NaNoWriMo 2013 Ends.

NaNoWriMo ended 3 minutes ago, and I proudly present my final word count for NaNoWriMo 2013:
32,168

Yeah, I have to say I'm proud. I'm glad I exceeded last year's 17,445 and I'm glad I count my story as a not-failure, especially considering the quality of its predecessor. Congratulations to everyone as NaNo '13 comes to a close! : ) I achieved my goal of 30K and even got the 32K I was praying for! I think it was worth the hour I spent every night writing and I'm proud of myself for accomplishing the student goal, at least.

Hope everyone has enjoyable holidays, birthdays, and summers and all that--might not write on here again until October 31 2014!

~N

NaNo Update--11.27

So NaNoWriMo 2013 is coming to an end and last year I epically failed with only 17,445 words and now I've got 28,461! So that's nice. I think by the way things are going, I'm aiming for 30,000, maybe 32K. But I'm only on chapter 8 out of 18, which makes me sad because I've really grown to love my story so much and I doubt I'd be motivated to write much after this whole thing is over, which is unfortunate! How grand it would be to complete my novel, perhaps with 60, 70K words in it, even if it takes a year! I wish I could see the day it could be complete! I can only hope I remain motivated to see the end of that thing.

Hope all is well with anyone else's novels as November comes to a close.
P.S. Happy Thanksgiving!

~N

NaNoWriMo 2013 update--11.20

It's already the 20th day of NaNo Time, but I remembered my blog and wanted to update.
Interestingly enough, (or not interestingly enough, since procrastination is unfortunately my strong suit,) I was in the middle of my nightly writing session until I came here to update the good old blog. At present, my new story has 20,860 words and it's 36 pages. I'm going for 30,000 this year, and I don't think I'll ever get to the Grand Total before high school ends, considering it's only going to get rockier and rockier along the way. Anyway, I plan to write buckets of words over Thanksgiving, although those four last days can either make or break you. Considering last year I spent my Thanksgiving vacation sleeping and, uh, not writing a single word, I'm starting to grow concerned. But I really like my story a lot and I can't wait to write the end. Whether I finish it or not before December, I hope I don't lose immediate interest in it once NaNo's over. Although it'll be an odd, odd feeling to write it without constantly checking my word count of course!!

Good luck to anyone else participating this year : )

~N

"The Pen Is Mightier Than the Sword"

Holding a pen is holding a weapon.

            I can slash through sentences without mercy. I can silence whole paragraphs in seconds. I can defeat an army of punctuation marks with a swift movement of my hand, forces of commas and periods and question marks transforming into exclamation points before they’re obliterated, flattened into inky scribbles on a white page.

            I can chew on verbs and devour my nouns. I can squash a period until it’s a comma and I can stretch a colon into an exclamation point. I can mold question marks into apostrophes.

            A pen is a hand.

            It can strangle a paragraph until it’s choking up sentences. It can rip letters from a word and then throw them across a page. It can tear two quotation marks apart and flip one into a comma and convert the other into an apostrophe.

            I can build a home for thousands of verbs and can set free a million adjectives. It can release hundreds of adverbs into the wild and it can pull them back when it needs just the right word. It can make a kingdom of similes and a country of metaphors. It can record the course of history and it can write and rewrite the future. It can free a million thoughts and catch a hundred possibilities.

            Holding a pen is holding the world in your fingertips.

Author's Note: "The pen is mightier than the sword." William Shakespeare. This is my favorite prose-y type thing I've written. (7.1.13)
~N 

The Semicolon

A sentence with a semicolon is a sentence an author could have finished but chose not to. A thought that could have ended but was left unfinished. Like a black-and-white painting that needed color but never got any. Like the artist couldn’t decide what colors to use from his grand pallet but if he knows one thing it’s that his painting isn’t complete. It can’t end there.

            A sentence with a semicolon is a giant bowl of soup. It’s Mom’s homemade chicken noodle with all its carrots and bits of celery, all its chicken chunks and noodles. Yet still, after every spoonful, the practiced chef knows for certain that something is missing—a pinch of salt, perhaps, a sprinkle of pepper forgotten from the recipe.

            A sentence with a semicolon is a girl wondering why her sentence isn’t over yet. It’s a girl wondering why the author would decide to continue a paragraph that doesn’t make any sense. Why would someone go through choosing such a complicated punctuation mark to continue a thought that is already finished? Why even bother? It’s a girl who thinks her sentence is better off a short, simple one, because even though a sentence with a thousand words and five hundred semicolons can be a beautiful one, a short one with a simple period at the end causes much less trouble. She doesn’t understand that the semicolon itself is an outcast—not a comma, not a period, but an awkward in between not yet acquainted with the common pen. She doesn’t understand that even though it’s not one or the other—a period or a comma—it can still be used. It can still find a place among the words; it can still weave itself onto a page and be accepted as a part of a beautiful sentence. 

Author's Note: I wrote this because of what a girl said to me once on semicolon day, 4.16.13, which is a day where all those who are depressed, hurting themselves, lost a loved one, etc... draw a semicolon on their wrist. A semicolon represents a sentence the author could have finished but chose not to. You are the author and the sentence is your life. 
~N 

New Eyes

Sometimes I like to take my glasses off just so I can see something no one else can.

            On the bus, strangers are not the people I’ve never met before—they’re aliens. Their dark winter hats morph into alien armor as they shove their way through the aisle to get a seat in the back. Their backpacks become shields strapped to their backs, their heavy coats become layers and layers of solid armor, and an old man’s cane becomes a sword for battle.

            My room is a child’s wonderland. My lamp blurs into a glowing candy cane, pictures of my family’s smiling faces turn into photos of hulking dinosaurs.

            At work, the heaps of papers piled in my office become the snowy mountains of something like a movie—the mountains nouns and commas and quotation marks trek the terrain fearlessly, unafraid of leaving behind clear footprints making up sentences making up paragraphs making up stories. My basic chair transforms into the throne of a queen and the precarious stack of the cafeteria’s Styrofoam coffee cups is a marble statue, painstakingly crafted by the hands of an old sculptor in the oldest parts of France.

            Outside my window, the patches of sun speckling trees are fairies coming out to say hello to me, migrating along the leaves as the sun makes its daily journey across the sky and dips into a sunset, a drop of paint spilling into a crystal clear puddle and streaking stains across a dying day.

            Sometimes, I like to keep my glasses on to know what other people are seeing. But other times, I like to take them to see what other people are not.

Author's Note: Something I wrote with an actual pen and actual paper because I haven't written a single thing in literally forever. So here we go! I like writing with paper and pen because you get a lot of chances to change and switch and edit things. So I made like 4 copies of this thing and it's only like 5 paragraphs or something. I don't know. It took a while but it's better now. Hope you like it! : )

~N

Clockwork Princess (3.19.13!!!!!)

For all those who don't know, an amazing book came out yesterday.

It's called Clockwork Princess, and it's the third and final book in the "Infernal Devices" series by the lovely and brilliant Cassandra Clare, whom I both respect and admire very much.

The second book was so good and full of heartbreak, it makes me cry like every time I read it. Even now, thinking about it... D''''''''''''''''':

What a weird face that was. ;)

Anyway, I just figured I'd post something, and since only yesterday I was skipping through Barnes & Noble, happily searching for my next true love (if that isn't an oxymoron anyway), I realized that if I wasn't writing anything recently, I'd at least talk about what I've been reading.

But yeah I'm on like page 150 or 160 and it's good!! I'm still waiting for what I want to happen to finally HAPPEN ALREADY, but... it's good! *anxiety *

For all those Cassandra Clare lovers out there, you get a high-five. :)

-N

King of Ashes--Seventeen Magazine contest entry

-->

When the quaking stopped, she was sure the world must have ended.

                  She didn’t know what to expect when she stepped outside. She imagined what might be on the other side of the door to the abandoned house she now hid in. Frozen, she saw a world of ice, or maybe of fire. Maybe there was simply nothing at all. Or, the allowed herself to think, maybe a new world had been born in the chaos. Maybe it will be Heaven, she thought.

                  She stepped over the wooden planks, snapped, that had fallen from the ceiling above her; she could see a grey sky through the spaces where the roofing had caved in, pushing aside wrecked household appliances—destroyed cushions, dismembered chairs.

                  She took a deep breath, standing by the door, her hand gripping the handle tightly. Was she ready for this? What if she saw something too terrible?

                  Nevertheless, she forced herself to swing the door open. Rubble was holding it closed, and she had to pull with all her might to squeeze herself through the doorway and out onto the streets of LA.

                  The first thing she saw was the sky.

                  It was layered with clouds of ash, smoke billowing up in the distance from an incredible fire in the northern side of the city. The endless skies held no light—and neither did the Earth’s surface underneath it.

                  Cars without doors littered the streets, careened off cracked roads torn in to pieces. As she stepped further out into the street, she saw so, so much more.

                  Only one, single building remained of the great city, looming over the city on its own, left to rule the city of ashes. The rest had fallen to crumpled piles of concrete and metal on the ground. Shattered glass layered the broken ground.

                  It was beautiful disaster.

                  She couldn’t believe her eyes as she made her way toward the city and that one, looming tower, now suddenly unbelievable huge next to the leveled grounds of the destroyed city.

                  She passed cars beyond totaled—tipped sideways and upside-down—their glass windows all shattered from impact.

                  She traced the yellow line running up the street. She found difficulty when the street plummeted into ditches created in the chaos. Cracks ran along the entire ground, and she wondered if they stretched on for miles.

                  She saw no people.

                  She stopped when she finally reached it, the single tower poking the serrated sky. The grand door was held open with a large chunk of debris. Inching herself through the space, she found herself gravitating to the stairs. Mindlessly, she climbed and climbed until she was at the top. By that time, she felt as if she’d been reaching for the tip of the world for an eternity, but she finally found the one window, a whole wall’s length, that stretched over the city. And as she stood there, looking at the whole city all at once, she knew she was the only one left.

Wish me luck!! :)
~N
P.S. THIS ENTIRE STORY IS BASED OFF THE PICTURE BY *ANDREEWALLIN ON DEVIANTART.COM!!!! (ANDREEWALLIN.DEVIANTART.COM) I'LL TRY TO LINK THE PICTURE BUT... it probably won't work. D': link Oh yay. : ) Have a lovely day everybody!! 
P.P.S. Oh and hey I just noticed the indenting is really weird? I'm sorry about that. D:

Like Forever

Wow it's been like forever since I've written  A SINGLE THING. :(

Fortunately, <<<CONTESTS RULE!!!!>>> http://figment.com/contests/seventeen/?utm_source=Contest+Blast+1%2F24%2F2013&utm_campaign=1%2F24%2F2013+Contest+Blast&utm_medium=email#details-tab  I'm in the Seventeen Magazine contest!! I'll post my entry in like a minute. :)
You know today I was reading ("Possession" by Elana Johnson) and I just had this weird... feeling in me, like I needed something but didn't know what it was. So I tried sitting down and writing my entry for the contest and I was like I BELONG HERE.

There's a funny thing about belonging. Over the summer at camp, they have a theater program, and my friend was going to make me do a musical. So it was my turn and I stepped forward, said my name, and, in the heat of the moment, with that spotlight on me--the owner of that stage for those fleeting seconds, the only thing I could think was I do not belong here and the director said, "Do you want to be in a musical?" And proudly, without regret, I said, "No." "What are you doing to do instead?" he asked, and I said, "I'm going to write all day."

I will never BELONG anywhere else but at my computer, writing.
All day, too.

~N