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
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Monday, July 1, 2013
"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
~N
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