book wouldn't really end if nothing was resolved, but having a cliffhanger ending doesn't really compute with "series-potential".
All right, this is a rant, but I guess what I'm asking is, do you agree with this? Do you understand it?
What's your opinion on the whole matter? I know most of you aren't writing series in the first place, but still, I should think that maybe in the future you will. Then again, I could be wrong. Either way... tell me what you think!
Continue Reading
About Me
- Mikey
- I'm seventeen, living in Colorado. An aspiring writer. I try but fail most times. I'd like to think I pick myself up and keep going though. I have a fetish for the human spirit and abuse it as much as I can in my stories just to show how strong people can be. Lame, I know. I really like Imogen Heap, Lost, Grilled Cheese, Fantasy in general, and movies. I want to learn more about directing, producing, acting, and all that jazz eventually.