Just spent about half an hour on one sentence.
Maybe 45 minutes.

It's the first sentence of the story, but still...
I don't think that's a very efficient pace.

YA Nov Con

Today I went to a little convention for young adult novels.
I wasn't sure about going at first, since I didn't know any of the writers that would be present, or the books they would be talking about.
But I'm glad I did.
It was a cool experience.

It started off with a panel of three writers - Neal Shusterman, Ann Jacobus, and Stephanie Kuehn - and an additional guest speaker. They talked about their novels that featured mental illness, and also about how mental illness had affected them, or those close to them.

I think I can embed a video of the talk here, though I haven't had a chance to watch it yet.


( Edit: Aaw heck, I'm in the video @_@ )

There was a brief Q&A at the end, and I went up to ask a question. I was second line, with a girl behind me. And some other girl came up in front of us, probably not even realizing we were there planning.
Which annoyed me. Not because my question was super important (I was going to ask the girl behind me if she wanted to go before me). But since the other girl cut in front of us, we ran out of time to ask our questions.
When the talk ended, I was at the "whatever" stage, not really caring anymore. But then they asked the three of us who still had questions to step aside. They brought us to a room with the three authors, so we could ask our questions.
And one of the girls started talking about these awful emotions and anxiety that she felt. And how her parents told her she didn't need to see a counselor or anyone, because she had them to talk to. But they didn't think anything was wrong with her.
The three authors and the two of us girls each gave her a hug.
She got some good advice, so I wish her the best of luck.

Depression is a real, serious thing. I know that, and a lot of the people around me know that. I forgot how common a thing it is for people to deny its existence.

So, yeah my question felt pretty unimportant after that. I was mostly interested in how to do accurate research to portray mental problems, since I have a story planned that will draw on that (I've written a practice chapter about it, as well as a short story about one of the side characters, but I still am missing a lot of the story).

We were there for a while, so I missed most of the next talk. I don't regret it though.


The next talk was about diversity in stories. Though again, I only caught the tail end of it.
It's about how most YA heroes are white. Or "typical" in other ways.
My characters tend to be rather... oddly diverse. Katani is half white, quarter Tibetan, and quarter Indian.
Ashlyn from my grad story is mixed too.
And Briena, from my older stories (she's getting a big revamp) is half Native American.
I don't even know what Evva is yet.
I think it's my strange mixed family that brought about all these blends. I love them all~

One lady, Lindsay Holland, talked about her book with a Chinese boy as the protagonist. She is not Chinese, or a boy. And yet so many of her readers were convinced that she was, and were shocked to find her a white lady. Her writing must be super convincing.
Heheh. I hope I can do that with Katani...


Next was a scifi/fantasy panel, which I was most excited abouty. YA fantasy is my genre!
Except scifi/fantasy was pretty much not discussed at all. Most of the questions were about the authors way of prepping themselves before writing, what their elevator pitch might be, ex.


After that panel, I dashed over and bought a book to get signed.
The one I really wanted was already sold out. I got Scythe by Shusterman. No doubt I'll write about it some time in the future.

Man, I really need to read more.
I'm so behind in reading.
And everything else...

For the next event, the crowd broke into fifteen groups - one for each of the 15 authors. So we got a few minutes to talk to each of them.

Neal Shusterman
Alexis Bass
Martha Brockenbrough
Jessica Brody
BT Gottfred
IW Gregorio
Lindsay Holland
Gordon Jack
Ann Jacobus
Stephanie Kuehn
Stacey Lee
Gretchen McNeil
Sara Santana
Andrew Smith
Mariko Tamaki

I'll share this highlights.

I asked Neal Shusterman if he had any general advice about query letters.
I didn't tell him anything about my story.
And he said that if it has dragons, or wizards, or mermaids, of vampires, ex, then no one will look at it no matter how good it is, because those topics are overdone.
...
Dragons and "wizards" are 2/3 of what I write.
I didn't tell him my query had dragons in it.

I don't believe that no agent will accept stories with dragons or wizards.
But judging from his advice, I guess it's really really hard.
I guess a story that includes them has to be really unique.

I guess my goal is even harder than I thought. And it's never been easy...


Lindsay Holland wrote the story about the Chinese boy.
She told us that she never reads online reviews of her books, for good reason. But her husband sometimes picks out good ones to read to her.
There was one review that only gave two stars, and she didn't want to hear it. But her husband insisted.
The review said "This is a good story, but it's too autobiographical."
Whoa, awesome. Her book is real enough to trick readers.

I asked her about how she researched to write for a Chinese character. She didn't really read any books. She had never been to China either. And when she had people who were from China go over a draft, they only had some minor corrections.
Unlike me, who has a couple shelves worth of culture books for Katani's story...

I really need to find a writing/critique group...
My old one is now too difficult to reapply to, because of the damn school limits.

So, that's one of the many books I learned about today that I need to check out.
I couldn't buy all of them...

Andrew Smith told us about how someone randomly approached him on facebook, asking to write a screenplay for his book.
He linked them to his agent, and that guy ended up being a famous Hollywood screenplay writer.
And then after that, some famous director contacted him about making it into a movie.
Every writer's dream - to have famous people begging to turn their book into a movie XD
Definitely impressive.


So, the good thing about going here without knowing any of the authors is that I didn't get nervous and awkward while talking to them (like I was during the few seconds I spoke to Hugh Jackman).
It was exciting to talk to them, ask questions, and hear their stories. Although since I wasn't familiar with their work, it was hard to pick out specific questions most of the time.

I'm glad I went. It was a good day.
I learned a lot, though not all of it was heartening.
I know it won't last, but right now it feels like every time I get close, something happens to push it away again.

blah blah blah
I hope to go back next year. I wonder if any of the same writers will be there. Hopefully I'll get the chance to read some of their stuff beforehand.

Overshadowing the Apprentice

I'm shifting gears a bit in regards to my writing. I want to get a bit more distance before I go back over Katani again.
I really suck at doing really long, detailed edits of my own stuff. Not because I'm bad at the detailed stuff, but because I'm bad at keeping that state of min for more than half an evening...
I'll need to get better at that, because this next work through of Katani is where I want to make sure I have every detail and word as great as I can.
Which is kinda impossible, because in a few months, a lot of it won't seem right anymore.

Such is fate.


So I'm going back to work on Evva's story. I've been neglecting her for a while.
My first drafts are always bad, but there's an interesting problem.
Evva is a mage apprentice. She's traveling with her master to gain experience.


As a master mage, Master Asani has to respond to requests from the towns they pass through.
Evva lets her master do most of the talking, since she hs more experience dealing with annoyed or frightened people.
Except this makes her seem kind of passive during these scenes.

I already kinda know what to do to fix it, at least.
Partly to have more of Evva's thoughts and reactions to some of the situations. And Also, Master Asani can let her handle some of the less intense situations, for practice.

I guess I just wanted to do a writing update.
Ugh, why am I so tired?

And finally,
UUURRRRGHHHHHHH, LIFE!
In so many ways...

Workaholic

Finishing up my posts from The Artist's Way.

It seems like work and creativity are in a never-ending battle for your time.
It's easy for people to become addicted to their work. They feel too busy to do anything creative.
And although work can be a real addiction, most people applaud it, since you're working hard. Even if you're working too hard.


Work might be an escape. We might use work as an excuse to avoid people, or feelings.
But it might end up blocking you from other important stuff.

A lot of people don't even realize that they're workaholics.
How do you know if you might be a workaholic? Here are some signs.

You are...
Not taking time off for fun or creativity
Working after you've left the office
Canceling hang-outs and get-togethers
Postponing stuff until "after work" (which of course almost never comes)
Taking work on vacation
Working during family time
Or if people complain that you always work


Workaholics could be afraid to have fun. They think of it as a mis-use of their time, so they tell themselves that they don't have time to do fun or creative stuff.

And the thing about being a workaholic is that it could go on without end. They think they'll do stuff after they've "finished work." But work doesn't have an end. There is no final goal, because there will always be some new project that you get once you finish the current project.
It's like running on a treadmill.

So, what do you do about it?
Well, start by setting limits on your work. Don't over-work.
And don't be afraid to get help.

Short and Sweet

Steven Universe Episodes are only about 12 minutes each.
And they do a good job of fitting awesome stuff into those minutes.
Now when I watch something like My Little Pony, I think of it in the context of shorter episodes (and from the context of cutting down as much as possible). Since they have twice as much time, there are some pretty obvious scenes that are longer than they really need to be.

I don't think that's bad. It's still entertaining (the target audience probably won't notice or care). I guess I'm just more impressed in the fact that Steven Universe can do a great job with such short episodes.
Although that does men that MLP gets longer songs... SU ones are pretty short.

Crazy, or Poisonous

Coming in with another post from The Artist's Way book.

Good friends and family are some of the best things in existence.
They make you happy just by being around.

On the flip side, there are poisonous people.
They are the kind of people that have a way of turning the mood sour. They make you doubt yourself.
Now, people close to you will give you a bad time every now and then (there's a reason "fight like an old married couple" is a phrase). But poisonous people have a way of darkening your day consistently.
Maybe they're jealous of your creativity.


Similar to poisonous people, although not as openly hurtful, are crazy-makers.
Crazy-makers make everything far more complicated than it should be.
They don't follow rules or schedules. They pretend like they care about your schedule, but they derail you from it anyway.
They expect special treatment. They waste your time and your money. They create drama, and blame others for their mistakes instead of actually trying to fix them.

Whether a person is poisonous or a crazy-maker, it's probably to your benefit to avoid their company as much as possible.
But it can be hard to understand if a relationship is poisonous or insane. If you suspect that's the case and you don't know what to do about it, try to get help.

When we're surrounded by good people, we can accomplish great things.

Environmental Plots: Agriculture

On to the the next environmental plot: Agriculture.
There are a lot of people on the planet. And those people eat a lot of food.
But not all food is created equal. The types of food, and the way in which they are grown, effect your life more than you might think.

Conventional farming methods go the laws of nature.
When agricultural land is packed with hundreds or thousands of the same type of plants, it can drain the soil of important nutrients. Farmland is not allowed to work as a natural system would work, so those nutrients do not get replenished.
Because of this, farms dump loads of chemical fertilizers onto their land.
These fertilizers are often made with fossil fuels, which are also not sustainable.
Extra fertilizer runs into nearby water systems, where they can cause significant damage. As these chemicals run down rivers and collect in lakes or bays, they may lead to huge dead zones where nothing can live in the water.
There's a massive one in the Gulf of Mexico.
This often has to do with algal blooms. When fertilizers gather in a body of water, they trigger the algae to grow like crazy. But all that algae sucks the oxygen and stuff out of the water. And when that algae dies, there is nothing left for the other organisms.

The other chemicals used are pesticides: poisons to kill bugs or weeds that could damage the crops.
Except pesticides don't only kill the bad bugs/weeds/ex. They kill anything. Even creatures that could help the farm, like pollinating honeybees.
And if pesticides are used poorly, the pests can actually become immune to them. Which means that farmers go on to use even more toxic stuff.

This is why organic farming is so important. They don't use lots of synthetic chemicals, which would otherwise pollute the soil and water, and damage nearby life.


When new farmland is created, farmers rip out the plants that used to grow there. Including the ground cover, which helps keep the terrain stable. When the ground cover is removed, all of the dirt beneath can wash away. As you might imagine, that makes it hard to grow crops there anymore. And all that dirt might be washing into the rivers and clouding them up (which can cause plenty of problems to the water life, and the quality of the water).
Did you learn about the Dust Bowl in school? Well, that was caused because farms ripped out all of the grasses that held the dirt in place.


Monoculture means to grow only one type of crop. Rows and rows of the same variety of corn, or tomato, or anything else.
This is not how nature works. Species rely on each other for nutrients, shade, stability, ex. In a monoculture setting, farmers need lots of extra chemicals to keep the plants alive.
One of the biggest dangers of monoculture is the lack of genetic diversity. If a disease shows up, it is unlikely that many of the crops will survive since they all have very similar genes. There's less chance that any of them will have a random immunity.
Our society relies almost entirely on a handful of species. So if anything ever happened to one of those species, we would be in a lot of trouble.
Think of the potato famine in Ireland.
So not only is it important to encourage polyculture - growing different types of plants instead of only one - but we also should give more attention to the heirloom species. The more diversity we have, the more stable our food foundation will be.

Now that we've looked at the plant side, let's turn to animals.
Meat takes many times more energy and resources to produce than vegetables do.
If you think about it, it makes sense.
When you grow a cucumber vine, you give it water and nutrients and light, and then you pick the cucumbers and eat them.
But if you raise livestock, those animals are eating food that could otherwise go to feeding humans.
It depends on the animal (chickens don't eat as much as cows, ex) and how they're raised (free range cattle, or those fed on grain, which is not a natural food for them). But it can take around 10 times more resources to raise livestock that to grow crops.
Animals need a lot of water, food, medicine, and land.
And animals also create a lot of waste. There's the obvious waste, which is sometimes flushed into nearby water systems.
But there are less obvious sources of waste too. For example, cows evolved to eat grass. But a lot of places feed them grain, which makes cows gassy. Gassy cows let out methane, which is a greenhouse gas (more powerful than carbon dioxide).

Meat also takes much more land to raise that crops do. Massive amounts of deforestation happen in order to clear ground for farming.
Your burger may have come from recently destroyed rain forest.

It is not efficient to raise meat.
And most of the time, meat production is incredibly cruel.
Those movies you see about animals raised on pastoral farms? Yeah, that almost never happens today.
Most of our meat, milk, and eggs comes from factory farms. Huge facilities where thousands of animals are crammed together in cages so small that they can't turn around. Chickens might have their beaks cut off so they don't peck their neighbors. Baby animals are separated from their parents the moment they're born.
Life is treated like garbage.
There are places that treat their animals better. But it's impossible for all meat to come from places that let animals roam free and eat natural food. We eat so much meat that there is not enough room to raise all of those animals in pastures. Our huge demand for meat means that animals are crammed into filthy, cruel, crowded conditions where they never see the sun.

Does this mean you should never eat meat? No. Meat has good nutrients. But you need to pay attention to where your meat comes from, and you probably need to cut back on the amount of meat you eat.


With so much land, money, time, and resources going into our food, it seems like people should appreciate it.

Except a huge percentage of what we grow/raise never even makes it to the markets. It might not be the right color, or it might have a spot on it.
So much that food we grew ends up getting dumped, although it's perfectly edible.
And markets throw away plenty of stuff that's been sitting around for a while.
And of course, everyone who buys food ends up wasting some of it.

It's a bizarre thing, with so much wasted food here, there are still people all over the planet who are starving.



How Would You Use this Topic in a story?
There could be some chemical disaster from farming. There are plenty of waterways that aren't safe to swim in because of chemical runoff from agriculture. I did a study on one such area.
In the novel Flight Behavior, there is a concern that farming chemicals caused killed someone by giving them cancer.

Maybe some nasty organisms have become immune to all known poisons?

A disease could infect much of the world's food supply.
This happened in the novel "The Windup Girl."

You might want to look into the cruelty of meat production.

Or check out the habitat destruction that happens before farms go up.

Or you could draw from history for ideas.
The Dust Bowl occurred when farmers ripped up the grassland, and all the dirt got blown into the air.

The potato famine happened because Ireland had to rely almost entirely on a single type of crop. When disease hit that crop, it meant mass starvation.

Make History Fun!

Yesterday my uncle was telling me about an author who writes about history.
But he writes it in a fun way, to engage younger audiences.
Rob says they're written almost like a mystery novel.

That is such an awesome idea. Why don't more people write history in ways that are fun to read? I mean, history can be freaking fascinating!
I like learning about it, but reading about it is so dull most of the time...

I'll check this guy out some time.

Whoa, it's cool when you watch something, and you can clearly see how it influenced someone you know.

Overthrown

I'm pretty sure Garnet has taken over as my favorite character.

Is it weird that I feel really guilty about it?
I'm sorry, Kenshin...

Big Screen!

A few weeks ago, they played Spirited away in theaters for a day.
And yesterday was a day where they had Princess Mononoke on the big screen.


I saw both of them. I had never seen either on a big screen before, so I noticed little details that I had never noticed before.
And the music was amazing.

It's easy to tell who had never seen Princess Mononoke before because of the reactions to some of the scenes. Like a samurai getting his arms shot off. I suppose you wouldn't normally to hear laughter at scenes like that, but there was plenty of it? I think more from surprise than anything. Heh.
I hope some new people fell in love with Princess Mononoke~

Princess Mononoke still remains one of my best models for environmental fiction.
I heaped love upon id during my graduate talk.
Although I still cannot pick a favorite Ghibli movie. It's impossible to choose...

New Beginnings

I haven't made a new years post yet!
New years is a fascinating time. It's a fresh start. A whole new year ahead of you.
There's a line from Anne of Green Gables: "Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it."
That's like the new year, except you have much more than a day ahead of you!

This year is definitely going to mean a lot of changes for me. Some that I'm hoping to pull together myself, but some that will come inevitably.
I'm leaving school, where I've basically been all my life. It's great to get out of it. It's great to finally jump fully into my field. But is also means that there are a lot of unknowns ahead. It's exciting, but also a little nervous. Nervous-making? No, that's wrong. That's from Uglies.

The jobs and the future and the life that have always floated around in my head will soon be a reality.
Whoo, it'll be something.

Good luck everyone! Have a wonderful new year, do your best, and have fun!