Happy Mid-July

 Ah, the Quill is back! Now in 2D with a fresh new url. ;-)


 Here we are, in July. In the past couple of weeks I've started two college courses and joined a writing critique group that is run by one of my best friends. I guess you could say that I'm busy, as I never seem to have the time to fit in anything new.

 The cool thing about my critique group is that our motto is "No Fear" and there are only three other members besides myself. It's not that hard to share my precious work with people I know well. The uncool thing is that it forces me to stop being lazy about writing and complete 2 short stories a week. If you know anything about me, I'm just happy to finish one chapter in a WIP per week. So.




Also, here is an example of my atrocious editing skills for your enjoyment. Its a collage of the funniest moments from season 7 of Doctor Who. I'm going to make a better one soon.

My Reading List Fall 2012

Ahhh... I've got some humorous blog posting coming your way soon, but until then, I'm going to post my reading list for this fall. I'm going to have to become friends with the persons at my library that order books, to be sure, to be sure.

*drum roll*

 ZE REEDING LISTZ (Darn, Aubrey. Thanks a lot. ;-D)

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Emmuska Orczy
The Book Theif by Markus Zuzak
Get Thee to a Punnery: An Anthology of Intentional Assaults Upon the English Language by Richard Lederer
These Happy Golden Years by Laura Wilder
Folks, This Ain't Normal by Joel Salatin
John Adams by David McCullough (started this last year and didn't finish)
Sleeping Freshman Never Lie by David Lubar (re-read; yessssss it was that good)
Firmament: Radialloy by Grace Pennington (missed the sale on July 4th... have to beg the library!)
Peter's Angel by Aubrey Hansen
National Velvet by Enid Bagnold
God and Kings: Chronicles of the Kings by Lynn Austin (got this for free on Amazon)



"EN AVANT THE CARTS!"

 I also want to read some of the other self-published books that were suggested for the VLAs, like Pirate Daughter's Promise, Charity's Diary, and the Destiny Trilogy, but I'll probably read those after I get some of the classics and non-fiction crossed off my list, :-D


( As a side note: prayers that I can afford a laptop to replace my old one would be appreciated, so I can get going on my senior year of homeschool. )

Morning

 It's funny how one can complain about life being too eventless to be fun, because when they actually become busy, all they can talk about is how nice it is to not be so busy.

 I don't like to be busy in the sense that I hate going out and doing errands. Just forget about trying to convince me to spend time with my fellow teenagers--what a waste it would be to drive to some place and pay good money to be a part of a 'camp' or 'workshop' that teaches me nothing and smushes me in a room with a bunch of attention grabbing-iPhone listening-unresponsive kids and expect me to have fun.

 This summer, I volunteered at a business that happens to have a lot of kid volunteers. There was one girl who found out I was older that her and afterwards would not even look or respond to me if I asked her a question or for help finding someone. I know I can be moody sometimes, but I hope I'm not that moody. Thankfully the volunteering session is over for the summer, because there was more than one issue with the place. But it's over, so I'm not going to go on and on ragging about it.

Girl: "Your a SENIOR?!"
Me: "Well, kinda. (didn't want to get into the homeschool/odd grade thing) Most people think I'm 12."
Girl: "No, I thought you were a Freshman or something."

Yep. True story.

Give me some fun loving, interesting adults any day. Or some sociable homeschoolers. Contrary to popular belief, homeschoolers are actually more sociable than today's average teen.


 On a good note, all of my free time has led me to write a lot more (anddomorechorescoughcough). But more than that, I've learned about the importance of making my own writing habits and rules, instead of listening to the NaNoWriMo system or the Writer's Digest techniques all by themselves. The truth is, I don't like to just write a whole novel in a month and spend the next 30 years of my life editing it. If I'm going to write it, it doesn't need to be perfect but it needs to have a good structure. And I'm also not into conventional plot arcs. Things become too predictable if you write in the same way that the bestsellers in Writer's Digest do.
  Newbery medalist Gary D. Schmidt (The Wednesday Wars, Okay For Now) uses a typewriter for his first draft, only pounding out about 500 words a day.  I really like that pace for myself. The average Young Adult novel has a chapter length of 2,000 words. I prefer to write by hand, so this means that with 500 words a day, I can easily write about two chapters a week. To be honest, I'd rather have two great chapters than a whole pile of irrelevant scenes crafted during NaNoWriMo.

 That's all for now, folks! By the way, if it crosses your mind I would love if you'd vote in the Verve Lit Awards. The deadline is August 15th.

Have a lovely day,

-Jessie

A Short Prologue of Many Matters

Copycopy Aisendsij

Finding the beauty in Comment Word-Verification Generators

@ChrisAugust

Is following me on twitter. CHRIS AUGUST! My first 'celebrity' follower. And a Believer, to boot. I haven't told anyone this before, but my character John from Deceptive looks a lot like him. And Adam Young. Without the beards and stuff, because John is only a Junior in the High. Anywho, *swoon*

Script Frenzy

Starts in 3 days. I may possibly be doing a script that has little spoof scenes added in, with characters we shall refer to as Beth, Edgar/Edmund Cummin, and Jake ;-D.

BETH

(to Edgar)

You still suck. And let go of my hand already.

Goodreads

Because I've read 24 books and 6,168 pages so far since January...

Messy Monday Homeschooling Myths Debunked Video

"HEEEEECK NO!"

 

So that  guy is pretty much a genius, and totally right. Go homeschooling!

 That's all for now. I gotta go write and watch more Messay Monday vids. And see if Walmart has Britt Nicole's new album GOLD yet.

One of Those Mornings

Because you're a homeschooler, you have a strange need to do schoolwork on the weekend and skip Mondays. So when you wake up on Sunday morning, you start reorganizing all 5 billion of your flash cards, and mistake Adverb for something that goes in the Algebra pile.

 Once finished, you realize just how hungry you are, but you don't want to wake up the sleeper inners with the rocket-powered microwave and a strawberry muffin, so you go for the cereal. But there is no rice milk. So you have the dry, uninteresting brand of organic Chex knockoff. With some sugary organic Frosted Wheats knockoff for some sugar. You pawn one of the uninteresting cereal bits to you dog to shut him up.

 "Go back to sleep already."

 Then, because you're in a scholarly mood, you contemplate correcting Taylor Swift on Twitter for posting 'Tonight we ended a 13 month tour.' at ten o'clock in the morning, until you realize that she is in Aussieland or something and it actually IS night there. She has graduated highschool, she's old enough to recognize a subject/verb tense disagreement (that's what you call it, because it sounds more correct than subject/verb agreement) Isn't it ironic that Owl City and Tay Swift and everybody seems to be in the Down Under this week?

 Then of course, you have to go through a typewriter club photo album to drool at a salmon colored Alpina.

This is not my photo and I did not mean to rip it off from the owner for selfish gain I just wanted to share the awesomeness with you guys and not make money off of it for any reason in any country in any hemisphere the intentions were simply for drooling purposes and you can stop staring at me like that for making the worlds second longest run on sentence the first longest is probably in some paranormal romance novel which we will not mention here because then it might be considered slander by those stuck up teenagers on nanawromo young writers program and I'm tired for this sentence so it ends here.

Since your purpose for getting on the computer was to go scroll through Author Agent websites, your mind starts to wander and you wonder how much your going to want to yell at the agent sites. They said in their Writer's Digest profile that they take all young adult fiction, but you are very suspicious when you see their gallery of published works. So you check out their blog to get a more in-depth idea of their prefrences, and it is admitted that they really only like teen witch stories. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Post Script

The Wednesday Wars by Gary D Schmidt is a really good book.