Of Bookstores and DD's

Blog Challenge Day 6? Maybe....

This Blog Challenge went to hell on an express train. After some consideration it has become abundantly clear that I don’t do things worth blogging about… at the moment. I was going to review a book then I was like but what book? Then I got distracted with writing. I wrote five stellar pages. Then I decided I was tired and went to bed with my puppies.

But tonight I vowed to write something and not totally give up. I’m home alone right now. I get to play designated driver tonight with my parents and brother. Should be fun. Two bars, three people, should be easily managed.

In the mean time I shall bore you with activities of today. I went to a bookstore. I’ve got a birthday party for a 6 year old to go to in like 2 weeks. He’s my brother’s girlfriend’s son and he’s just the cutest thing ever. So I was thinking what to get a little kid. I can’t toy shop for my life for a little boy. I was going to get a star named after him, then surprise surprise you don’t actually name a star you just pay for the fancy paper certificate. Boooo. I settled on a book a month for a whole year.

I could have done it through a website, but 1 that was expensive and 2 the book choices were sucky. So while my mum and I were out today I made us stop Barns and Nobles. I spent about 2 hours in the kids section looking for books. I had to google the authors of a few of my childhood favourites like Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and the Miss. Nelson stories. Then I read through new ones I’d found that looked cool and I wanted to make sure they weren’t shitty or too tough for a kid to understand and/or read. Over all it was 2 hours well spent.

I’m off to the post office tomorrow to grab envelopes. Then I’ll write something cool in the books and warp them up all cool like. Set a reminder in my phone and put the books in a half inconvenient place (like the side table in the dining room) so I don’t lose them or forget about them. After all I’ve got to remember them for a whole year.

Well picking up the parents has thrown off my mojo so it’s good-bye for the night!

Cheers,

Back to the Drawing Board

With my first book in The Quest Quartet done it’s time I get around to starting the second one right? I’ve been dabbling in a few other of my writing projects since I finished and now that I’ve meandered back to the Quartet I have run into a problem. And quite a large problem at that.


I seem to have changed the plot too much… oops. Where I ended the first book isn’t where I’d originally planned to end it. In fact I completely altered it so that even my most current outline fails to be of use. And if you remember I’ve done quite a few extensive outline rearranging.

^freshman year in college^

^Last fall^

So I now must do another extensive rewrite to make things flow easily. Sad to say most of these rewrites are occurring in the second book. But I’m also sort of excited for this. After all I brought a character in three books before I had originally planned. So it’ll be interesting and fun. And who knows I might throw an outline out the window and just wing it… well not totally wing it… after all I have things to foreshadow and places to be seen… so as I return to the drawing board I’ll leave you with a bit of fun news.


My dad brought me mail this weekend and guess what was tucked in there? My postcard from DAW!! They officially logged in my manuscript on the 8th!! Woooo!! So I’m super excited and crossing my fingers that they’ll love it as much as I do!


Cheers,

I Gave Away My Child Today…

Today I went to the post office first things and shipped out my manuscript. After spending 7 years writing I really do feel like my manuscript was my child and I only paid $7.40 for my precious child to be handed over to someone else.

My mum and I made it a momentous occasion of pure ridicules proportions. We decided to take pictures… lots of pictures.

So we go into the post office and I’m filling out the address and stuff and the guy behind the counter let me take pictures with him.

When we first walked in I thought everyone in the post office would think that I was a total nutcase because I was so excited about sending my book off. Boy was I wrong! Turn out Michael (the guy behind the counter) was a fantasy geek like me! I found that out when he asked me what genre and I told him mine was fantasy, he’s a fan of Tad Williams (I’m 90% sure it was Tad), and guess who Tad Williams is published by? DAW aka hopefully my future publisher. There was also another man in the post office that was interested in the fact I was sending out my second manuscript. So we swapped business cards. This was quite a crowning achievement for me as it was the first time I had actually swapped cards with someone. The majority of my cards go out in my books that I sign. I also gave Michael one. Again a new thing, no one had ever asked me for a business card.

All around not only did I send my manuscript off to DAW but I felt like a real important author. I know I have ages to go before I really am… but it felt nice to feel famous for a few minutes. It made me even more confident about sending it out. Everybody cross your fingers that DAW just loves the book!

So on the way out I had to pose with my receipt…

Over all it was a very satisfying day!


Cheers,

Done!!!

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything about my writing so I’ll kick a whole new round of writing related posts off with some awesome news. I finished the last round of edits on Entangled Fates yesterday. July 4th at 8:24pm.



Now this is quite a few years in the making. I started writing my series when I was in 7th grade which is 7 years ago now. As I read the last line of my book I thought about everything that I’d put into this to get to the point where I’m so much in love with it that I’m confident to send it out into the world. I don’t know how many hours I spent writing and editing it but I’d be willing to guess it’s been a couple hundred hours. There were a few times that I didn’t think it was going to be worth it but now… now it’s totally worth it!


I’m also quite tired of it… I hate to say it but I’m ready to stop reading it over and over. How could I possibly be tired of my precious book? Well it’s changed a lot and taken a lot of my brain power to work everything straight.


When I first started writing it all out in notebooks it was really going to be straightforward and rather cliché. It was also going to be one book. They were going to get all fours pieces and have a happy ending to boot all in one book. Back then it seemed like a brilliant idea to me. So I kept writing all through the 8th grade finishing a few notebooks in the process. Somewhere along the way I’d changed my mind and decided I wanted a series. I finished writing the first draft in notebooks and felt triumphant.


Then I realized that hand written material wasn’t acceptable to send to publishers. So I started typing it all up. When I reopened my first notebook I realized what I’d written was complete crap so I scanned the rest of the notebooks and realized the whole plot was shit.


That’s when I outlined a new series to write. I set aside my very first draft and kept in mind a few of my favorite parts as I started a new first draft. I don’t remember when I first started it but I finished it freshman year in college.


I started reading from the beginning and realized that once again it was shitty. I’d changed characters and the eventual ending so much that the beginning made no sense. So the first half of the book underwent extensive changes.


And now after three more rounds of edits I look at the finished manuscript and I picked out the things that were the same as my very first original story from 7th grade. Here’s the dismal list:


1) Neal’s name


2) Jamie’s name


3) Billy/Tantin’s name


4) Reuniting the Armlet


5) Exyel and Lawrence names and cities


And that’s all I could pin. It’s under gone a lot of work to get to the shinning gem it now is. Another thing that I love is the word count. I’ve done three rounds of edits from what’s saved on my laptop as the original. I had older copies but switching between computers they slipped between cracks somewhere never to be found. But check this out.


Original - 143.551 words


1st round - 127.792 words


2nd round - 129.808 words


Final - 123.823 words


I love that I cut so much. Most of it from the original to 1st round was plot lines I didn’t need, characters that were useless, and fluffy scenes that wasted time. And from the 2nd round to the final was simply word smithing, that’s a whole other post. In short I simply took out useless words and sentences and picked one word to replace two. Hard work but it makes everything flow easier and read faster which makes the effort worth it.


Now all that’s left is to write my cover letter and send the whole lot off to DAW books. Everyone cross your fingers that DAW picks me up. They’re pretty much my dream publishing house as the publish most of my favorite authors (like Pat Rothfuss).


Cheers,

Books

So I saw this on one of my friend’s Facebooks and I totally loved it.






The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions:


Bold those books you've read in their entirety.


Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 The Republic - Plato
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hug


I’ve read 19 out of the 100. The ones that are italics I’ll probably get around to finishing them one day. But it’s funny because most of the ones that re bold are books I had to read for school. So I feel slightly ashamed that I have so few that I’ve read of my own free will. I’ve read hundreds of other books that are recent Fantasy or Sci-Fi ones… so that makes me feel a little better.


Laters,

Entangled Fates

I’m so fickle sometimes. So The Snowy Waste has had it’s title for seven years now. And this morning as I was doing my life coaching assignment for the week (which is to set goals) I realized as I was typing The Snowy Waste completion as one of my short term goals that the title no longer fits. Basically I’ve changed the plot so much that the title no longer fits with the whole story. I brainstormed two new titles. 1- Threads of Time and 2-Entangled Fates. Then I went to google books and googled to see if there were any books by the same or similar titles. This threw Threads of Time out the door. So The Snowy Waste is now entitled Entangled Fates. Cool right? And it’s not even one o’clock and I’m making such big changes!!



Laters,

P.S. Pat Rothfuss now has NOTW shirts! yay!

Another Game of Catch Up

It seems I’ve forgotten how to blog… oops. I’ve been majorly busy though… so you know what that means, it means a loooong post and fun updates.



1) Basically since the last week of summer I’ve been getting ready for school then it was the first few weeks of school crammed together. So I’ve been getting into the swing of things, doing homework and what not. But it’s all good. My classes are super fun. I’m taking Chem 1, Anatomy and Physiology, Revolutionary Era Europe, World War one and U.S. History till 1877. They’re all really cool, I totally like my Europe class cause we’re focusing on the French Revolution now. Sooo cool! And I have a very good roommate this year. She’s super nice and polite and isn’t loud when she comes in at night. So my life is pretty much made. And my suitemates are nice too!


2) These last two and a half weeks I’ve been running around like a chicken with it’s head chopped off. Why you ask? Because I’m trying to go abroad next semester. So I’ve been rushing to get my application in. it’s all due Friday… eeek! But I’m pretty much done with it all. So it’s all good. Plus it’s Ireland. I mean come on Ireland. How super cool right. I’ll be at the University of Limerick! Whoot. I’ll be there for four full months from January 17 till May 17. Granted I have class way less then that. Classes will start January 24th and end may 14th. So I’m super psyched about that. I’ll keep you updated.


3) My birthday! I turned 20 yesterday! And it’s totally strange to think about it. Because I’m no longer a teenager now. And the next time that my age will start with a 1 is if I get to 100. Crazy right? It boggles my mind. It also gets me thinking that I’ll be starting a “real” life in a short year and a half! Yikes! But it’s also exciting you know the whole opening a new chapter to your life. So I’m totally down with it.


4) Edits. Edits. Edits. And then I finished edits and realized the rest of my series was shitty and that I had made so many changes to the first book that I needed to fix up and re outline the first series. Because no offence Quest Quartet but the second series is way better. Remember when I blogged about it last year. My epic outline on my wall. So that’s why the second series is put together so nicely. But it’s a good challenge. And so far it’s going nicely.


5) comparing schools. I’m still deciding on weather to put my effort in for another go at applying to NYU… I think I will because it will be a heck of a lot easier to graduate with my double major and now minor (in Irish Studies). While if I stay at Kean I’ll be lucky to graduate on time and no minor for me… so I’m trying to go for NYU. They’d better take me this time or I’m going to be so very angry! But it’ll all turn out just the way it’s supposed to so I’m actually chill with whatever. I’ll be living in the city next year anyway. I’m getting a flat with friends.


And I think that’s all I’ll bore you with for now!


Laters,

P.S. this is my 100th post! Whoot!!

Drawings and Cards

Okay guys I’m sooo excited! I just had to post again. So my mum and aunt came to visit me at school today and we went out to dinner. My mum told me that my business cards came in!!!! weeee!!! And I was talking to my aunt and her boyfriend’s daughter draws anime and she’s willing to draw my characters for The Cycle of Zantor!!!! I have been trying to get this done for ages upon ages and I’m so happy. Plus it’s going to be anime style and incase you didn’t know I’m an uber anime freak!! So ya today just got even better!



Laters,

To Read List and Pictures

Konnichiwa,

So I’m home for break!!!! Yay! This means hard core typing time!! I was so excited to be home today that I cleaned my room which is now my writing room! Whoot. And oh my goodness it’s snowing outside! Like a lot of snow, about five inches I think. I can’t wait to go sledding tomorrow. I’m such a little kid with snow. Haha. When I was cleaning my room today I realized I had a lot of books! Okay so what I also realized was I still had some book I had not read so I decided to make myself a “To Read” list for the break since I don’t go back till January 19th. So here is my list…
(1) The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy (so Ryan can stop bugging me about not reading it)
(2) The Queen of The Damned – Anne Rice
(3) Winterbirth – Brian Ruckley
(4) The Sea of Trolls – Nancy Farmer
(5) Hood – Stephen R. Lawhead
(6) Beauty – Robin McKinley
(7) The Outstretched Shadow – Mercedes Lackey and James Mallorv
So I’ll start with those and go from there. I’m so excited to be home and be done with course work!

Laters,
T.V.

p.s. here’s a picture of my doggies. Cody is on the left and he looks demonic with his eyes cause I couldn’t fix them. And Sidney is on the right. What cute wieners!