Bits and Pieces: April Edition

Picture/Photo Find:

Something I Did:

Yesterday I traveled to Hays, Kansas, for my last ever robotics competition. Because I'm fifteen, I have outgrown the welcome of the FLL robotics team, and so I can't compete next year.

Being with my friends all day definitely kept me from feeling too nostalgic, but at the end of the day, as they dropped me off at my house, I couldn't help but feel a little sad (also, I was emotionally compromised because we had just been watching the saddest part of Life of Pi, when my friend Erin paused it to dump me off).

One of the best parts of the tournaments is that you are surrounded, literally surrounded, by geeks and nerds alike. They crush you with their nerd-dom, something that is both familiar and comforting. You can talk about Loki freely with a group of people who understand his character development. You can show people your Figment page because they actually know what Figment is and are interested in reading your stuff. Really, it was great.

I plan to help my robotics coach next year and maybe attend the competitions with them, but it won't be the same--not only because I won't be part of the team, but also because I won't be competing. I'll be helping.

There's a certain part to growing up that really slays me, and it's that the bigger you grow the more responsible of things you are, and the less fun things you get to do.

A Writer Thing:

The short story: I submitted my first story o a lit mag.

The elongated story: After shuffling my feet and dreaming of the days when I would finally grow some balls and write a cover letter so I could send some short stories out to literary magazines, I finally took the initiative, sat down, and wrote it.

Then, I carefully submitted a short story to a small, online magazine called Lightning Cake.

Their description:

Lightning Cake is a tiny zine of illustrated speculative flash fiction. New electrifying bites published weekly. Cut yourself a slice and chomp in.

I thought it sounded like just my cup of tea, so I submitted. Plus, it does not hurt in the least that I know the editor from Figment, and I am very comfortable submitting my stuff to her. It has been a learning experience, and even when I get rejected I will be grateful for the experience.

A Song for Your Ears:

You may remember a few months ago in this one Bits and Pieces post, where I told you that I watched a lot of these anime movies by a guy named Hayao Miyazaki. Hoping to gain yet another layer from these movies, I started listening to the scores from them.

My favorite is from Howl's Moving Castle. Have a listen; I like the violin parts most of all, because they move and take the melody, but I think the piano bits are especially breathtaking. 

What am I Doing Tonight?

Well, tonight is my high school's prom. My sister Hope will be going with her boyfriend (also known by close friends as "Rhett"), and I will be staying at home, dreaming of the day when I will have a boyfriend--or at least a friend--to attend with. 

Perhaps I will do some reading.  

Easter at my Grandparent's

This is the first time I have ever blogged away from home. Usually, when there's something interesting going on worth blogging about and I'm away, there almost always isn't any wifi. I'm at my grandparent's house, tucked under the layers and layers of sheets that my Grandma insists there be on every single bed, and now that I'm winding down I figured now is a perfect time to post what I've been up to.

Today I woke up very early for a Saturday, went and milked the goats, and when I came back I lazed around and read some of The Host again (Hope and I went and saw the movie last night). At around two I finally started packing, and then after I stalled them for a bit over whether or not we should take the dogs with us, we were off on the road.

While driving the two-and-a-half hours to get to my grandparent's house, I got on my laptop and made my little sisters outline a story with me. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Ainsley, what should my girl main character's name be?

Ainsley: Um... [pause] Janet.

Me: I'm not naming my main character Janet.

Ainsley: Okay, um... Margaret?

Me: [types it into the outline] Good! Where does she live?

Elizabeth [joining in]: She should live in a shoe.

Ainsley: Yeah, a shoe! [giggles profusely]

Me: She's not living in a shoe. Do you know how predictable that is?

Elizabeth: Fine. A Victorian. But it has to be green.

Me: [types in information] That's gold. 

 Eventually we came up with this story about a girl who works at a fruit stand, with eyes that can stare into your soul, who falls in love with this boy whose father was killed in a freak tiger accident at the zoo, and who is ultimately afraid of animals because he believes they're going to change into bloodthirsty killers and eat hit also.

I started speaking like Lumpy Space Princess off of Adventure Time after a while while outlining, which was hugely successful and got my sisters and giggly and full of energy. Then I got bored with outlining and decided to take a nap. 

When I woke up we were at our grandparent's house. It's a quaint house, with white siding and more irises than you can count growing in various spots around the yard. My grandparents are getting frail in their old age, and so they have this wheelchair ramp-thing that takes up half the sidewalk, but is fun to walk up. 

My parents decided to take us to a movie at the local theater; the movie was The Croods. So we ate some sandwiches and went to the theater, which was packed with little kids all chattering about this cartoon show that I love called Gravity Falls. I wanted to join in so badly, but I refrained and talked to my sisters about other things while Hope and my brother Noah got popcorn. 

The movie was really good, and if you have the chance to see it you definitely should.

 I helped Grandma make up beds when we got back, and then I changed into my pajamas and brought out my computer to write this blog post. Tomorrow is Easter Sunday, so I will be at church in the morning in a brand new dress with a color scheme that matches the rest of my family's--this year the color scheme is purple and green. It's good to be spending Easter here with my family, and I'm sure tomorrow will be fun. 

Happy Easter!

Bits and Pieces: February

Picture/ Photo Find:

Something I Did:

 I watched a bunch of Hayao Miyazaki films over the past few weeks. Back at a camp  last November, I met someone who was really into Japanese culture/ anime (she'd even spent a month in Japan that past summer). She had this pack of cards that we played with, and they had these anime characters on it from a movie that I sort of recognized but didn't know anything about. 

She explained that the movie was called Spirited Away, and that it was her favorite.

Back when I was six or seven my mom brought home one of Miyazaki's films called My Neighbor Totoro, and I really liked it. So I had a recollection that those movies weren't bad, and I wanted to watch another one.

Anyway, turns out Hope's boyfriend happens to own a lot of Miyazaki films, including Spirited Away. I borrowed the movie from him and watched it the other day. Though it was definitely weird, I really liked it all the same. 

leejayjee.tumblr.com

I went back to Rhett's house the next day and borrowed Kiki's Delivery Service, Howl's Moving Castle, Ponyo, and My Neighbor Totoro.

One thing I really like about every one of his movies is how creative and original the plots are. For example, Howl's Moving Castle is about a girl named Sophie who gets turned into an old lady, becomes a housekeeper for a magician named Howl in a moving castle, and befriends a talking fire, a spy dog, a cursed prince, and the very witch who turned her into an old lady in the first place. Of course, Sophie doesn't stay old, and the way that it's handled is very good.

It's really hard to choose a favorite out of all of them, because there are aspects of every film that I adore. So I guess I'll just leave it at that. 

A Writer Thing:

I took nearly a month long hiatus during January. It wasn't planned or anything, I just didn't really feel like writing--call me lazy. I'm ready to return now, and so this month (though it's half over), I definitely plan to cover some ground on Mermaidens, as well as now-untitled-redraft of The Glass Girl.

I'm not going to make it a goal, or announce anything, because when I do the goal usually doesn't end up getting accomplished and I feel like a failure. So for now it's just word of mouth. 

Horse-ly Horse:

 Nearly a month ago, in January, Peso injured himself.

Before surgery.

We keep our goats in the pen next to his, and we feed them alfalfa so that their milk will taste good. Peso enjoys alfalfa too, and so after I finished milking and left he tried to reach over the fence for it, and ended up kicking the fence down. That would be fine, except that when he tried to go through the fence, he got stuck between the barn wall and the fence, and ended up cutting his side pretty badly. 

 Several vet calls, surgery, some trials involving Peso refusing to eat his pain-killer, and daily hose-downs later, Peso has returned to his normal personality. Of course, it will be a few months yet before he will be completely healed, but we're definitely lucky that it didn't turn out worse than it did.

After surgery

Song I Can't Stop Listening To:

"Lego House", by Ed Sheeran

New Writing Projects (ish).

*WARNING: The following content is full of insufferable whining and jerky behavior. I tried to put all the worst parts in the footnotes, but I failed. BE WARNED AND PROCEED WITH CAUTION*

So back in April I wrote a post on this blog about all of the stories that I was currently working on. Only one of those books is currently still on my work list, and so I thought I'd update it a bit, just so you're in the loop. Because I love all of you guys.

But before I begin, I'll just start right off and say that I didn't crop the photos like in the last post, because I post these stories on Figment and I can just crop them there, without the photos becoming pixelated and grainy--if that makes any sense.

The quotes underneath the covers are from the synopses-es found on my Figment page.

1. The Glass Girl

The font used are Bell MT and Sunshine in my Soul.

The world has turned to glass. Everything is smooth, colors pinks and whites and lavenders. Lea collects small people, making terrariums for them back at her house.

This is my Camp NaNo project, and it's the story of a girl (and also a boy) who live in the world after it's all turned to glass. It's set in Topeka, Kansas (with a smattering of Colorado Springs), because I've been to both places and so the setting is natural to me.*

In this novel there are skeletons and magic and tea and the color orange, automatons, miniature people, and also a fair amount of reading. 

I think this book has a lot of potential--more potential, than, say, that awful book I wrote last year that was a dystopian. **

I also think this book is odd, to say the least. It's definitely different (as in, the plain girl does not fall in love with any hot, perfect guys), and so I'm wondering if it will ever be published. I'm not willing to make it any more boring than it already is--it's set in Kansas, land of the flat and dry--and so maybe I'll have to self publish it or something. But I'd rather not do that, and so I'm leaning on the traditional way.

Either way, I want to see this baby in print. Hardcover form, please.

2. Mermaidens

The font used is Bell MT.

Living in the seaside town of Klarine, there is a girl named Charlotte, and she holds a deep secret: she is a mermaid.

Yes, I was working on this book in the last post I made about my current works in progress, except for the fact that the plot has changed so dramatically from the last draft you couldn't recognize the similarities in it (also, the cover changed. Here's a gold star for noticing!). I will now list quite a few things that went wrong while writing the first 8K words of the first draft.

• The twin sisters were hard to write, even though they've sort of remained in the current draft. But they did seem to hate each other before I scrapped them up. Plus, they were so different from each other. One was shy and cried a lot (my main character) and the other was outgoing, snarky, and downright rude. 
• On the topic of my main character, I'd like to add that she wasn't strong enough to carry the story on her shoulders. She was far too fragile, and in about the fifth chapter, I broke her (there will  now be a future blog post on how you can break your characters). Her name was Leila, if that gives you a hint as to her character.
• Too much happened in too little time. 
• The pacing was terrible. 

And now, a list of things that stayed the same throughout:

• Calvin's name--and, for the most part, his character. Only, he's considered insane by everyone... except he actually isn't.
• Minos, the big black draft horse. 
• Water. There's definitely water, somewhere. 

 

3. The Sheep Watch

The font used is Garamond.

Leonard watches for wolves one night while tending to his sheep. But when he hears a noise in the apple orchard, he follows it and meets the incredible Penny Keaton.

The Sheep Watch is a contest entry for the Defy the Dark contest, and it's about a boy named Leonard who falls asleep while watching his flock of sheep one night, and when he wakes up he meets this girl named Penny, who is intentionally a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (a pretty, young, perfect girl who is put into the story to alter the course of a man's life. See: Margo in Paper Towns and Clarisse in Fahrenheit 451).

It's probably one of the lighter things I've written; the death count tolls in at only one victim! A huge success!***

Plus, it's finished. So I'm not exactly working on it anymore. I figured I'd just announce that it exists or something. 

Footnotes:

* Mom, you may remember that I paid an awful lot of time trying to spot the top of the Capitol building while passing through Topeka on our way to the book signing. I consider this "novel research." I've noticed that there are a lot of trees in that city, though--trees that I sort of forgot about while writing the first 30K words. REVISION TIME.

** And speaking of dystopian... this new book is not one of those. Not. Yes, it is, for the most part a post-apocalyptic novel. But it does not take place in the future, and there aren't any guns or knives or swords in it--and there is also no instance where an incredibly hot boy falls in love with an average, plain girl *cough cough Divergent and Delirium cough cough*.

*** Of course, this sentence has led to a ten-minute long math problem while I deduce how many characters I kill per story, on average. The grand total: 5.3. I had to guesstimate for my novels that I haven't finished yet, but I believe the number is pretty accurate.

The Lawrence Book Signing.

I don't think I've mentioned I was going to do this on the blog yet, but I attended a book signing a few days ago in Lawrence. It was for The Merry Sisters of Fate--aka, Maggie Stiefvater, Tessa Gratton, and Brenna Yovanoff. They were releasing a new book called The Curiosities, and it is basically an anthology of short stories. You can check out their work here. 

My mom graciously agreed to drive me six hours to the event, for which I'm very grateful. At the signing there were quite a few girls there, and a few sort of like me--namely, they want to be published authors.

During the question portion of the event I got to ask them a couple of questions (and one of which was on my mind since I finished The Scorpio Races last November), which was awesome. What I liked most about it--aside from the fact that they defaced one of Jackson Pearce's books for me--was the fact that they were normal, and appearance-wise they looked just like authors should look, in my opinion: two or three years behind on fashion trends and odd looking. 

Well, alright, two of them fit that category. Maggie was pretty cool. 

But they were talking about stuff I'd only discussed with some of my internet friends! There were NaNoWriMo people there in the audience and it was awesome. We talked about Writers' Block and query letters and character building and settings and plot and everything. My head's still reeling from it. 

This is me looking sufficiently awkward with her.

I was shaking while in line  for the signing part. I mean, they were real authors. Two of them had made the NYT Bestsellers list. One of them had written some of my favorite books. And I met them.

Definitely worth a six hour drive.

On Writing and Hair Dye.

Sorry for the lack of updates, guys. Things haven't really been very interesting around here. I've been writing, and holing up in my room, mostly. And despite the fact that I've been writing so frequently, I'm only at 20K words right now. 

I technically wrote the ending to my book today. My story was crawling along so slowly about a week ago, and so I skipped ahead to past the climax and started writing from there. It really sped up the process, and gave me something to write about, though unfortunately, I reached the end today. Like, I finished the story and put that cheesy 'THE END' at the end. I was a bit sad, even though I'm not even finished yet.

I learned a lot about my characters and plot my skipping ahead, though.

By now I've accepted the fact that I'm not reaching 50K by the end of the month. Instead, I'm aiming for a good 30K. And I'll be happy.

Speaking of happy. I dyed my hair last night.

Excuse the awkward photo. I'd just woken up.

It turned out more red than I expected, but I still really like it. So now I'm glad I actually did it.

So yes.

Bits and Pieces: August.

Picture/ Photo Find:

Something I Did:

I actually haven't done anything noteworthy recently. I've been writing a lot (obviously) and I've been 'hanging out' with a friend. Today I went to the next city over from my small town with her and we bought chicken feed.

While there we went to IHOP, where I ate the worst meal of my life. Seriously. If you're ever there, *do not* order the Garden Crepes. You will sincerely regret it. 

I also started reading Fahrenheit 451. It's good so far... but I sort of lost it (or someone stole it. Hmm). One minute it was sitting next to my bed in a stack of other books, and the next it was mysteriously missing. Maybe my brother is reading it. 

A Writer Thing:

I've discovered just how hard it is to move your story forward when all there is to work off of is a few miniature people, some cans of green beans, and a glass world. Also a fully-stocked library, but it would sort of feel like cheating describing each and every novel that passes through one of my character's hands.

Also, I believe I'm actually teaching history, geography, and science lessons in my story. I'm not sure, though. I like to throw in fun facts, but then the fun facts build into something entirely different.

Song I Love:

I'm going to end this post right now because I have to go write 1.6K words. Also, I'm sorry I'm neglecting you. I promise to write at least three more posts this month, if not more.

Rambling.

I wrote something today. I also wrote something yesterday. I think my mom might start to get annoyed by my time on the computer, and not outside or something. 

I was struggling yesterday, and I'm also struggling today. I love my new story idea, but spur-of-the-moment a new character poked his head in and I had to create a backstory for him. What can I say? He was charming. He wore the most unfortunate trench coat, tattered and frayed on the bottom hem. He told me that he was essential to the storyline, and so I vowed to both fix his horrible fashion sense and his broken heart.

I'm a crazy loon, aren't I? Maybe I need to go to public school, so I can start talking to real people. 

... Or maybe I'll just stay home all day and read (also math and other boring things like that). Also write. 

I don't know what I'll do, though. I need to make my mind up by Thursday. Any suggestions? I'd like to hear them!

Penguins Don't Let Their Plots Simmer.

It's my 92th post, and I feel that we know each other well enough for me to finally show you what I actually write about. All of my following works are fiction, and the covers were made by me (except for the last one. That one was designed by the amazing Fena).

1. Mermaidens.

 

Believe me when I tell you that I just spent the past ten minutes making this cover, specifically for this post. So I expect you to feel like a privileged blog reader, okay? Because I like to spend my time entertaining you. 

......

Also, I just needed a cover for it.

So anyway, this story is about two twin sisters, whose mother was killed by mermaids when they were younger--and their father runs the country they live in.  And there is a slight infestation of she-fish living in the lakes and streams around the country, but the dad blatantly ignores it, in favor of a new healthcare bill. 

There's also a boy named Calvin, who has a pretty decent role in the book. 

Remember when I said in the last few paragraphs that the country has a slight pest problem? Well, they kill young women. And Calvin's job is fishing these girl's bodies out of the lakes. Creepy, I know, but I just love it.

He also has a big black horse named Minos--which makes me like Calvin slightly more.

2. Space Girls

I definitely (take note of how I spelled that) love this storyline--but if I didn't love it, I wouldn't continue writing, would I? I don't think I would. There are quite a few things in this world that I finish, and a story I don't enjoy writing in my free time sadly isn't one of them.

This novel is about three girls and a smattering of alien men-type creatures, and love, and pickled vegetables. 

That's all I'm going to say, because if you look on my about page, you will find the link to go read it somewhere else online. Keep in mind that there are only a few chapters yet, and that it's not finished.

Thank you.

3. Flowerhead.

I also just made this cover for this blog post.

I swear, the things I do for you guys. 

I started writing this story yesterday, a few hours before bed. It's my intention that this piece will only be a few thousand words long, and I expect to have it completely finished and up on Figment by the end of this month. 

So far it's about a boy named Liam, who's a writer. He's writing about a girl with flowered hair.

And that is all I have. I'm only about a thousand words in so far, and I'm still developing the characters and setting and foreshadowing and minor stuff like that. I think it's going to be fun to watch play out. 

4. First Spark.

I've put this novel on hold right now, while I write Space Girls and Flowerhead. I can't wait to return to it, later, but for now, I have no plot in mind for it, so I'm letting the story simmer, like one of my very favorite authors Jackson Pearce said I should do last week at the liveshow. Her being an author, I decided to take her advice and just let it sit.

It's a dystopian about these creatures who have killed almost the entirety of the human population. The point of view is from one of the few thousand remaining humans; a teenager named Tessa. 

I'd tell you more, but as I said earlier, it has no plot yet, and I have no idea what I'm going to do with it. 

So yeah. Those are all of my current projects. As you can see, I've thrown myself head-first into the pile of shredded ideas that is my mind, and I've pulled out several stories that might or might not work. 

Who knows?

Still a Little Behind...

Okay, still about as behind as I was. Maybe a little more, since I posted that post yesterday, and a day has passed.

(And now, because I just HAVE to call the kettle black): Hope is a laptop hog.

Meh, pig, koala. No one knows the difference.