Never a Dull Moment

You know, every now and then I'm afraid I'll run out of ideas for my blog.
I always aim for at least 10 posts a month. Sometimes I forget and miss one, and then I'm very sad to see that a month only has 9 posts. XP

But I've had this blog going for 7 years.
Holy crud... has it really been that long? O__O
And I haven't run out of ideas yet!
It seems that I get ideas all at once for posts, and I write them all down so I don't forget. I just got several more ideas, so I'll slowly post those over the next few weeks.

Also, I still have my list for the "Environmental plots" section. I'll have to start working on one of those again.

Family Crest

I thought I'd post this.
We have a family crest!




And a saying for the camily too.
"Brave in Difficulty"

I looked up some more pictures of the crest, and it seems that half of them have the colors of the lions and the background inverted. So I'm not sure what the differences in them mean.
But I want to draw our three lions now...
And I wonder if any other sections of my family have a crest. Hmmm.

Making FIRE

This weekend I went to a program where I learned how to make fire. Without matches or a lighter or anything.
It was so exciting! There were about ten people in the class, and everyone was so thrilled the first time they were able to blow their tinder into flame.
We used a bow drill.

It doesn't seem like it would be hard.
It is.
Rubbing two sticks together will not give you fire.
There are so many different factors - the type of wood, the hardness of each piece of wood, the way each piece is carved, the friction for each piece, how hard you press, how wide and deep the notch is.
the first day, we practiced with the kits the teachers brought. Even that is tricky. You need to brace your foot over the board, and kneel at the right angles with your legs and feet. You also need to make long strokes, keeping your hand parallel to the ground (it's a lot easier with two people). At first I was pressing too hard. And then the handhold wasn't waxed, so too much friction was going up there. And then it turned out that my board was too hard of wood.
It's really easy to get smoke. It's hard to get a coal. Once you get a coal started, you need to take it very slowly to let the coal stick. And then you wrap it up in its little nest and keep blowing until it ignites.
It probably took me ten tries the first time.
And then everyone howls and goes "FIRE!"

Yesterday - the second day - we all made our own fire kits. We didn't gather our own materials. That would make everything much harder than it already was. We did gather our own bow and we carved everything out.
I was the first one to finish and get fire.
For my second fire, I built it up and we kept it going as other people added their flames to it. It was still going by the time I left. It was like my baby. XD

Always pray to the fire spirits, and thank them for their lovely fire~

I started 3 fires - one the first day, and then two yesterday, on my own kit.
This kind of stuff will be great for my stories. We also learned to make cordage, which is great because that's the kind of stuff Katani likes to do . Now I know how it works~

A long time ago, I wrote about this book called Tracker, by Tom Brown Jr. As a kid, he was taught everything by a Native American shaman. That first book actually gave me some great ideas for my Ashes story. I'm reading another of his books now, and there are several others (I want to read them all). He has a survival school in New Jersey, and our two teachers were his students.
I really want to go to that school... his books are amazing.

Personal NaNoWriMo

The NaNoWriMo is infamous among amateur writers. Simply put it's the National Novel Writing Month.

The rules are as follows:

- Write one 50,000 word (or longer!) novel, between November 1 and November 30.
- Start from scratch. None of your previously written prose can be included in your NaNoWriMo draft (though outlines, character sketches, and research are all fine, as are citations from other people's works). While this is no longer a hard-and-fast rule, it is still very strongly recommended, ESPECIALLY for first timers.
- Write a novel. We define a novel as a lengthy work of fiction. If you consider the book you're writing a novel, we consider it a novel too!
- Write more than one word repeated 50,000 times.
- Upload your novel for word-count validation to our site between November 25 and November 30.

Now I don't know about anyone else, but I have a life (or at least I pretend to have one) and I don't really have time to write 50,000 words in a month; especially since I'm very particular about my own work. Not only that, but 50,000 words is a lot for a hobbyist who isn't all that invested in getting into writing as a career.

But as one kind person who understands lazy people like me wrote, "But you can rebel and you can do your own thing!" And thank goodness for that. So a few friends and I decided to rebel in the most rebellious way we could while still keeping the idea of NaNoWriMo intact.

We decided our own goals for the month: write a complete chapter, write some amount of words a week, write anything, etc.

Then we decided on a date to send our work for the week to everyone via email and a date to send out feedback on everyone else's work.

After that we decided what we wanted the others to pay attention to. For me I wanted my betas to pay attention to character interactions, believability of the world, and the believable integrations of characters into this world, plus grammar and spelling.

Then we started writing. Simple, no? We removed the novel part of the NaNoWriMo as well. Mine will eventually turn into a videogame with multiple branching storylines (or just a comic, we'll see). The weekly check-ins and feedback are really useful and it's nice to discuss how to tackle certain problems and see the results. That and I get some great ideas for character interaction by talking with everyone.

It may not be the NaNoWriMo that everyone is accustomed to, but hey it works for me. I'm even thinking that maybe I should just do it all the time. I get to work at my own pace and I don't need a billion words by the weekly turn in date. For the first turn in day I submitted a few pages of notes about the world!

I like how it doesn't demand my full attention constantly and it's easy to go and deal with all that life has to throw at me.

So here's my question to anyone reading this out there.

What are your writing goals?
What do you want your audience to get out of your work?
What do you want your betas (editors, whoever) to pay particular attention to when they read your work?

My First Craft Fair

Okay, so last year Mom took some of my craft stuff to this little craft fair, but this was the very first time I got to go to a fair to sell my stuff!
I was fun~
There were maybe about 15 booths, and it went for an hour. I also knew several of the people, since it was through Ananda. I think since it was a small craft fair, it was a lot more easy-gong than a big one, which made it less tiring and more fun.
It's fun seeing the other booths! I didn't get anything but Mom got some stuff.

I made some new things for the craft fair and pulled out a ton of stuff that had been sitting around for a while. Mom also added a few things she had crocheted.

I printed out a few little "business card" things. And then I didn't hand them out to people, so I still have most of them. >o< It's nice actually being able to interact with the people who like my stuff. Almost everything else I've sold has been online. I sold 9 things. And 3 people asked to reserve things before the show even started. This one little boy hung around for about 10 minutes, obviously wanting to get some stones that Mom had in little packets. He did get a stuffed cat I made, so that his stuffed dog could chase it XD. He kept asking why everything cost so much. There were a couple things that I was really hoping to sell, and both of them were taken! So I'm glad that they found a nice home. The poor teddy bear is still stuck here though. I guess there are too many teddy bears floating around. I put a bunch of the remaining plushies in Etsy, so maybe they can find homes there.

Now I gotta finish a couple commissions.

The lull

Well, I have officially reached the part of my story beyond which I don't know much. All of the solid ideas I had have passed. And ahead is just a muddy blur, with a vague end point.
So, I'm going to plod along and see what happens. Last night I hit a little burst of ideas, so I hope they keep coming.

By the way, I don't think anyone mentioned the nanowrimo-esque thing.
Will one of you guys write a post about it? Since it was your idea originally?
(Desperately trying to bring other writers back to the blog @_@ )
My November project is to try to finish my rough draft of Ashes.

So, I will go and continue writing through my muddy pit and see if anything happens in the next hour.

Recommended Books

Whoo, I finally finished!
These are two posts that i've beebn slowly building off of as I find new books or movies to recommend.
To Watch
References for Writers


The first one is entertainment, mostly. Books, movies, shows, anime, manga, games, ex.
The second one is mostly research stuff. Websites and books, and stuff about writing.

There is a bit of overlap between the subjects. And some of them could possibly get switched, but I'm tired of messing around with these lists. XP
Both posts are listed under the links heading of the sidebar.

I recently realized that I didn't really list most of my reference books, about horses, or Chinese gardens, or art, ex. So I've been slowly adding those to my lists.
And I finally finished, with my stack of horse books. ^-^' I have a lot of those from when I used to go riding a lot...
I want to go riding more. TT^TT

Big Hero Six

So, we went and saw Big Hero Six today.
I think there were things that I wanted to say about it... but I can't remember any of them. Xd
IT WAS AWESOME!
I don't think I've ever been in a theater with so much laughing. ^-^
Baymax was so funny, just about every time he appeared.
All the characters were fun.

Maaaaaan, after watching this, I reallly need to work on my furure world for my Ashes story. The world in the movie was so awesome...

Ashlyn Reading 2

On Thursday, I read chapters 2 and 3 of my Ashes story (My grad project).
I should think of a better way of differentiating my 2 creative writing classes... Anyway, this was the smaller class that I'm taking on the side.
One of the girls in my class was really excited to read more of my story, so I hope she liked these chapters. XD
I also realized that I've gotta do a lot more work on developing the future world. Their technology, and their transportation, ex. It takes place about 50 years in the future. And I purposefully didn't change certain aspects of life. But that doesn't mean that I shouldn't work on them. @_@
Although some of it has to do with the fact that Ashlyn doesn't experience a lot of things during the first 2 chapters.
And some of it has to do with me just not adding in details that I had in the side of my head.
I designed some new technology for them, at least.
I think I have a better idea of how to incorporate the back story too.

Why, bikes? Why?

I wonder why people on bikes can be such jerks.
I can kind of understand why they might be mean to people in cars, because people in cars may sometimes be jerks to people on bikes.
But that's not always true.
And it also doesn't explain why people on bikes can also be jerks to other people on bikes.
So, what is it? Do they feel special because they have fancy road racers and riding suits?

To Teach a Class

So, my class that I taught on Wednesday went well.
I've given plenty of presentations to my classmates, but this is the first time I gave an official talk to younger students.
Originally, I was told there would be 45 students, but there were apparently 10 more than that. They were in 7th and 8th grade.
They listened very well at first, to my intro, and when I read my story. They seemed to like my story, so that's good. But because I asked them a lot of questions, they'd chatter a lot during them and I'd need to quiet them down (For example, as I listed some environmental fiction, I mentioned Wall-E. Someone made a Wall-E noise, and I asked if anyone else could to it. That opened up a chorus of "Wall-E"'s, which was hard to quiet. That was the first and most interesting one XD). Which is to be expected, I'm sure. It was a long lesson, and they probably wanted to go do more stuff around the ranch.

As an activity, I asked them each to design a story, or part of a story.
Some of the ideas they shared were very cool. Others just came up to share to be weird, or to get attention. Again, that's to be expected. It was kinda funny though. I asked if they had any questions about the environment, and one girl asked if we could milk chickens. Leslie, the director of the ranch seemed pretty shocked about that, apparently thinking the girl's question was serious. It wasn't.
I tried to record the lesson, but I was dumb enough to leave my recorder on the picnic bench, so I probably got very little of my speech, and a lot of the kids talking and whispering. Heheh.
Robin took a lot of pictures for me. I haven't even looked at them yet, come to think of it...
Hopefully the kids had fun during some of it. I'd have liked to have kept it shorter, to fit their attention spans (the whole thing, with story, talk, activity, and sharing was pretty long). But partly my lesson needed to be a certain length, and a lot more people wanted to share. Which is great, but I think the sharing started making some of the others bored. XD
So, yaay~ That took a lot of planning, since I went so much earlier than the rest of my class. So it's nice to get that big project out of the way.