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Blessed Be Everyone!
I’ve been a baaaaad blogger lately, haven’t I? I’ve been trying to blog and do NaNoWriMo AND complete my graduation portfolio AND write an eight page and a five page paper…you get the picture.
So anyway, how is ‘Build-A-Babe’ coming along? Honestly, I’ve written quite a bit of it but I have a feeling that I won’t make it to 50,000 words in four days. But that’s fine because there’s always next year and also I have some wonderful news!
Before I started writing ‘Build-A-Babe’ for NaNoWriMo, it started out as a ten page short story that I wrote last April for my Creative Writing class. Like here, it got MASSIVE raves from my teacher and all of my classmates which I was pretty shocked about. I believe I am my worst critic, but I did NOT believe that everyone was going to like it so much.
Especially since I go to a very conservative college and there were some very…non-conservative dark humored jokes. They weren’t raunchy or anything, trust me. Let’s just say some things included grave-robbing, feeling up a dismembered female torso and boob jokes…yeah I’m weird and I’ve accepted it.
Anyway, my teacher liked it so much that she nominated it to be published in Paper Clips. Now, Paper Clips is a really really big thing at my school if you’re an English major, it’s sort of a magazine that the English Department publishes every semester and they only publish like the best of the best papers and essays that the school has to offer. If your writing is deemed ‘worthy’ enough by your teacher, then you fill out some paperwork and hand that in with a copy of your story/essay whatever-thing. From there it is handed off to what I call the “Professors of the Round Table” because the heads of the department sit around a big table and pass back and forth all the entries and look them over for all the
usual Englishy things like grammar, fluidity and stuff like that.
From what I understand, if you get one or more ‘no’s then your stuff is trashed but if you get two or more ‘yes’s then you’re in or something like
that.
Guess what…I got in!
You can’t see me but I haven’t stopped smiling since I got the Congrats! email. Like I said before, getting your stuff into Paper Clips is a HUGE thing because it’s like I’m getting validation that ‘Yes Sam, you ARE a good writer and everyone was right’. Now, here’s my little Emmy speech:
I want to say thank you to everyone who proofread the H.E double hockey sticks out of this ‘monster’piece and gave me so much encouragement to keep going with it and make it into a novel, which I plan to finish soon. Thank you Mom, Christine, Barb, Laura, Carissa, and everyone else for putting up with my weirdness and welcoming me with open arms and hearts. 🙂
See you all soon! Blessed Be )o(
Hey everyone!
Sorry if this post is going to be really short but it’s late in the semester with only a month or so left of school before winter break (Yay!) and what with trying to do NaNoWriMo and all this essay writing, I haven’t been at my best lately. So far, my word count isn’t where I want it to be. I don’t even want to mention it, but do count me out yet! I plan to write-up until the very end and we’ll see what happens.
Have a great weekend guy! Blessed Be )0(
Blessed Be Everyone!
*drum roll….* Here is the special thing I promised you guys!
Beloved October is coming to a close very soon and November aka National Novel Writing Month aka NaNoWriMo aka ‘A Month of Hell and Caffeine’ is right around the corner (*arms in the air*Yay!). Plus! This is a very special year indeed, because we also have the presidential vote coming up (*weak* yay…).
Am I the only person sick and tired of all the political negativity being blasted after every other commercial on the T.V. and radio, not to mention the internet? Seriously! I’ve seen less slop thrown at a pig farm than what these politicians are doing to each other. So to lighten up the mood…we’re going to have our own voting session!
I’ve been struggling to pick out a story manuscript for NaNoWriMo, so I thought I’d let you the people pick it for me. I like making up mock-book covers to help inspire me through my writing “effort” and I’ve Photoshopped four, count them FOUR covers for FOUR different stories. Read the blurbs underneath each one and then cast your vote as many times as you want on the one you would want to read the most and the one with the most votes by November 1st, I’ll attempt to complete.
This is Writing A Silver Broomstick and I approve this message…
Build-A-Babe: A Monster Love Story
F.J. is dying to go to the prom, but every girl at R.I.P High tells him to drop dead. He manages to dig up a date eventually…at the local cemetery. With the help of his ghoul friends, a perverted zombie who can’t keep his limbs to himself and geeky scientist madder in more ways than one, he manages to create the perfect girl. Will this be love at first fright or a prom date from hell?
Forever Young
Sarah Shepherd is seventeen years old, yet she’s more of an adult than her parents are. While they go through a messy divorce and custody battle, Sarah is forced to be the mother to her younger brother while all she wants to do is go out act her age. When she sees David and his gang causing mayhem at the local carnival, she feels that he’s the one who can give her what she wants. But David has different ideas, ideas involving blood, death, and rock and roll.
You Shine
Seo Sun-Hi or Sunny to her friends was born in South Korean in the fishing village of Pohang. While still an infant they moved to the U.S. where Sunny became a typical All-American high school nerd who has a panic attack every time a boy even come near her. Her parents tell her she has to get over her shyness because…they arrange for her to get married! To a K-Pop idol! She can’t get married at seventeen to a complete stranger, so she and her best friend devise a plan to break the entire thing off. Lucky her, her soon-to-be husband has the same idea…
Greeting From Planet Earth…Now Get Me Out of Here!
Jane Smith isn’t your average freshman. She can do Quantum physics in her sleep, she’s never heard of the Cee-vil War and she thinks her neighbor’s cat is trying to eat her. That because ‘Jane Smith’ is not just a transfer student, she’s a transfer student from another world! After ‘Jane’ and her crew make an emergency bathroom landing on Earth, their spaceship is locked down by the Home Planet for entering a recognized hostile zone. In order to return home, Jane and her crew must document modern human life as a human family for one Earth year or else… One thing Jane sure learns is that no matter what planet you’re one, high school drama is universal.
Hello everyone!
Happy Memorial Day and welcome to another written episode of ‘Writng a Silver Broomstick’!
Last Monday was my first day of my internship at The Shepherd Express( yay!). Now, for everyone outside of Milwaukee, The Shepherd Express is a weekly arts newspaper that writes about many interesting things happening in Milwaukee and sometimes Wisconsin as a whole.
If you want to know about any performances in music or theatre, and you don’t want to hunt down a computer to Google it, you go pick up the Shepherd at your local grocery store or your favorite coffee place to find out. And it’s free (yay free!). So far, I’m absolutely loving it. I get to work from home on my own laptop, which is wonderful because I can sleep in until nine and go to work in my pajamas. 🙂 Right now, I’m ‘in charge’, and I say in charge delicately, of the Fall Arts Guide where I get to contact local performers and put together a list of their performance dates. It might sound boring but for an introvert like me it’s perfect.
Yesterday, my mom and I were on the bus going downtown to the Historic Third Ward, sort of like a mini version of Chicago, and we happened to pass by the Boulevard Theatre and I mutter, “Oh, that’s where that is.” My mom says, “What?”
I point and say, “The Boulevard Theatre, I talked to (insert name here) yesterday about their new play and I thought it looked interesting. I was wondering where the theatre was.”
My mom is very excited about my internship, sometimes more excited than me. While on the bus, she kept nudging me and pointing to people reading the Shepherd and talking about it. I kept envisioning her standing up from her seat and screaming to the passengers, “My Daughter is an intern at the Shepherd Express!”
She didn’t do that but I kept visualizing it.
The first week was great. I’m very happy working for one of the few remaining locally owned Newsweeklys in the US. If you want to check it out on the web here’s the site below.
http://www.expressmilwaukee.com/
Have a blessed Memorial Day! Blessed Be 🙂
Technical Writing class is kicking my butt right now. I’ve had writing classes that were challenging but this one takes the cake. I’ve been in school a month now and before all this I thought this class was going to be okay.
But I knew my perception was a tad off when the first thing my professor said to us was quote, “This will be the most difficult writing you will have in your undergraduate lives,” unquote.
Now, what technical writing is…is a style of writing used in fields as diverse as computer hardware and software, engineering, chemistry, the aerospace industry, robotics, finance, consumer electronics, and biotechnology…at least according to Wikipedia. I personally call it something don’t feel comfortable saying let alone writing. It’s learning to write all important documents you need to know such as tedious twenty page reports for your boss who will only read the first two pages , the little incomprehensible instruction packets you get with your furniture…all that fun stuff.
Yay…
I know it’s going to benefit me in the long run but right now as I flip though my text-book that’s so dry it makes saltines look moist…I’m not seeing the good side.
Thanks for listening to my rant! 🙂
*looks around, blows dust off computer*
Wow, it has been a hectic couple of months! After so much I finally have the time to sit down and get back to things, like this blog. But where to start off…
I made it pass exams and finished out the year successfully (yay!) but the happiness was short-lived. When I finished class in February I had a message on my phone from my dad saying to call him back as soon as possible. My first thought was “Crap, I must have forgotten to so something at home.” But that wasn’t the case.
On February 24, my grandmother Gloria, a women who helped raise me and inspired my love for nature, myth, and fairies passed away. It hit me harder than I thought it would, I knew she was sick for a long time and my mom told to prepare myself…but like many people say “you can’t prepare for death.” My mush-mush *that’s what I called her* put me on the path that lead me to my love of writing and to my faith, but with her gone it was like my faith and love were gone too.
I didn’t know what to do, I felt like there was a big void in my life and I didn’t want to do anything. It was three months before I started writing again. But still, it got me thinking about life and death and that if I stopped living, it doesn’t me the world stops living. It will go on and I could either forgo everything I worked to achieve: my writing, my work at school, and do nothing or I could go with it and just live every day as much as I could.
I have finished my first manuscript and currently working on the sequel to In My Nature, called Making Moon Eyes! I am planning my book out for upcoming NaNoWriMo in November, which I will me posting my progress here.
I will be blogging again, at least once a week, maybe more depending on school. So everyone here is my final words for this post…Life can be smooth like chocolate or bitter like lemon but we have to take the bitter with the sweet and make something out of it.
Blessed be,
Sam
I am jumping up and down with joy! (Which is hard to do and type as the same time). I have succeeded where many have failed, I have written a novel within 30 days…and I am so glade that it’s over and sad at the same time.
By November 26th I had 20,000 words done and was panicking (plus I had an essay and a sociology Powerpoint to complete on top of that). But my frazzled mind concocted a plan that would help me achieve my goal: Me writing 10,000 words for three days, roughly 1,000 words an hour, and forego sleeping, I could possibly make it.
I got up at 6:30 am everyday (the only school days ever that I woke up that early and didn’t throw my alarm clock across the room) , powered up my laptop, filled my BigGulp container full of my fabulous chocolatey coffee and went to work. (With small intervals for classes, eating and frequent potty breaks). The first day was not so bad except that i had not seen the draw back of that it would take me to 1:00 a.m to finish my 10,000 words. But I did!
November 28 and the 29th was a horrible repeat of the cruel cycle that had become my days. I dreaded hearing that damn alarm clock every morning. I would think to myself, “Just today, I’ll sleep in a little bit. A haft an hour, twenty-minute, I just need five more minutes of sleep.”. But then the shrill buzzing that had become my master would send my body on auto-pilot and I found myself sitting up, and reaching blindly for my laptop in the darkness .
By the afternoon of November 30th, or D-Day in my case, sleep-deprived, my bladder bursting at the seams but refusing to go before i hit my 1,000 words an hour mark, I was panicking. The worst thing that could happen for a writer on a deadline happened to me.
I was almost finish and I only had 43,532 words. Like any college students crazed on caffeine and suffering from computer glare, I cam up with, what I though at the time, was the most brilliant plan ever: not using any apostrophes.
I made sure that every can’t and won’t, and you’re magically became ‘can not, would not, and you are’. It was brilliant! Call me Wil E. Coyote! It was…for about an hour. I only had 46,297 words now.
Dead line approaching, midnight coming closer even though it was only 12:30 in the afternoon!
I was frantic, I was tired, I wanted my mommy.
I wasn’t going to finish on time.
Until a little birdie poked me in the shoulder. And that little birdie is named Alixe (my BFF)!
She sat down by me in the cafe where I was sitting and asked in an innocent tone, “Sam, why are you hitting your head against the table?”
I looked up from my pitiful state, “I am hitting my head against the table because I feel like it!”
“Are you done with your book”, she asked me.
“Yes”, I grumbled.
“Then what’s wrong?”
“I have no more words! The story is complete as it could be and I have no more words!”
‘Then start on your second book.”
“What?”
“You’re planning a sequel, right?”
“yeah”, I said hesitantly.
“You know, some books include an except of the next book the writer is writing. Why don’t you do that?”
It was so simple. She said it so simply that I was dumbstruck, but she made a good point.
So on November 30th at 6:47 p.m. I became an official NaNoWriMo Winner! What did I win, you ask?
I won a very cool, very sweet…printable certificate and a free print copy of my book!
Many maybe wondering, “You suffered all that to get a fricking certificate and ONE BOOK! Are you crazy? Why did you do it?”
I could tell you many things like , “I did this not for the prizes, but the see if I could” or “I did it for the grand experience and the test of my discipline”. But honestly…
I did it because I could.
Am I going to do it next year…oh yeah!
Week 2…15,359 words…one day behind with a 1200 word essay due…news paper articles not going well…considering comitting technological homicide to my lap top…
But on a less crazy note I made a new cover for ‘In My Nature’ with Photoshop *yay* I think it’s more teenage-friendly than my previous one and I found a nice pic of the actress that inspired Sadie Shay. I couldn’t find a pic for my hero that I like so I subed it for a very loving young man who many might know as Jax Teller form “Sons of Anarchy”.
I’ll post that when I’m done tweeking it.
I am swamped with work so I might only be posting once a week until December…it’s okay to cry 🙂
I’m on chapter 6 with my story and so far so good. I had to make a list of priorities on what to get done this week so here is my list…
Wedsday:
-Load articles to Basecamp
-Start essay that’s due next Thusday
-Finish and print paperwork and assignment for sociology teacher
-Eat somewhere in between
-Try to get ahead on my word count.
-Sleep
That sounds like a good list, I guess.
Things are becoming more and more crazy in my life. I’m trying to do twenty things at once (more like ten; three article for the school’s newspaper, two big projects for sociology class, writing ANOTHER essay for my Intermediate Comp class while editing my OTHER essay, my daily word count, etc) *head twitching…brain smoking…OVERLOAD! OVERLOAD! DOES NOT COMPUTE!*
But the good news is I got really far in my word count yesterday! It is currently…10,640 words. At this rate I am 2 1/2 days ahead of schedule (it involved perseverance and a bag full of Pixie Stixs).
I’m smack in the middle of chapter 4 with my heroine getting ready for the party that will change her life forever. ( oh, I feel so sorry for her *sinister laugh*)
My mom and I are right now planning a surprise, well kind of surprise, Halloween party for Little Bro. He couldn’t go trick-or-treating last weekend because the doctor said quote:
“This is the worst case of strep throat that I have ever seen”.
On top of that he had a 102.6 degree fever and was completely miserable all week. But he’s a lot better now (so better he conned my parents into letting him stay home an extra two days from school. “Mom, *weak cough* I need to stay home.)
At least he stopped waking me up at 3 a.m. with “Sam, *vomiting into an empty gallon ice cream bucket he carries with him that holds more diabolical things than ice cream now* I think I’m sick.” Yeah, who needs an alarm clock when you have a one of those.
Blessed Be! )0(
Writing A Silver Broomstick 