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...

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Okay, so I feel like I'm pretty good at reading the signs in books. I'm fairly good at going, Okay, this and this and this is going to happen. Probably.

Not with Rebecca.

Rebecca is the story of a young woman who marries a man named Maxim de Winter. He takes her back to his home, Manderley, and she begins to uncover awful secrets about the former Mrs. de Winter, whose name was Rebecca.

I got to about page 250 and I think I gasped out loud. Actually, I gasped out loud a lot. It's full of twists and turns and complete plot reversals. If for no other reason, read it to see how a really good reversal is done!

I adore this book. The very last page left me completely stunned as the author pulls yet ANOTHER twist--and then ends the book!

Rebecca is very fantastic and highly recommended by me.

a lovely quote

I'm reading this fantastic book called Rebecca right now. It's by Daphne du Maurier. Anyway, I was devouring--I mean, uh, reading--it yesterday and came across this brilliant description of one of the gentlemen:

"Yes, Frank," I said. I called him Frank because Maxim did, but he would always call me Mrs. de Winter. He was that sort of person. Even if we had been thrown on a desert island together, and lived there in intimacy for the rest of our lives, I should have been Mrs. de Winter."

I just like that very much.

And that is all.

Inky

love is in the air

By this I mean all sorts of love, like

a) my friends and I have been getting along REALLY well lately. Like, even the few of those beloved people whom I sometimes just kind of want to edge away from. They're agreeable, I'm agreeable. I love it when this happens! It's so...so...happifying.

b) love of stories. My writing has taken on a new wonderful PURPOSE lately. I think I might actually have been given the resolve to finish some of my stories, and that is a great feeling.

c) even though, for whatever reason, I have been feeling achy lately, life seems to be going really well. My family is cheerful and loving and we're just doin' good.

So this is an optimistic post! Let's keep ROCKING!

Inky

Happy Mothers Day!

To moms, grandmoms, and everybody else!

Lately this holiday has become a very special one for me. My mother does so many wonderful things in caring for her parents, watching out for all of her friends, and being a role model for me. A lot of my friends are closer to her than they are to a lot of adults; she's very easy to relate to and is understanding and sympathetic. She's great.

Dad and I collaborated to cook her favorite meal for lunch as a surprise, and I got a DVD she's been wanting to see for ages.

HAPPY MOTHERS DAY, MOM!!!!!

follow-up to ideas post

I just went on Scott Westerfeld's--of Uglies, Midnighters and Peeps fame--website and found this killer answer to the "Where do you get your ideas?" question:

"From a little town called Schenectady. They make them there." And he links to the County of Schenectady's page.

Scott Westerfeld is pretty awesome anyways, but this is a fabulous answer in my opinion.

Inky

P.S. Also--I still haven't got a title for the "letters" story! Comment and please give me HELPS! I'll return the favor for YOU.

jelly beans

So, my uncle and aunt sent us this big bag of jelly beans in the post today. They're called Belly Flops, because they're the Jelly Bellies that didn't turn out quite right. Some of them look a little funny, or are globbed together in twos.

But they taste good. I love jelly beans. And not just for the flavor.

Recently, there's something very enticing to me about the surprise of what your taste buds are going to get next. It's completely luck of the draw when you open a bag. I just ate some foul little dark green ones, followed by a lovely blue tie-dye that was some kind of sour blue rasberry. You have to actually take the chance of tasting something wonderful, or something awful. It's very...interesting and intriguing for me. I don't know. But I love it. Once I was given this little box of jelly beans in really weird flavors--one was soap, another was rasberry, and yet another was actually vomit! (That one was disgusting beyond WORDS. Oh my gosh. *shudders*) They were all labelled on the back--oh, the grass-flavored one was pretty good, btw--but there were several that were very similiar, and it became a guessing game once again. There were some great buttered popcorn ones, if I recall correctly.

So, yeah. Jelly beans. Two thumbs up.

gardening

This evening, Mom and I planted a lot of things. We planted tomatoes--three different kinds!--and bell peppers and green chiles and best of all, an apple tree. *sighs happily* I LOVE trees.

And I really love to garden. I have a pot of basil planted, just hoping and praying that it will come up. There's something very soothing to me about getting my hands--and knees, usually--covered with dirt. The smell is so good.

Writing and school are both going pretty well. Math is easy enough that it's almost boring; I hope we move on to new material soon. And as for writing, I'm up to 15 pages on the 19th century one that I was talking about in earlier posts.

Also, new theme! What do you think?

Inky

a call for name possibilties

I've been telling different people about this alternative history novel, but I have nothing to refer to it as. With my family I call it "the letters story", but that simply won't do for me.

Does anyone have ideas? I'd be happy to tell you more about it. I just want something to call it!

Inky

p.s. As per usual for me, any advice will be repayed if you would like it.

ideas

Go to virtually any author's FAQ page, if indeed they have a website. Inevitably you will come across the question, "Where do you get your ideas?"

And writers reply in several ways: in some cases, they will give as truthful an explanation as they can, explaining carefully that they get their ideas from ________. Some will give a very short answer, or a nonsense word, to get people off their case. And then there are always a few who admit to HATING THAT QUESTION.

If you write, you probably know how utterly randomly ideas can come to you. I've gotten ideas from books, movies, or songs--a sentence, or a shot, or a single lyric will really catch my attention, and off I'll go. Other times I'll brainstorm with other writers, if I really need an idea for a story. But my ideas come from anywhere and everywhere! From things that make me happy or sad or things I think are simply outrageous--"That should be rewritten!" I say to myself, and then I do.

But let's face it. I don't think anyone answers it better than Neil Gaiman: http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/Cool_Stuff/Essays/Essays_By_Neil/Where_do_you_get_your_ideas%3F

So. Are you writer? Where do you get YOUR ideas?

Inky

put on a happy face!

I have to remind myself of that because I'm writing this dreadful little story for the writers' group I attend, and it's very sad, and writing it is making me a little gloomy to tell you the truth.

I'm tired, and will not stay long on blogger. Had a good day; it was gorgeous, albeit a bit windy at times, outside. And I had an opportunity to eat two slices of a lovely pound cake. And I finished a really good book: Thirteenth Child by Patricia C. Wrede. I recommend it to everyone; fantastic.

Got some writing done above and beyond this sad, sad short story. The 1800s story is now about 4700 words long; nice fun length! I have lots planned for this story, and it's sooo much fun to write.

Must go brush teeth and sleep. G'night!

Inky

my stories

If you know me at all--if you've ever even met me--you probably know that I LOVE to write. Mostly fiction (short and long). I've done exactly one good completed essay.

I'm always working on several things, and my love of them varies. It usually starts out very high, and that continues for a couple of pages. And then I normally think, "This is stupid, I'll never be able to write the whole thing", and nearly give up. Then another rush, and I'll keep going for a while.

Right now I'm working fast and hard on a story set in an alternative history that's similar to ours up until about 1750. Then, in this world, there is a massive world war, after which many countries are in chaos. England especially was hit hard by the war, and suffers from piracy, riots, and poverty. Gloomy as that sounds, it's not such a gloomy story. We pick up with Lianne and Oriel, friends who have promised to write each other faithfully even though heavy security means letters don't get places very fast. Lianne has just been sent to live with her aunt and grandparents in London, because her mother was worried that Oxford--where the mother and Oriel both are--is too dangerous for her daughter. Li's mom would have loved to send Oriel, too, but Oriel was convinced she could be of more use in Oxford.

Right now, this story is my favorite. It's a very different kind of style for me, since of course girls in the 1800s, even alternative history girls in the 1800s, do not speak or act like modern day girls would. So that's way, way fun. Possibly will post an excerpt here, sometime.

Inky

hello (i.e. who is this strange creature who calls herself a blogger?)

Well, to begin with, I do have a real name but if you'll call me Inky, I'd be much obliged, even though "much obliged" sounds like something old westerners are and while I may be a westerner, I am not old.

So there.

What I AM: young, loving, a writer, a reader, a pianist, a singer, an artist, a comput3r prsn, friendly, crazy, and a music lover in many forms. Punk rock to classical to bubblegum pop--but not rap. I hate rap and most heavy metal; gets on my nerves. You might like rap or metal, and that is fine. *tries to live up to being friendly*

I like storms, rain, sharp pencils, popsicles, shuffling cards, my piano, the smell of books, making friends, libraries, tape, cameras, bookmarks, and reading funny blogs. (Well, music, too, but you already knew that.) Since I like reading them, I try to write them, but sadly I don't think I succeed. I adore writing in almost any form--my favorite is fiction.

I'm new over here, fresh from a beloved Wordpress account, so any tips that you might have about blogger would be useful. I only really came because all of my friends use this instead of WP...and because I thought I'd try out the format of blogger. And I have to say, I really really like it so far.

So, hopefully see you soon!

Inky