bbc 100 novels meme: ~the challenge~

Because I have nothing better to do. Quite a few of these I've already read, but I will read them again. For science. Anyway, BBC is all, most people will only read six of these 100. I am going to read all of them. It's also related to the 101 things in 1001 days (originally I wanted to do Time Magazine's list, but this one is better, so).

101 things in 1001 days

Because, liek, everyone else is doing it. :3

100 random facts about me~

Because like, everyone else is doing it. Like.

on dreams (this time the stupid figurative kind)

I can't be bothered posting this on wordpress. lulz. sup blogger.

Okay, here's something that's been bothering me...well I suppose it's always been in the back of my mind, but only now has it been more at the forefront, the black cloud of sorts.

I'm doing a psychology degree. I love psychology. I always have. In high school I researched it all by my lonesome, because I found it so interesting. In my last year of high school, my interests in uni majors bounced everywhere - but something I realize now is that all of them - nurse, psychologist, teacher - are...specific, I suppose. We need more nurses, and more teachers, and more psychologists, too. I guess I mean that they're in industries, health and education specifically.

Bear with me as we go into gibberish territory. I write. I write in my head constantly, I write on the bus, at home, when I should be doing assignments. I always have. It's what keeps me sane (or 'keeps me insane', which might explain a fair bit). I don't care that I've never been published, or that the people least interested in last year's Nanowrimo adventure were members of my family, who still look confused when I mention 'writing' and why I would possibly waste my time on such a thing.

hello i have moved

earlystar.wordpress.com

on dreams. the literal kind, not the unlikely aspirations.

Last night I had pretty much the greatest dream in the universe. I was at some kind of place with a bigass stage, and a crowd of hundreds was chillbangin'. Why, you ask? Because I am cash, and apparently the lead in a musical. So I took the stage first as a principal - the musical was about a high school musical (BOOM) - and the crowd lol'd heartily at my Kiwi accent. Then I ran backstage pulled on a ball gown and in a disconcertingly decent voice led a song about coffee. Except I ran out at the wrong time, and had to play it off all cool while my less talented co-star was all "BITCH WHAT ARE YOU DOING."

the long, long process of writing a novel.

Sup? Alright, so I won NanoWrimo last year at just over 50k. Possibly the hardest thing I've ever done in my life - especially when my computer pooped itself, and the first 8k vanished five days into the competition, meaning I had to rewrite it all. So technically, it was like 58k.

I kissed a zombie and I liked it (jk)

Some of the best and worst of supernatural/dystopic YA

So I have a ton of ebooks I haven't got around to reading. One of them is Adam Selzer's I Kissed a Zombie, and I Liked It. Apparently it's supposed to be satire, but because my face looked like D: the whole time, idk if it worked. It's about an 18-year-old chick called Alley (like seedy back alley) who falls in love with a pale, mysterious dude called Doug. Anyway, turns out he's a zombie, who was brought back to life to work in the Megamart store chain, and now keeps himself...er...alive by drinking embalming fluid every four hours. Om nom nom nom

Anyway...er...moving on. I wanted to make a sort of general post on YA at the moment, especially the paranormal and dystopic genres which are hardcore full right now.

sup blogger?

Let's do this~

hello

Hello :3

I doubt many people will ever see this, so I don't see much of a point in a huge introductory post. And that's what the about page is for, I guess. Anyway. Let's get straight into it.

I'll go with what I know best, which is writing. The fictional kind - not so fond of non-fiction at the moment. In my uni course we're trying to learn the APA format, in general and for an upcoming formatting assignment. (It's due in less than two weeks and I haven't started it). It's difficult and fiddly and has all these stupid technicalities, and if you miss a bracket or a comma or something, you'll get owned by having a bunch of marks taken off. That sort of thing bothers me - why can't things be looser? The answer, it's a professional format, and I suppose it would be cool if my assignments were, you know, legible.

In the meantime, I've outlined 18 scenes (and written about 11 of them) on a new novel. Because of my sucky attention span, I can never stay on one story for long; I'll go full steam on it and sort of flounder around for a month, then it's unbearably boring to me and my brain drifts off elsewhere. So in the case of this one - I have no idea what I'm calling it so let's say, er, Candy - close enough - I'm trying to avoid that. I noticed when my computer was unusable and I had to handwrite everything, I worked a lot better when I took notes/outlined stories first.

So I'm taking advantage of this discovery of sorts - scribbling out the scene/chapter outlines for Candy, because for some reason my brain works better like that. I never do this at home for some reason, always in lecture breaks or on the bus. Then I get home, convert it into a spreadsheet on XMind that is pretty cash if I do so myself and actually write the scenes out, adding bits and pieces in when I feel like it. It took a long ass time, but I finally figured out an outlining plan that worked for me, sort of.

I do want to finish something concrete. Maybe I'll start a short story, or a novella, because I haven't really tried my hand at those on a serious level. But I do want something finished. I know the odds are incredibly slim, especially in a country with so very few literary agents (and most not taking submissions, anyway, or disinterested in the young adult genre which is very full right now) - but who cares? Sometimes it's sort of disheartening, if I write a really stupid scene or want to headdesk at my own dimwit characters, but it's always worth it. I don't choose to write; it's just something I do. I'm fairly prolific in terms of word count but how much of that is actually salvageable into a decent draft?

I guess we'll see. I want the outline for Candy finished in the next week, and hopefully the damn first draft done by mid-semester break which is 2-3 weeks away. Insane? Probably. But that's just how I roll.