Portland

So, got up at 5:00 AM this morning and drove for about 12 hours with my uncle and grandma to get to Portland. I tried to go to bed early to prepare... which kinda worked? Maybe? I still want to go to sleep right now though.
I'll be here for a week with family.
In the meantime, I have a few blog posts that I've been thinking about. Except I forgot a couple of them so I'll have to dig them up. >_< And I'm hoping to use some of my free time here to smooth out some more stuff on Red Seeker.

Second Draft

So, at 12:20 AM, I finished my first edit of Red Seeker, Katani's story.
Took me long enough. XD
Yaaay!
There's still a ton I need to fix, but it feels good to get my first edit completely done.
And now I'm of to pass out...

Mooovies

Okay, I did another long environment post.
So now I'm gonna do one for fun.
(After a brief, disbelieving comment about Wednesday. Would you believe it? On my way home on the train, after my last day of class. And for the third time this semester, the train stopped and everyone was kicked out. And I got kicked out at THE EXACT SAME STOP as the other two times. What's the deal? This never happened the four years I was in college. And now 3 times in one semester? I had to take the bus home... Maybe there's something near that train stop that's calling to me. But I walked around there a couple weeks ago, and didn't find anything)

Anyway, moving on.
I like writing about new movies that I see. I've been trying to avoid it, since I don't want to comment on every new thing I see, but I'll go for it tonight since I've been going on an involuntary movie splurge.

I saw Catching Firs yesterday. I've got to say, I'm really impressed about how the Hunger Games movies stay so faithful to the books. Usually they love to add and change a bunch of stuff in movie versions (I'm still really dubious about the Hobbit movies for this reason).

Today I went to see The Book Thief with Mom and her brother.
Another good movie.
I like the snowball fight in the basement. ^-^
You know, Geoffrey Rush is great. I like him more every time I see him in something.
He makes an awesome pirate.
He's in Finding Nemo (favorite Pixar movie).
His version of Javert in the non-musical Les Mis is a bit different, but still great. Every now and then, I get random scenes from movies/manga/ex stuck in my head. And one of them is the scene where Javert is captured by the Revolution. Valjean walks in and sees him tied up. When Javert talks to him, the defeat and hopelessness for some reason really hit me.
He's great in The King's Speech.
And I really liked him in this movie too.
The main family reminded me of Anne of Green Gables. His character was kind of like Matthew. Hans and Matthew are both great characters.

Habitat Destruction Plot

Finally starting another environmental plot post. The first one I did was about deforestation. This one will be about habitat destruction in general.
Forests are mentioned the most when people talk about protecting habitats. But forests are definitely not the only habitat that's being destroyed by human expansion.
Wherever people build new homes or clear land to grow crops, some area of natural land was destroyed.

It may not seem like it, but deserts are incredibly fragile areas. If something disturbs desert land, it takes an incredibly long time to heal. There aren't many plants or much rainfall to re-sculpt the natural landscape. In areas of Nevada, such around Reno, housing is spreading deeper and deeper into the desert hills.
Perhaps you've heard of the Dust Bowl? This happened when farming expanded into the Great Plains. People took their machines and tore up the grass and thick layers of sod beneath. The problem is that this tangle of grass roots was holding the soil down. And once the grass was torn out, that dirt was free to blow away. And it created a huge cloud of dust over much of the country. Let's not forget the huge dust storms that came with it. Houses were buried. Yeah. Not fun. And try breathing with all that dirt blowing everywhere. A lot of people had to move.
Tundra is another one. Oil drilling is a big problem up there (a lot of oil is in wildlife preserves, which are supposed to remain untouched). The problem is that these factories and the massive pipes used to transport oil are right in the way of migration routes. Migrations of hundreds of thousands of caribou travel across the tundra every year, and when a huge pipe cuts across the land, it makes it hard for them to get to their winter and summer homes. And with the melting ice that comes with climate change, many arctic animals have enough trouble surviving as it is without the threat of oil leaks, roads, and pipes.
Wetlands are also in danger. There is hardly any pristine wetland habitat left. A lot of it has been filled in to build houses. The problem is that wetlands are homes to thousands of different species, and are often important stops for migratory birds. They are also essential for cleaning our water and providing buffers for storms that come in from the oceans. Some of the fish we eat, like salmon, use wetlands to get big and healthy. Wetlands are also excellent carbon sinks - even better than forests. That means that they can hold carbon out of the atmosphere, so there is less carbon in the air contributing to climate change.
I'll cover other water habitats in later posts. But rivers, lakes and oceans all suffer if the surrounding habitat suffers (from erosion, runoff, litter, and so on).

The fact is, there are too many people, and not everyone can live in their own separate house with a yard. There's isn't that much space on the planet for humans, let along all the other species that need land to live.
Multi-story apartment buildings do save a lot of space. It's actually a very environmentally-friendly way to live (especially if it's built sustainably). I took an eco-footprint test once, and had a very sustainable lifestyle, except for housing (even though I live with 2 other people).
People need to stop developing new land whenever they run out of space. We can't expand forever. We need to learn how to compact our development, and reuse space that's already within cities. We need to reign in developers who want to build on every spot of land they see.

Farming is another big cause of habitat destruction. Try to avoid buying food that was grown on cleared land.

As for how to use this in a story, I think a lot of what I mentioned in the deforestation post applies. You can twist things around to fit the habitat of you're choosing. And all of the consequences will vary as well.

Hoot is a book/movie that talks about stopping a development that would destroy burrowing owl habitat.
And there's all those movies and books I listed in the deforestation post.

Cliff-Hanging Myself

Last night I though I'd finally be able to get writing again, but I ended up spending most of the night figure out classes for my grad program and emailing teachers and stuff.
And it turns out that I'll have to do a revision of my big research paper too. And I'll have to do more research for it...
I haven't gotten all of my classes either.
But who cares! It's been over a week since I've been able to right, and I'm one sentence away from an exciting part. Forget school! I'm going to write.

Cursed School Delays

I'm sooooo close!
Sooo close that I can almost reach it!
Only ten pages of editing left for Katani's story!
And what happens?
I have a research paper due next week.
TT^TT
No writing my story until that's finished... Maybe I can get the first draft done tomorrow so I can have my teacher look at it.
It's a paper about environmental fiction. Which is what I want to write. But I haven't really found an statements saying if books/movies have actually changed a person's views or behaviors relating to the environment and sustainability. Which is what I'm really interested in.

But after I finish my paper I need to finish editing Katani's chapter 4 that I read in class last week. I need to turn in the edit next week, now that I got my review from a classmate. So I can finish fixing that chapter up, and finish going through the notes Crystal gave me on the same chapter.

Why does school taunt me when I'm so lose to finishing?
TT^TT

No Repeats

The creative writing teacher was talking about this in class last week.
Yet another way that the school system is being screwed up.
Apparently throughout the whole state (or is it the whole country? I'm not sure and I'm too lazy to look it up) students are no longer allowed to retake a college class, unless they fail. They cannot repeat a class.
Which is horrible. Because there are so many classes that rely on a large number of students who return over and over.
Such as our band. We would not have a band if we did not have our musicians returning every semester. If only one-time students were allowed, there would be maybe 7 people in the band. And it would no longer be a band. Although I think we found a way to get around that, fortunately.
Repeats are forbidden for PE classes. And drama. And our creative writing class. In our writing class, we have older students with a lot of writing experience.
I hope people manage to find a way to sneak back into these classes.
the government has no right to stop people from gathering and learning and sharing what they create, whether it be music or writing.
People are paying for these classes. Not everyone retakes a class because they fail. And half the people in some of these classes graduated many many years ago. They take it for the love of the subject, not for credits.
Stop screwing with schools! They've been hurt enough already.

"So, do you use this blog to vent?"
...
Yeah, sometimes

Chapter 4

I read chapter 4 of my story in class last night.
Maan, is it normal for your throat to get so dry when reading something so long? Bleh.
There were a couple "guests" in class, who had taken the class before. One of them asked me about my story and we swapped emails.
It was exciting to have a person I didn't know actually come up to ask about my story. XP

Past Inspirations

So a few days ago, I talked about The Longest Journey, and how it probably inspired me to have my different worlds, all connected to each other.
So I thought I'd mention a few other inspirations. Although I'm pretty sure I mentioned a few of them before.

Dragons. I always liked dragons. But I think there was one story that might have nudged me over the line of the dragon-crazy. In middle school, I was reading through a textbook of short stories when I came across one called The Smallest Dragon Boy. And that story stuck with me. I learned many years later that it was part of a very well-known dragon series called the Dragon Riders of Pern (I learned this by accident when I started reading a book called Dragonsong, that was entirely to similar to be coincidental).
My ideas for telepathy did not come from the Pern series. Nor did they come from Eragon, or the Tortall series or any of that. Instead it came from a book called Kinship with All Life. That book was the start of my entire telepathic system. The other books I mentioned follow a similar system, but they weren't my inspiration. Nor do they work exactly the same.

And these next ones relate more to Fern than my stories in general.
I think the main reason that I created Fern was because of the X-Men. At first, I developed a few mutants to join the X-Men. One of them was actually quite similar to Fern. But eventually they all disappeared, and Fern took their place. And Fern, of course, is more of what I would like to be as a mutant.
Actually, I don't remember why I initially created her. But she has grown a lot from that point.
And I did not draw Fern's powers from the Tortall series (specifically Daine from The Immortals). Ferns main power - shapeshifting came about because that's what I think my superpower would be. And telepathy, as I said, came from Kinship with all Life. Her small abilities with the elements are also sort of along the lines of my research following the Kinship book. The healing is sort of too. Though I admit that Fern's healing ability may have been inspired by Daine. I don't actually remember how that one started.

And then much later I decided that Fern was actually one of a race of people from Magic-Earth, the Shaydens. Her powers echo their mixed magic.

Painting Fern

I did some painting recently. Painting of Fern in her dragon form, to be exact.

This one was practice with painting a picture, since my last painting didn't turn out that great. This one is better.


And this is a paint-your-own dragon figure I ordered form Windstone... back near when I graduated. It's been sitting around forever since I've been spending most of my craft time on pony orders for a while. But I had a break, and I've been using it to work on a bunch of other stuff. I finally finished the top layer of my quilt too, so I'll post that whenever I put it all together.
Anyway, here's Fern as a Windstone dragon. ^-^

I wish the details showed up better though.

Accepted!

Wooooot!!!
I was accepted into my grad program!
TT^TT
Finally.
I probably still have to do a bunch of stuff to finish registering. And I think I have to convince some other people to let me do my weird thing for my thesis (story instead of research paper).
But I'm finally in.
I'm a mixture of relieved and nervous.
Nervous, because I don't know how hard it will be, and it will probably cost a looooot.
Wish me luck!