Last Weeks in Kentucky

This is one of my last weeks on campus, so though Tech Week for Macbeth is now over, now I have final projects and the like to frantically complete. Basically, I don't have a whole lot of time to sleep, much less edit and otherwise function like a normal human being.

So not a lot of editing has gotten done this week- a little has, but only a very very little. I've read enough to realize how bad the writing is in the beginning of the manuscript- and see how bad my patch job was the first time through. But once I finish the read-through and major cut/pasting, I can go back and make the writing decent. It's not so bad that I can't read it- a little distracting, but more of an incentive to get done and go back to fix it than a soul-crushing hindrance as before.

I should stop procrastinating and get some more work done, but first I'll leave you with a couple sketches I've done this week. (sketching is a good procrastinator, funny enough)

This second one is a uniform of sorts that I thought up for the scholars of the Valley castle- I thought since they're a pretty tight community they might dress differently from others, so here's an idea for a High Wizard costume.

Working on Macbeth's costumes has influence what I'm designing in my head, and now I've been watching a bit more of Game of Thrones (my friends have gotten me hooked, and I've been watching it in between classes because I have no self control) so the costumes on that are making me geek out about gowns and things. Such a pretty show.

Getting back to work now.

Have a good night, everyone!

First Edits Done

It's done. I've gotten through the whole manuscript. Wow, that's pretty cool.

So the first edit is done, which is awesome, and I feel like I fixed a lot of the writing. Now I know what major problems need to be fixed, and for the second edits I can go back and do the major cutting and pasting and touching up logistical problems and anomalies.

But first I'm going to take a small vacation. My spring break is next week, so I'll spend that time to do some more editing research, relax, and maybe get some work done on other projects. I haven't written any short things really, I think I'll try and get a few written to get back into writing, instead of just editing. I might even look at my failed NaNo attempt and see if it's worth salvaging.

I'm also going to be working on my art portfolio again, so I'll probably do some more sketches for y'all as I do that. What kind of images are you guys curious about? I'm thinking of doing some more landscape and architecture sketches, I do so few of those.

I do have one sketch to post now- I redid an interior sketch I drew a long time ago. I've fixed a lot of discrepancies and will try and restart that digital painting of it I wanted to do.

So there's that. Wow, I can't believe that last half went so quickly. Kind of makes me scared to go back and see why the beginning gave me such trouble; I doubt I fixed it all up.

I've got a lot of schoolwork to get done now that I can't use my manuscript to procrastinate, so... I guess I'll see you all in two weeks!

Slow and Steady... Right?

Gosh it's been such a crazy month. College is so weird. But I have gotten a little editing done.

Not much editing, there isn't much to report. What little I've done involved a lot of cutting pretty fluff. There was a lot of unnecessary description of dresses because I spend too much time thinking about them.

One thing I hope to accomplish is a story that's interesting to anyone, so I can't have too much girly things. It's not a very limiting thing, but as I said last post, I get a bit carried away.

Thank you all for being so patient with me, here's a sketch!

... of a dress. You see my problem? This is Elle in just a plain dress. But I like it. I haven't been drawing for myself much lately because I actually have drawing homework. It's kind of amazing. So this is the last of the sketches from my last go-through of my sketchbooks. I shall make more soon.

I'm still trying to figure out what to do for NaNoWriMo. I kind of doubt it will be possible though because college is a lot of work. But no surprises there. I might just try a collection of creepy stories. I have a few theories about hauntings I could explore. Last night I was in the art building during a pretty good rainstorm and it gave me some good ideas.

I'm Still Alive, I Swear!

Hello! Wow it's been so long, I didn't mean for this to happen!

Things have been kinda crazy with packing, moving my brother into his college, moving myself down to College (it was an eleven hour drive) and even now trying to figure out how to be a College Kid. Life now involves a lot more naps and using froyo as currency than I'd expected.

So I haven't gotten a lot of editing done. Strangely I've been really inspired to write poetry the last few weeks, so I've done some of that and we'll see if that turns into a thing.

This month is (supposedly, according to my NaNo Newsletters) officially NaNoWriMo Planning Month, so are any of you all planning anything? I really want to do it this year, as always, and since I'm not actively writing another story I might do it as a side thing. In order to lessen the load my friend and I might do a cowritten thing, which I know is cheating, so I don't know how we'd put that on the site, maybe just track our own progress so we each aim for 25k. It's not a thing you're supposed to do, I know, but it might just be best. If my friend decides she doesn't want to I might attempt it with my roommate, or even on my own but I don't know which story idea to expand on yet. I could retry my original NaNo attempt or start on the sequel to The Prophecy (since I accidentally already wrote an opening scene for it on the car ride to drop my brother off) but I don't think so. I have a list of ideas, I shall see.

I've been thinking a lot, as well. I mean I'm always thinking but it's usually about like, someone's nose or why society is dumb or that really attractive person across the room or something. This time I've been thinking about watching people die.

On the long-butt drive down to Kentucky I witnessed a car crash in which the driver in the car in front of mine went into the median and then flipped over midair, sending both driver and passenger through the windshield to hit the ground. The car ended up in the north-bound lane, and thankfully didn't hit anyone else and no one but the two in the car were injured. However I'm fairly sure I saw two people die that day, and I was the only one who got such a good view of it.

It was startling to say the least, and really hit me that I saw two people (who were unconscious from the initial impact in the ditch of the median) fall to their deaths. It was strange that as I watched it happen I thought "this looks exactly like the movies" up until I saw two bodies flop out of the car. You see the crashes in movies, but never the people who supposedly die in them. This may be because in movies everyone supposedly has their seat belts on, which would stop people from being ejected, but I think it's because however realistic these movies are they don't want to horrify the audience of an action movie. We are so used to seeing the battles, the high speed car chases and the amazing crashes and disasters portrayed in entertainment media but they never seem to show the effects.

A couple days later I saw the movie Now You See Me, which has a high-speed car chase in it and my musings held fairly true there, and that got me thinking even more, as someone who has written battle scenes into this story of mine, who has put characters through death and made others witness it, that I didn't really know what I was doing. (I mean I knew that anyway but now I know it in a different way, you know?) And we'll see how well I did once I get to those scenes in editing. But still I wonder, are books even supposed to make us feel horrified in ways movies won't? Books are already so much more personal, and take place in your head, already occupy so much more time and brainpower, is it alright to have this kind of realism?

I suppose realism from books is in part contributed by the reader and the extent of their experiences and what they can imagine. I remember being particularly horrified in certain parts of the Hunger Games at the violence, I wonder how it would effect me now that I've actually felt those things? I wonder how it would feel to a veteran?

So these are all things I've been thinking about. I know this isn't a particularly organized post.

On another note.... Have some sketches!

These are things I did last spring while on a trip to the US capitol, Washington D. C. and they're based loosely off of the Desert queen (left) and Elle (right) though really (especially for the one on the right) I was just messing around with pens and the thought of those pretty old-fashioned cameo things.

Back to actually on-topic things, I have not, in the past chaotic month, been able to do much editing. I have done some! Just nothing really of note. It's really just me being lazy and/or completely overwhelmed by everything that's going on so once I find out how to be a College Kid and get to a daily routine (which, if you play Sims- protip: get your sims on a daily routine from day one) I will actually pretend to be professional and set aside time each day.

I'm sorry for the long wait, everyone! (I mean no one really seems to read this but still, to those who do, thank you! and sorry.) I'll be back to weekly posts I think from now on.

Rock on, y'all.

LAIRE Again

So I still haven't done much of anything more in editing, which is very bad. I've been working and excuses.

However I did get the chance to go larping at LAIRE again, which was really fabulous. I need to make so many additions and repairs to my costume... but now I have quite a few months until I will be able to go again so I have time to do that.

This is the main design of my character, Wilsa.

Yeah ignore those feet there. Maybe once I fix the costume up I'll post a picture of me actually wearing it.

So I've put up plenty of sketches of Elle, but none of her familiar. He's kind of a mixed jungle cat, with markings all along the back, and the size of a medium sized dog. Of the two he's the sarcastic, realistic Hobbesian one. That's not a final sketch, I'm still working on the specifics of what he'll look like.

Oh and his name is Taim for now.

I'm editing right now, I actually have the manuscript open and everything. So no updates for now. Sorry.

The Desert Cast

So here are some more sketches! YAY!

First I'd like you to meet Violet. She's kind of a bitchy, stubborn and closed-off person, explaining her expression. She's one of the friends the main character meets and sticks with during the second part of the book, when she's in a desert region to oversee a conflict between nations. There Elle becomes part of a typical trio, I suppose, like you see in most stories. Most of the time she's just with her familiar, but in the desert she becomes attached to two other guards. And, for some time the familiar isn't always there... ~ooh mystery~

Next we have the other part of her trio, his name for now is Serb, which I chose not even realizing that is actually a word... But the sound of it suits him so well. Even so I think I'll have to change it. He's more friendly, the heart of the group, kind of, despite Elle being so emotional. I thought it would be nice to have a warm-hearted guy in the mix when so often those types of characters are shown as weak or useless. He's like a dad, kind of. In many ways he and Violet end up acting as parents for our orphaned protagonist.

There are actually two sketches of Serb, and you'll see the question mark on the second one; he's supposed to be around forty, which is still young, especially for their world, but the first sketch is my first attempt and he was way too old-looking. The second one is better, but I don't know if it's quite perfect. Still, you get the idea.

This is the uniform Elle ends up wearing, it's pretty standard, Serb and Violet are mages and wear something similar but they also have a lightweight cloak that all mages have, that may or may not be magical armor. Either way, Violet is for some reason very attached to hers.

Progress on editing, this past week, was minimal since I finally started working. For three straight days I scraped up goat poop and was almost humped by an alpaca. It sounds annoying but I really loved it. I got to just hang out with the animals for a couple days and it was strangely therapeutic, just being there by myself.

That job is over but the past couple days I've been working at Six Flags more, which doesn't have animals or feces involved (usually). So I've been pretty tired and lazy. I'm going to edit a lot today though.

113/415

Problems I'm Thinking About:
-general suckage
-character consistency
-mastering the use of dialogue
-well-rounded characters
-concise story-arcs for chapters (actually the last chapter I finished was great with this and I'm very satisfied)
-In the series, will the first book be considered lackluster (maybe it's just since I was recently very excited about the next book- they'll all be very different, but all the others deal more with a larger theme that is only hinted at in the first one.)

New Toy

It's my birthday today! Yay!

One of my presents (that was really for graduation, but I just downloaded/bought it the other day) was Scrivener, which I kind of fell in love with while researching for my editing. Aaand I spent the morning wading through the tutorial and getting my manuscript onto the program!

Now it looks a bit like this!

It's super exciting, and the program is really great. I expanded my chapters a bit to show you- on the left, see? It had the parts, which I broke down by where my character is, since she changes location drastically about halfway through the book, then the chapter, then scene. It really is nice for editing purposes. So easy to locate things. I also just finished tagging the scenes I've already edited with the characters and important things present. There's also a place on the right there that I could use to make notes on what needs to be fixed... It's just wonderful. And now I need to stop procrastinating and edit.

I haven't made much progress since last post- I went to visit family and was a bit busy having fun in their pool. Also they have five kids and I have an excuse there somewhere.

Also, here's a sketch!

It was from a few months ago, trying to learn how to draw older faces. I need to work on it, since I have a few characters well into their seventies. I'm getting better- I drew another one just recently but haven't uploaded it, but I thought it came out pretty well.

I don't know if this is really anything like a character of mine, but I was thinking of Darius when I started. Don't think it's really like him. But hey.

Due to Scrivener not having page numbers (that I can find) the page count will be a guesstimate from now on.

So far, since I just put it on Scrivener, the Word page count still works so I'm on page 95/415.

Problems I'm Thinking About:
-general suckage
-character consistency
-mastering the use of dialogue
-well-rounded characters
-concise story-arcs for chapters

Couldn't Wait

My schedule is all messed up for many reasons (but mostly because yay, no school!) so I couldn't wait the entire week to post again.

On a side note, even though (besides the last two days) I've been getting a lot of editing done, my parents are annoyed that I've just been "sitting on the computer" and... yeah. That's bothersome.

I also have been researching again, looking into mesopotamian mythology, because it's really interesting how the first civilizations saw their large dangerous world, and I can incorporate more of that into the story, if need be.

I couldn't wait to post mostly because I recently went through my sketchbooks again and have a few character sketches I really like. I filled up two sketchbooks since last summer and a lot of them had stuff relating to my book because it's been on my mind so much this past year.

So this is Jamie/James, and he's probably one of my favorite characters, even though in this book (after all I am planing a series) he doesn't get much time in-story. He's the first generation, so this is actually how he looks young, like in the "fifty years ago" prologue. I'm still learning to draw old people so... I'm also not sure, I realized yesterday, how old he should look, since yaknow, magic and all.

Haha, this sketch went through multiple de-smudges and a bad attempt to use hairspray instead of fixative before I actually fixed it. I don't usually have to use fixative on sketchbook things by I think I had been using a weird pencil... some pencils just CANNOT be hb when they say they are.

Please tell me what you think! I have yet to get ANY comments on this blog. What's up with that?

85/416

Problems I'm Thinking About:
-general suckage
-character consistency
-mastering the use of dialogue
-well-rounded character stories

-making world more realistic

-it sounds a little childish, where I am now, so getting rid of that "eighth-grader's fanfiction" feel.

Grand Beginnings.

So here's the last of the sketches I've uploaded thus far; it's the first sketch I made regarding the castle. It's the entry hall, and you can see directions on the margins regarding other areas of the castle. A couple of weeks ago I started an attempt at painting this digitally, Pottermore-style, and have made some sorely needed corrections to architecture. (For the record I drew this is Spanish class last year)

Editing has not progressed any further, due to personal events and stress and lack of time. I'm making another run at it this week. Wish me luck!


Problems I'm Thinking About:
-chapters
-general suckage
-character consistency
-what is the title going to be??
-mastering the use of dialogue

The Main Character

Allow me to introduce you to the main character, Elle. These are early sketches of her, and while I know they aren't that good, I plan on doing another in the future that is like, a serious drawing of her. I also plan on having her grace the front cover, but we'll see how much power I have over that. (I've always wanted to paint my own cover, I hope I can.) Just for the record they're more than a year old. Her neck is bothering me.

I hit a bump in editing progress. This is a pretty pathetic start, huh? It's school related- I have two huge senior projects and Advanced Placement testing. The testing ends (for me) Wednesday and it's been tough juggling studying my ass off and editing, but for most of the week I got about five pages done a night. Proposals for both senior projects are due within the next two days so I really don't have time to even be writing this. Ah, forbidden loves.

Problems I'm Thinking About:
-chapters
-general suckage
-character consistency
-what is the title going to be??
-mastering the use of dialogue for character and plot development (anyone have any dialogue tips?)

On Style

Looking through my sketches, a lot of them are just character designs- my sketchbook is filled with people, as that's what I usually like to draw. Here's some pulled from my sketchbook that show how my characters tend to dress.

I call this dapper gentleman Simon Tylor[subject to change]. He's a minor character, but he was escorting the main character to a ball, so I drew him to get out of a rut when I wrote that part last July. In this fancier getup I decided to draw most of my inspiration from seventeenth century styles. Seventeenth century has since been where I get the basic shape for most male characters, but I'll never be comfortable enough with those tights so it's been modernized somewhat. Women's styles in the story I usually create drawing from Renaissance art.

On the left is a Renaissance girl, not one of my characters, but a sketch that shows what I have in the back of my mind designing the women. I modernize their outfits to my liking a bit as well. The story isn't technically in a different time period, just removed from ours and lacking an industrial revolution since hey, magic. On the right is another design, not taken strictly from the Renaissance, but also relevant to the styles in my book.

I realize that what the characters are wearing isn't of the utmost importance, but I'm very visual and it's part of how I immerse myself in the world. I draw to make it real to me and to make me able to see the characters and how they would interact and move within a scene and with others. And let's face it, I like pretty dresses.

I hope y'all liked the drawings!

Current Word Count: 187,767

Last Panic

I've had yet another unproductive week. I'm kind of stuck at this one point because I feel it might not fit into the story well, even though it was in my original outline. I've decided to write it anyway to give myself the option to take it out when I edit, but it's really awkward and hard to write when I'm constantly doubting myself. I'm also afraid writing something really awkward might mess me up for the ending scenes, which are supposed to be really nice and heart-warming and fun and I'm sooo excited to write them. Part of this is probably nerves- the procrastinator in me is freaking out that I might actually finish something and is stomping on the brakes, but I'll push through. -dramatic music-

I just went through all my sketchbooks from the past couple years and pulled anything slightly related to the story, which was surprisingly little-eleven sketches. One of which Picasa somehow shrunk down to one blue pixel, so I'll have to upload it again. The amount of things I've irreparably screwed up by hitting the wrong button is too large to count. (also why I have my manuscript saved online and in three other places)

So here's one- From a moment in the prologue. But believe me this character comes into play later as well. Just much, much later.

 Yes, that one is missing a finger. It'll all make sense later. Eventually.

Current Word Count: 183,793

Character Sketches

These are four stylized character profiles from a while ago. Bear with me-I really cannot draw older people well, which is why the bottom right is so strange looking. Will learn.

From left to right, top to bottom: Main character Elle, Queen Daniella, Officer Daryn, and Advisor Darius.
More sketches to come, once I charge my camera and stop being lazy. (ha)
I'm now realizing how old these are and thinking I might redo them. We'll see.

Also, I haven't written that much due to a huge project this week. I ended up presenting the thing in the school auditorium and it was quite a trial. Glad it's over.

Current Word Count: 183,686

Mick

There's one character that I've noticed I have a habit of drawing.

This is Mick, the top two are not exactly alike, I know, but that's because I don't exactly know what she looks like as a young woman. The one on the right is actually my favorite, but I didn't know I was drawing her until I was done.

In the story she isn't this young; she's around seventy, and looks more like the vague drawing at the bottom.
But I like drawing her young; both because I can't draw old people very well, and because she's full of life. She cracks me up, at least in my mind. I'm sure it doesn't translate as well onto paper.

But that's what editing is for.

No updates on word count.