Flying

[Note: This is a freewrite I did for my English class. Enjoy. It was written concerning my experience with airplanes and that whole industry.]

I think the view from an airplane is totally incredible, in more ways than one. Obviously the view is gorgeous--especially if you're flying into or out of somewhere with a lot of standing water, like Louisiana. The sun reflects off the water brilliantly, leaving patches of gold everywhere.

But there's something else amazing about that view. While you're in a plane, you are hanging thousands and thousands of feet up in the air, an altitude at which humans shouldn't be able to survive in, given the oxygen levels in the air. Yet thanks to engineers and scientists, it is now possible.

What would Orville and Wright think of all this? Of the huge terminals we modern flyers trek across in order to catch the third or fourth "leg" or our flight? Or the planes themselves?

Sure makes a girl sitting in row 9 wonder.

TTFN,

Inky

nanowrimo (it's that time of year, ppls!)

And you KNOW I'm doing it. Even though I'm in public school, which = much less writing time. Even though I'm 13, and thusly am doing the official, adult NaNo, which means that I'll have to do 50k words which is going to be crazy hard.

It's good to push yourself, right?

So, official declaration: I IZ A PARTICIPANT. Or, er, I'm trying. (And killing fruit flies. Is anyone else having a major epidemic of fruit flies like we are? It's extremely annoying.)

I was going to upload a prettyful web badge or two just to prove it, but apparently that is beyond me, plus they all still say NaNoWriMo 2008. So that'll have to wait. However, I'll post some as soon as they become officially available.

Inky

inspiration journals, i haz one

Has anyone here heard of inspiration journals/notebooks/idea notebooks?

What they are (if you haven't) is basically a notebook in which you can put anything. You can journal in it, write down ideas, tape in pictures, sketch designs...whatever you want. It's funfun. I only have a little, but I think I'll get more fast. It's nice to write something that doesn't have real standards; that you don't have to worry about other people seeing.

School's going very well, starts again tomorrow. Yay!

Katie

obviously, i am a brilliant and consistent blogger

...or not.

Sorry, people, I just got all busy all of a sudden! School is the primary source for my busyness. Since I still have homework to do, this will be a short post.

Today I got my hands on a copy of Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins. It's the sequel to the fabulous Hunger Games, and I was waiting with baited breath for this book! I am SO glad to have it, and am about a fourth of the way through it. Am reading fast, though, so it may not be long. I'll try to post a nice, un-spoilery review of it when I do finish.

My writing has been suffering from my return to public school, though I'm finding time here and there, mostly on the weekends. Okay, ENTIRELY on the weekends. But it's still happening, just at a much slower pace than it used to.

Snakes, lizards, toads, and turtles! I love 'em. Am going with a bunch of herpetologists (that's people who study reptiles and amphibians, btw) to check their traps! It promises to be really fun.

Now, I suppose I should work on some algebra hw, but I think I'll do that tomorrow. Tonight, I am going to just read!!!

Katie

Twitter stories

TeenInk, an website and magazine for teen writers/readers, is having a contest right now. And you know what the contest is?

"Write a piece of fiction," says the newsletter that I receive through e-mail, "In 140 characters or less and send it to us."

Well, I couldn't leave THAT idea be. I love flash fiction! It's challenging and it's so much fun. So I'm definitely trying it! I encourage everyone else to try it. You can find Twitter itself here, if you want to brush up on your micro-blogging skillz.

I'M working on ideas. Are YOU?

Inky

love

Yesterday, among other things, we had a brief power outage. It's just part of living in the country, and we're all used to it--no big deal. ;) So our internet was dead, but my laptop still had a little charge, so I was browsing through an electronic theusaurus.

I'm not sure why, maybe I just felt random, but I typed in the word "love". Tons of results came up--there are so many different kind of ways to love! The theusaurus alone lists eight, two of them verbs and the rest nouns. There's deep affection, relationship, best wishes, beloved, liking of, and so many others.

And you know what? There are only half as many ways to hate someone.

Very encouraging, I think. :)

Inky          

review for Pendragon: The Merchant of Death

So I seem to have a lot of friends who read these books.

Well, okay...three.

Still, it seems like a lot when it's their absolute favorite books apparently, and they talk about them ALL THE TIME.

Naturally enough, I thought that I should probably give the series a try. Book one, here I went. And went. And went...and went. It took me a really, really long time to read, to begin with. Which is not always necessarily a bad thing; I have been reading this one other book for about five months now. And it's good; it's great. It's just taking me a long time.

(And please don't think that this is because I am an extraordinarily slow reader. I'm not. I can read relatively quickly. The more times I read a book, the quicker it goes--usually.)

But back to Pendragon.

To begin with, I didn't like the concept. I feel like young-person-is-called-to-save-the-universe is overdone to the extreme, and usually will decide to NOT read a book based on this factor alone. But I thought, "Okay, there has to be something cool about it. I mean, my friends like it, right?"

I'm going to divide the rest of my review into two parts: Liked and Didn't Like.

Liked

- Osa. She was great. I mean, she was SUPPOSED to be great, but she still was great.

- Loor, whom throughout the whole book I preferred to Bobby.

- Mark. Even though he was the stereotypical kind, thoughtful, gentle geek boy for most of it, he kicked just enough butt to make me like him.

- The format of journal/people-reading-the-journal/journal again. It was pretty cool and fun to keep up with both worlds.

- Pacing. Mr. MacHale did a good job of keeping things moving and interesting, and I appreciate that SO SO SO much.

Didn't Like

- The two girls who survived the whole book were instinctual, primal characters who had to have boys tell them how to think things through *glowers* One character who this happened to would be fine. Or if it was occasionally a girl who could correct a boy too. But at least two times, in COMPLETELY PARALLEL SITUATIONS, the girl blindly followed her instincts and the boy corrected her. I'm sorry, it ticked me off.

- Rampant! Use! Of! Exclamation! Points! Good grief, this book had a lot, keeping in mind that I'm generally in favor of the whole "less is more" thing when it comes to these excitable points of punctuation. I think I counted something like eight on a single page, and these are not big pages we're talking about here (!). So, Mr. MacHale? Get someone who's just chillin' to read your ms sometime. But that's just me being picky, so let's move on to something bigger. Much bigger.

- Saint Dane. Arguably the character with the most fallen flat potential. Saint Dane could have been a hero turned bad, he could have been a slightly sympathetic character, he could have been surprising--and oh wait--he could have actually had a REASON for trying to bring chaos upon all the territories.

I guess all this doesn't sound really positive, does it? In fact, that Likes list looks pretty wimpy compared to the Didn't Likes. But really, I did like it. It was entertaining and mostly enjoyable. Not my favorite. And I probably won't read it again. But I might read, say, the sequel...