How one develops an idea depends largely on the writer and the idea. For a lot of us, the first stage is kind of like the effect of a particle accelerator: two or more interesting ideas go around and around in your brain until they smash into each other at high speed, causing a chain reaction. Other times, the initial development is more like putting a seed crystal in a supersaturated solution and letting it grow. Still other times, the writer needs to consciously and deliberately fill in whatever key bits are missing from the original interesting notion—adding some characters and background to an interesting plot idea, or coming up with a plot for the interesting characters to get mixed up in.

The key thing, no matter which way you end up trying to start the story development, is that everything in the story has to fit somehow with everything else. You can’t just throw in random things, no matter how cool they seem. For me, this part is mostly a matter of instinct—and sometimes, the instinct doesn’t kick in as soon as I’d like it to, and I do a whole lot of development that I have to throw out later because it doesn’t fit for some reason.

All of this, by the way, is stuff that happens before any actual writing begins. I call it “getting to critical mass”—getting an idea developed enough that it can become a story. How much conscious development an idea needs depends on the writer. Some folks like to sit down at a blank screen and surprise themselves; other folks like to have a meticulously detailed outline and a ton of notes to follow.

I’m somewhere in the middle. Once I get to critical mass, I sit down and do an outline. (I never follow the outline, but making one gives me something to rebel against and helps me organize my thoughts about the plot.) I start researching anything I know I’m going to need to research, and detailing any background or worldbuilding that I think I’m going to want. This is also the point where I start hauling my friends out to dinner to help me plot-noodle.

What I’m talking about here is the getting-started part that so many non-writers find so mysterious. “Getting ideas” for what happens next once the story is underway is a whole ‘nother post, which I hope to get to at the end of the week. (Sorry to wait so long, but I’m out of town until Thursday.)

THE BIG 3
Years ago, when I was an unpublished wannabe, I was at a local SF convention trying to learn the True Secret of Writing from the professional writers in attendence. One of them (I think it may have been Gordy Dickson) threw out a piece of advice that has stood me in good stead for all the years and books since.

The advice was this: There are three main things that any scene in a book or short story can do. 1) It can advance the plot. 2) It can explain the background or backstory. 3) It can deepen the characterization. If a scene does none of these things, it isn’t actually a scene and doesn’t belong in the book (or perhaps doesn’t belong in this book). If it does only one of these things, the writer can probably improve it by figuring out how it can do another as well (that is, if the scene only deepens the characterization, figuring out how it can also add backstory or advance the plot will likely make it a better scene). If the scene does two of the three things, then it is a good solid scene—still suceptible to improvement, but a keeper nonetheless. And a scene that does all three things is the gold at the end of the rainbow.

It’s not hard to see why. What is a story? It’s something happening (plot) to one or more people (characters) somewhere/somewhen (background/setting/backstory).

Plot, characters, and background are the Big Three when it comes to writing. Different kinds of writing tilt in different directions—adventure fiction is usually heavy on plot and maybe background/setting, but often light on characterization; genre Romance novels usually put characterization first, with plot and background trailing along behind—but characters, background, and plot are nearly always there in some form, because they are the basic building blocks of stories.

There are other things that are important to stories, ranging from fairly central things like structure and theme, to techniques like transitions and narrative summary and viewpoint, down to microwriting considerations like how you do speech tags. But at bottom, stories are about people, who are a product of their experiences and environment, facing challenges or new experiences and dealing with them. Characters, background/setting, plot.

BEGINNING
How do you decide where a story starts?

Stories, short or long, generally are not about characters who are happily living their normal lives. Something unusual is going on; something has upset the status quo (whether the status quo was a miserable life as a slave, or a happy life as a king).

Stories therefore generally start in one of four places: either just before, just at, or just after the point at which the status quo is upset, or else in medias res, smack in the middle of whatever is going on.

I have found that, since I am a natural novelist, starting in medias res for a short story is seldom a good idea for me. Usually, it means that I’m trying to write a novel, but because I’ve artificially decided to write a short story, I’m leaving off the beginning and most of the middle of the book, and the end result is just not going to work as anything but an excerpted piece of a novel, no matter what I do. Starting in the middle of things works fine for some novels, and I’ve used it at least once (The Seven Towers, if you were wondering), and it works find for other short story writers. Just not for my short stories.

“Just before” works well for fantasies and SF, because in these stories, the “status quo” background is usually unfamiliar. “Once upon a time, there was a woodcutter who lived at the edge of a great forest with his three sons” is a just-before-things-change opening; it sets up the status quo. The change arrives with the sentence that begins, “One day, when he was out in the woods working…” something happened that set the story going. The trick is to keep it just before the thing that changes everything happens—it is very easy to back off too far, and provide too much introduction to the status quo. The current situation isn’t the story; the story starts happening when things begin to change. And of course, this sort of thing isn’t limited to starting with a fairy-tale-type opening; “The woodcutter shouldered his ax and started off into the forest for another day’s work.” is also a just-before sort of opening; he’s not doing anything he hasn’t done a million times before.

“Just at” the point where something changes the status quo would be “A poor woodcutter, hard at work in the woods, heard a cry for help. Running in the direction of the cry, he found a small man about to be eaten by a lion…” It is not usual for the woodcutter to rescue small wizards (for that’s obviously who this is) from lions, and the woodcutter’s reward, whatever it turns out to be, is going to form the basis of the rest of the story.

“Just after” would be “The woodcutter set his ax beside the door, stared at it a moment, and went in. His three sons looked up; at the sight of his face, their expressions grew worried. ‘Father, what has happened?’ said the oldest. ‘I met a man in the woods today,’ the woodcutter replied. ‘And he told me…’”

In medias res would be something like “The woodcutter crouched behind the arras, watching the guards pace outside the king’s treasure vault. Through the iron grate that covered the window, he could see the glitter of gold—and, more important, the shine of his magic ax. If he could just get his hands on it again…” This works really, really well for lots of people, but as I said, for me it’s a bit dangerous to open a short story with it, because (for me) it usually means the story really wants to be a novel. In addition, one needs to be careful not to disorient the reader too much. Also, I find it hard to fill in the background/backstory in the limited wordage of a short story, unless I’m doing something like a fairy-tale, where the backstory is so familiar to readers that they can fill it in themselves. “Cinderella stood at the top of the stairs, looking down at the sea of wondering faces that filled the prince’s ballroom” would make a perfectly good in medias res opening for a short story. On the plus side, the in medias res opening generally gets things going with a bang; it is often a very good opening for an action-adventure.

How you decide which one works best—well, you just have to look at the story and think about it for a while. There aren’t rules for this sort of thing, unfortunately.

DIALOGUE:
Dialog is the primary way most of us communicate with each other, so it’s also the main way our characters communicate with each other. It’s really hard to write a satisfactory short story that has no dialogue at all, and the longer this story, the harder it is to tell without ever having one character talk to another.

But dialog in fiction isn’t a transcription of actual speech. It’s not even an imitation of real speech. It’s a model of the way real people talk to each other, a model that’s both simplified and exaggerated so that it can be clear and read easily while still sounding “real.” Real conversation is full of ums and ers and other placeholders. It digresses and repeats as the speaker tries to order his thoughts and find the right way to phrase them. We’re willing to put up with that in person because we have no choice…and besides, most of us do it ourselves. In fiction, though, most of us won’t put up with the rambling way we talk in real life.

On the other hand, dialog is still speech, not narrative. It is therefore a lot less formal. This means the writer has a lot more leeway to use things like sentence fragments, improper syntax, unusual punctuation, and phonetic spelling. Sentences tend to be shorter and less complex. Contractions are welcome. The rhythm of the sentences is much more important; it’s a large part of what makes dialog feel like real speech. When I was writing “Roses by Moonlight,” I used the same Shakespearian trick I’d first learned writing Snow White and Rose Red, and marked all the rhythms of the Faerie Queen’s dialog to make sure she spoke in iambic pentameter. Even though, for that short story, I kept her word choices modern, the Shakespearian rhythm gave her just enough of a different feel from the other characters (I thought) to make her stand a little apart the way I wanted.

Dialog isn’t just what the characters say; it’s how they say it. A lot of the difficulty people have in writing dialog comes in trying to get the delivery across. The first, most obvious, and usually easiest way is to just tell the reader how the line is being said by adding an adverb to the speech tag: “Nice job,” he said smoothly. Unfortunately, this method is so obvious and so easy that it has been overused to the point where one of the common “rules” for writing has become “Never use adverbs in speech tags.”

I, of course, wouldn’t say “never.” Adverbs have their place in speech tags, and one of them is to indicate when the character’s tone of voice and/or demeanor is at odds with what he/she is saying: “That’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen,” she said admiringly. What you really don’t want are adverbs that don’t actually add any new information: “You’re out!” he shouted loudly is redundant; “You’re out!” he shouted hoarsely isn’t.

Sentence fragments, punctuation, syntax, etc. are all tools the writer can use to convey the way a line of dialog is delivered. So is the placement of the speech tag and/or stage business. Consider the following:

“What have you done? I don’t believe you. You’ve ruined everything!” he said, taking the report and staring down at it.

He took the report and stared down at it. “What have you done, I don’t believe you, I don’t believe you, I don’t—you’ve ruined everything!”

“What have you done?” he said, taking the report. “I-I don’t believe you.” He stared down at the pages. “You’ve…you’ve ruined everything!”

“What have you done?” He took the report and stared down at it. “I don’t believe you. You’ve ruined everything!” he said with a grin.

The first line groups all the dialog together, with speech tag and stage business at the end. It implies some simultaneity of action and dialog, because “he” is presumably taking the report at the same time as he’s speaking, but that’s about all. In the second line, with the stage business first as a separate sentence, it’s clear that first he takes the report and looks at it, then he panics and speaks. The panic is conveyed by stringing all the dialog sentences together with commas as a run-on sentence and repeating the middle one; it gives the feeling that the speaker isn’t pausing for breath during his denials.

The third line builds slowly, and the speaker comes off as stunned, rather than panicked. First the speaker is worried (indicated by the emphasis on “done”). Then he takes the report and is in denial (that stammering—obviously, this is bad news). Then he stares down at the pages and it slowly sinks in (the elipses indicate more of a pause between the repeated words, compared to the n-dash in “I-I don’t believe you” earlier). The last line manages to completely reverse the implication of the first three (that this is someone getting bad news) by emphasizing “believe” and adding that grin at the end—obviously, this is someone who agrees that everything should be ruined. (And in context, in a story where we already know who is talking to whom and what is being ruined and why, it might not even need the grin to be clear.)

In all three of the last lines, the pacing of the dialog is conveyed by the way in which it is punctuated and broken up. Emphasizing different words by italicizing them, repeating words, deliberately using run-on sentences, breaking up the dialog with speech tags or stage business in different places—each one changes the implied delivery.

WRITING ACTION SCENES:
Action scenes are the bread-and-butter of whole genres of fiction. As such, they’re pretty important, and I was rather stunned to realize that I’ve said very little about writing them. I was even more stunned when I went to the bookcase that’s full of how-to-write books—five shelves of them—and couldn’t find even one that really talked about writing action scenes. (A couple of them pretended to, but what they were actually talking about usually turned out to be plot, or else conflict or suspense or drama within an action scene.)

I think part of the reason for this is that action scenes don’t get much respect. They aren’t very intellectual; they’re lowest-common-denominator. Everybody knows what an action scene is, and everybody can spot a bad one at twenty paces. So they should be easy, right?

Yeah, right.

Another part of the problem is, I think, that as usual, “action” can mean more than one thing. There’s “the action of the story,” which usually means the events that make up the plot, even if those events are all conversations and social encounters, and there’s “the story has no action,” which usually means that the plot does not involve car chases, gun battles, or other physically demanding activities.

For purposes of this discussion, which is going to cover several posts, I am going to define action scenes as scenes of physical action: people attacking each other with fists or weapons, chase scenes, avalanches or trains barreling down toward people, escapes, and so on. Suspense alone is not enough; a ticking time bomb is not enough. A formal tea party can be suspense-filled and full of all sorts of emotional time bombs, but it’s not an action scene until the ninjas break in through the window to hold everyone hostage.

By that definition, the first key thing to remember about writing an action scene is that there is movement. People are doing something—running, fighting, sneaking, throwing, searching, blowing things up, whatever. Something physical (besides talking) is going on. In addition, whatever is happening often doesn’t take much elapsed time (a fight scene is more likely to cover a minute or two than an hour). Action scenes generally move fast; more to the point, they read fast. If the action starts to drag or the scene feels like it’s going on forever, something is wrong.

Note that this does not mean an action scene has to be short. As long as the tension and the pace remain high, an action scene can take pages or even chapters to cover a few minutes or an hour.

Action scenes are actually a subset of description, but instead of describing a static setting or backstory, the writer is describing movement…which means paying a lot of attention to verbs. Anyone who remembers Schoolhouse Rock should be unsurprised to hear this. :-)

This leads me to one of the first big mistakes some people make with action scenes: dropping in some “action” to fill time or “liven up” a boring stretch of story. Action, like static description, needs a reason to be in the story. Readers will usually cut you some slack in this regard—they don’t expect to find out why the ninjas are attacking the tea party right away. But random encounters seldom work well in fiction, so readers do expect there to be a reason for the ninja attack, they expect it to have something to do with the story, and they expect it to be explained eventually.

To put it another way, whatever action sequence the characters are engaged in needs two goals. The first one is the goal the writer has for the scene. It may be that the structure or pacing of the story requires some action at this point; it may be the way to reveal some plot-critical information, or set up for a later revelation or plot twist; it may be a way to expose some aspect of the particular characters. Unless this goal is related to pacing or structure, it may not actually require an action scene to achieve, so the writer needs to at least consider the possibility that the most effective way of achieving his/her goal may be some other sort of scene entirely.

The second, and possibly more important, goal for an action scene is the one the characters have. In fiction, characters usually act to achieve something, and it’s usually plot-related in some way. The ninjas attack the tea party in order to kidnap the heroine; the bandits attack the caravan because they want the jade idol in the second wagon; the wolves attack the farm because they are starving, and they’re starving because the recently-arrived dragon has eaten all their usual prey. If none of the characters have a reason for doing whatever they’re doing, the scene probably doesn’t belong in this story.

So how do you build an action scene? There are a lot of things to consider. Some of them will be dictated by decisions the writer has made earlier in the story, and the first and most important of these is viewpoint, which frequently implies level.

Action can be “seen” by the reader from lots of different levels. A bird’s eye view is a Big Picture description that is most often employed when describing a full-scale battle (but it can work quite well for smaller fights); a general’s view is closer in, but still fairly Big Picture, and allows for more surprises because the general can’t see everything the way a bird could. A participant’s view is restricted to his/her own experiences, but it can make the action feel more personal and involving. If the writer is telling a story in omniscient viewpoint, as a memoir written long after the fact, or in multiple tight-third, she can think about which of these levels to employ and when, and how to mix them to get the best effect.

(Georgette Heyer’s description of the Battle of Waterloo in her novel An Infamous Armyis primarily an omniscient Big Picture description of the action, but she occasionally drops into a closer, more personal view of characters we’ve heard of or met earlier in the novel. The result is a masterpiece, which was actually used at Sandhurst Military Academy in England to teach the Battle of Waterloo. It is also an excellent example for writers to study.)

Except for omniscient, memoir, or multiple-tight-third-person, the viewpoint the writer is using for the story pretty much determines the level from which the action is going to be described. A first person narrator who is telling the story as it happens is not likely to know anything that is happening on the other side of a battle unless he’s an observer with binoculars rather than a participant; the same goes for a single tight-third-person viewpoint. The writer, however, quite often needs to know the whole Big Picture, whether we’re talking about a full-scale battle, a smallish bandit attack, or a one-on-one duel.

Which brings us to my next point, planning. The larger the scale of the action, the more planning is a good idea for most writers. (Note that “most”; this is yet another area where personal process trumps how-to-write advice. Some people just can’t plan ahead, because it wrecks their ability to continue on. These folks have to “plan” in retrospect, working out how the close-up scenes they’ve written can be retro-fitted into a Big Picture that makes sense.)

Anyway, for the rest of us: Even if your hero or heroine is only going to see one small part of a battle, it’s usually a good idea to have some idea of the overall strategy for each side, and how their specific plans do or don’t work out in practice. The flanking move by the enemy cavalry on the other side of the hill may make things suddenly more intense around your heroine, even if she doesn’t know why. The return of the foraging party may be enough to route the bandits, though your hero doesn’t immediately know why they’ve started running. And I have personally found it exceedingly helpful to go through parts of a fight in slow motion with a colleague who knows something about martial arts, so that I can find out in advance whether particular moves I have in mind will work as I envision them (and so I can get ideas for even better things to happen).

Plans should be flexible. (”The writer should always reserve the right to have a better idea.”—Lois McMaster Bujold) Action scenes are often most effective when the things that happen are as unexpected as they would be in a real battle or fight or chase, and a writer who has managed to surprise herself has a greater chance of surprising the reader than she otherwise would. I’m not talking about big surprises here, though that can happen; I’m talking about little things that may or may not change the outcome of the action: the horse that throws a shoe, the gun that jams, the opponent who drops his knife and bites…the things that come up without warning during the process of putting words down on the page. (If that’s not how it works for you, don’t worry about it. It’s not something you can train or force; it’s just how some—some, not all—writers’ heads work.)

(I thought I was going to get to the nitty-gritty of technique today, but it seems I have a bit more to say about the nitty-gritty of planning.)

What you need to know up front (unless you are a total “surprise me” writer, who can’t know anything up front) is 1) what the setting is like, 2)who the actors are in the scene, 3) where each of them is at any given time and what each of them is doing, 4) what you (and they) expect to get out of this, and 5) how all this interacts with the larger picture, at least to some extent.

The setting determines what you (and your characters) have available to work with. If your action scene is a car chase through San Francisco, you have different options that you would if it’s a chase on skis through the Alps; if it’s a brawl in a bar, you have different options than if your characters a dueling with lightsabers on a spaceship.

Knowing who the actors are means knowing who all is present and watching, as well as knowing which characters are actually going to be doing the punching, running, shooting, or whatever. It should be pretty obvious why you need to know who is supposed to be actively involved—which characters are acting determines what skills, weapons, etc. they’ll use , and to a large extent how they will approach what they’re doing (as well as the details of what they’ll do).

Bystanders, on the other hand, are not so obvious. They’re also not as necessary to know about in advance, though I find it often helps a lot. Sometimes bystanders will pitch in as opportunity presents itself, or do or say something that accidentally (or on purpose) affects the main action, so it’s good to know who’s watching. This is also an area where surprise frequently comes in—someone the writer didn’t expect shows up, and it changes the way the action plays.

Where each character is and what each character does during an action scene are inextricably intertwined. If A is sitting behind a desk and B is leaning against the wall by the fireplace, neither is in position to suddenly haul off and slug the other. On the other hand, B is perfectly placed to grab the antique sword hanging over the fireplace and charge…but if you don’t know he’s standing beside a fireplace, you won’t think of the sword.

Choreographing an action scene can be done in a bunch of ways. You can get a bunch of friends together and actually role-play the whole thing (which I find a bit extreme, but which I know has been done to very good effect by a number of writers). Or you can act out the whole scene yourself, playing all the parts in turn (this is particularly helpful for writers who are strongly kinesthetic and need to feel the way the characters move and stand). You can get some action figures and play out the movement of the scene. Or you can diagram it on paper, like a series of football plays, with circles and crosses and little arrows to show who is supposed to be moving where, and maybe asterisks to show thrusts or punches and figure 8s to show tripping over barrels, or whatever diagram codes you come up with. Storyboarding (drawing a series of sketches to illustrate the action) works well for some artistically inclined writers (and even for some who can only draw stick figures).

What your characters want out of the scene, and what you want out of it, determines where it’s going. You need to know both; if your characters want to capture the traitor, but you need him to escape in order to move the plot to the next phase, then you arrange the choreography so the bad guy escapes, even though the good guys are trying really hard. If you need the traitor to be captured, you stack the deck in favor of the heroes.

The fifth thing the writer usually needs to know is what the Big Picture is and how all the local, character-on-character action fits in. If we’re talking about a battle scene, the writer often plans out the overall battle first, then figures out which characters will be there and what will happen to them based on the ebb and flow of the larger battle (even though the reader may not find out how the larger battle went until a chapter or two after the big action scene. Sometimes, though, the writer knows he wants the hero run down during an enemy cavalry charge, so the big battle has to be planned so that there is an enemy cavalry charge that makes tactical and strategic sense.

In other words, very little of this has to be done in any particular order (though it’s a little hard to figure out what your characters are doing if you don’t already know which of them are in the scene). And none of it is set in stone. If you get a better idea, jump on it, even if it means junking your last two hours of work.

Finally, if you look at your action plan, and it just looks too easy for one side or the other, there are two things to remember: “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy,” and Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong, will. Murphy is a writer’s best friend; bad luck and other people messing up (and consequently derailing the plan) are always more plausible in fiction than good luck and everything going right.

And a final reminder: some writers can’t plan in advance; if you are one of them, you’ll probably need to do at least some of this stuff in revision, retro-fitting your battle to fit your action scene, for instance. If you can’t plan without destroying your need to write, don’t worry about it. But don’t kid yourself, either; if it’s just that you don’t want to plan…tough. Nobody said this job was going to be easy.

So after rambling on for three posts, I’m finally getting down to the nuts and bolts of writing action scenes. One of the first pieces of action-writing advice you find is usually “Use short sentences and sentence fragments,” because they pick up the pace, and an action scene has to be fast-paced, right?

People who think this have obviously never been to one of those martial arts movies where half the action scenes are filmed in slow motion…and still work perfectly well (sometimes brilliantly).

Now, using mainly short sentences, sentence fragments, and short paragraphs is very often an effective technique for writing action scenes. They do read fast, and they tend to be focused and physical because there isn’t room for more than the basic subject-verb-object if the sentence is to stay short. So using a lot of short sentences, etc. forces the writer to stay focused on the action—who did what—which is often very useful.

Unfortunately, too many writers take the short-sentence thing much too far. They’ll have a page of one-short-sentence paragraphs: The soldier leaped./Max ducked./The bomb exploded./A huge bang!/Max fell back./As debris rained down./The soldier screamed. (This is closely based on a real example, BTW, but I didn’t feel right holding the poor beginner up to ridicule directly, so I changed the topic.) And it doesn’t work, because it’s too much.

Any technique wears out very quickly if it is the only one you use. Even as a single paragraph, the above list feels choppy and rushed, rather than fast and immediate; as a page of one-line paragraphs…well. What works with action, as with pretty much anything else in writing, is variation. You can see the variation trying to come out in the above sentences—by the time the sequence gets to “The bomb exploded,” the writer is feeling the need for a longer sentence (”The bomb exploded with a huge bang!”) but forces him/herself to slavishly follow the “short sentences, short paragraphs, sentence fragments” dictum. It’s even more obvious that ”Max fell back as debris rained down” wants to be a single, complete sentence…and the whole sequence would read more smoothly if the writer had trusted his/her instincts and just written it that way.

Matching the sentence length to the action itself is a sneaky writer trick that few people notice consciously, but it often works really, really well. By this I mean using short sentences when the action is snappy or abrupt, then moving to longer sentences when something falls into a longer rhythm: She struck once. Twice. A third time, and her opponent fell. She kicked him away and spun like a dancer, looking for another victim. The first two sentences (OK, sentence and fragment) are short, and thus give the impression that she’s moving fast. The longer third sentence mirrors the fact that the opponent is out of the fight and falling over, which takes longer than a couple of jabs; the last sentence is much longer, and the way it flows is supposed to imitate the smoothness and grace of the protagonist’s movements. It also gives both protagonist and reader a moment of breathing space before everything starts moving fast again.

Grammar and punctuation are excruciatingly important in action scenes. Mistakes stick out more (at least, they do for me) when things are supposed to be moving fast. Random Comma Syndrome seems particularly prevalent among writers who use lots of sentence fragments, possibly because they can’t figure out proper comma placement without the structure of a full sentence.

Reversing causality can be a useful technique for heightening drama, but it’s another thing that too many people overdo without thinking about it enough. What I’m talking about are things like “He screamed in pain. The sword entered his side, and he fell.” The cause—getting wounded by the sword—comes after the effect (screaming in pain), instead of before, the way it ought to. This can be tricky to spot, because “He screamed in terror” would work fine (he’s presumably afraid of the sword), which means that it’s not always clear whether “He screamed. The sword entered his side…” has cause and effect reversed or not.

The next question is what to describe. More than any other type of description, action lives or dies by the telling detail…the right telling detail. Some writers concentrate so hard on being clear about exactly what is happening that they describe every fleck of paint falling off the wall the hero has just been thrown into; others, in the interest of giving the reader a close-up-and-personal “feel” for the action, provide no details at all (save perhaps generalities about what was going on in the character’s head—Pain! Fear! She felt confused, and she’d lost track of George. Something slammed into her shoulder. OW!). The sweet spot is usually somewhere in the middle—exactly where will depend largely on the writer’s personal style and on the chosen narrator. A cool-headed, highly trained, experienced soldier will likely notice a lot more key details than a sheltered, confused, and inexperienced babysitter.

The minimum you need to describe are those details that a) are necessary to current action (”He tripped over the ottoman” is rather different from “He tripped over the dead cat”) or b) you want in order to set something up for a few paragraphs later (i.e., you need to mention the gun on the mantelpiece if one of the characters is going to grab it in a few more lines). Most action scenes work best if the verbal “camera” is at a middle distance—not so close that all the reader “sees” are flying fists and blurred scenery, but not so far away that a lot of distracting and irrelevant detail is visible. You usually do want some additional detail, though—enough so your characters aren’t running or sneaking or fighting in an unvisualized fog.

It all sounds horribly difficult when you break it down like this, but so does riding a bicycle. Most writers get the balance right via instinct and practice, but I do think it helps to look at the different parts of the juggling act if one knows there’s something off about the scene.

“INFODUMPS”
Infodumps—those long passages of narrative summary that provide a huge wodge of background or plot development or characterization—have an undeservedly bad reputation among would-be writers. The allergy to infodumps is a bit of stylistic advice which is largely peddled to beginning writers, but which is not upheld by looking at real live published fiction. Infodumps that are ineffective, boring, annoying, or unnecessary should be cut, obviously, but that is by no means the same thing as “all infodumps are horrible and a sign of bad writing.” James White, for instance, used infodumps to great effect for decades in the Sector General books; ditto David Weber in his Honor Harrington series, Patrick O’Brian, and many others.

There are three basic approaches to fixing a story when someone has complained that it is infodumpy: 1) You can rewrite to remove the infodump, 2) you can rewrite to make the infodump work in the context of the story, or 3) you can ignore the advice and leave the story alone because you know your critiquer well enough to know that he/she has absorbed the “no infodumps rule” and is therefore not actually assessing whether your infodump really works in context.

Rewriting to remove the infodump is often appropriate if the infodump is ineffective, boring, etc., but in quite a lot of cases, the problem is not that the infodump is the wrong technique to choose, it’s that the particular author doesn’t know how to write good infodumps, or doesn’t know how to make an infodump work in the context of the story and viewpoint he’s chosen. Rewriting to remove the infodump will do nothing to solve this underlying problem, if it is present, since simply removing all infodumps provides no practice whatever in how to write effective infodumps … and odds are that sooner or later, the writer will need to write an effective infodump.

So the first question the writer needs to answer is: What is the most effective way to give the reader the information necessary to understand the story? Should I use an infodump, or something else? This is generally a question of pacing, rather than structure, because traditional infodump mechanisims like narrative summary or two-page blocks of lecture in dialog lay out information a lot faster and in a more condensed fashion than the slow revelation of needed details in a scene or during a conversation.

Assuming you decide that you need the infodump, the next question is how to make it work. One of the most effective ways to do this is to arrange things so that the infodump is of information that the reader already wants to know. This is one of the reasons why long prologues full of the background history of the world seldom work and are commonly cut by editors—when they pick up a book for the first time, most readers are more interested in the story or the characters than in all the cool history the author has worked out. It isn’t until later, when the information becomes important to the characters and the story, that the reader wants to know more about the background.

Another technique is to lay out the story-problem as a central part of the infodump, or (if the story problem has already become obvious), give the infodump information in such a way that it clearly makes the story-problem worse. If, for instance, you have two characters at the top of a cliff preparing to go down, and you need to infodump a bunch of geological and geographic information, you could probably get everything you needed into an infodump that described, in gory detail, just how high and pointy and hard to climb this cliff is (because of relevant geological facts) and just how many other people have died trying to climb down it (for various geo-political reasons). It’s a matter of focus: the information you want to infodump is all still there, but the focus is on some plot-point that increases the tension.

Some voices and stories lend themselves to effective infodumps more than others. James White makes extraordinarily effective use of the sessions in which his doctors are briefed on their new patients. He slides effortlessly from the setup conversation into two- or three-page narrative summaries of the important background information (which the reader already wants to know because of the hints in the setup conversation) and then back to his fully dramatized scene. A first-person narrator can get away with infodumping information a lot more easily than a third-person narrator. The trick here is to make the narrator sound as if she is musing on or analyzing or explaining to herself something that is important to her at the moment. A story that covers a lot of time—months or years—also often requires a good many chunks of narrative summary to fill in what happened. Memoir tends to have a lot more summary than dramatized scenes.

I’m currently getting lots of practice with this because the Frontier Magic books are first-person and an imaginary memoir and covers years per book. When you have thirteen years of a character’s life to cover, which important bits of her life story you show and which ones you summarize turn out to be a lot less obvious than you might think. Pacing and structure and flow become a lot more important, too. Thank goodness that problem will decrease in the next two books, because they won’t be covering fifteen years in one volume.

At least, I think they won’t.

ALL TOGETHER AT ONCE
Writing is difficult to talk about. I mean the real thing, the stuff that happens when you are sitting there with your paper and pen or your computer or your stone tablets and chisel and telling a story.

We talk about bits and pieces of writing all the time. We separate out plot, characterization, setting, and theme into neat little boxes so we can study each of them and try to figure out how they work and how to do them better. Then we slice it all in a different direction and look at action and description and dialog as separate things. And this is a good thing. It’s how we understand a lot of the world, from toasters to the Hubble telescope.

Too often, though, some folks forget that when it comes to actually writing, everything has to happen at once. During the brief period when I was teaching classes, I occasionally saw stories that looked as if the author had stuck together a string of writing exercises: here is the two-paragraph description of setting, followed by three paragraphs of description of the character, followed by a page of dialog, followed by a long paragraph of the viewpoint character’s internal musing, and so on. Each exercise was done well, but putting them together didn’t make a story. Reading them was like riding a bicycle over a cobblestone road—ka-THUMP, ka-THUMP, ka-THUMP.

This is not to say that one thing can’t take precedence over everything else. It only makes sense to play to your strengths—a writer who is really good at witty dialog will tend to have lots of witty dialog, and the characterization and theme and plot and so on will probably happen mainly through exchanges of dialog, rather than through action or description. But if the only thing that gets down on paper is a lot of talking heads, what the writer has is a screenplay or a play script, not a novel. And turning it into a novel is going to take more than throwing in a few random lumps of description and narrative summary.

Part of the problem, I think, is that we get used to talking about the bits and pieces of writing. We become accustomed to looking at one thing at a time. When I go hunting for an example of good action, I don’t pay much attention to how well setting or characterization or theme is woven into the passage, because those things aren’t what I’m interested in. If the passage does a lot of other stuff well (in addition to the action), I tend not to mention it, because what I’m talking about at the moment is the action part (or the dialog, or the characterization, or whatever I’m ranting about that day), and the other stuff isn’t relevant to the point I’m making. Experience also tells me that people get really confused really fast if I try to show them more than one unfamiliar thing going on at the same time; after a while, I just quit trying.

But that only works if, once folks have a handle on plot and description and dialog and so on, they learn how to put it all together at once. Most writers figure this out for themselves. For some, like the students I mentioned above, it takes a while, or someone has to point out that they need to do more than one thing at a time. How to do it…well, that varies. Some writers learn by trusting their instincts; some by consciously and deliberately imitating their favorite writers for a while. I learned a lot from actually analyzing some of my favorite writers—when I was getting started, I’d come to a bit where I knew what I wanted to do, but not how to make it all work at once, and I’d stop and spend hours combing my bookshelves, looking for an actual published writer who had done something similar, so I could figure out how they’d gotten everything in and made it work. Some writers learn during revision—they didn’t get everything in the first time, but they can see what’s missing and get it in during the second pass. Some use a layering technique, concentrating on one thing at a time and going over the scene multiple times to make sure they have everything there.

Eventually, most of us learn to do most of the stuff all at once, most of the time, without needing to concentrate on it all at once. But it doesn’t start off that way for most writers, and I think it’s worth pointing that out. It’s not enough to know how to do dialog and characterization and plot and action and so on; one has to learn to do it all together at the same time.

THEME
Theme is something I’ve been thinking about for years, because it’s one of those writing things that I can’t seem to ever quite grasp when it comes to my own writing process. Thanks to my excellent high school English teachers, I can pick out and analyze themes in other people’s stuff, but I never quite get it for my own.

Judging from some of the discussions I’ve had on this topic, lots of other people are confused abut theme, too. So I thought I’d ponder that for a little today.

Theme is often defined as “what the story is about,” which I think is where the confusion starts. Stories are “about” their subject—“Beowulf” is about a hero defeating a monster, for instance, and the story of King Arthur is about a kid who unites a kingdom, becomes king, and then has it all fall apart on him. But theme is what the story is “about” on a deeper level, underneath the trappings of specific characters and events, where Beowulf is about facing and defeating fear, or protecting the people you are responsible for, and Arthur is about the human drive to create a utopia and how impossible it is. Or Beowulf is about courage and Arthur is about ideals.

It’s like listening to an argument between two people who have a long, problematic relationship. If you listen just to what they say to each other, the argument is “about” which TV show to watch tonight. But the real argument may be a long-running conflict over who makes decisions all the time, or who has power in the relationship, or over one party feeling neglected or ignored or disrespected by the other. The TV program is just the mechanism, the excuse; the argument is “about” TV only on the surface. Under the surface, it’s “about” something else entirely.

But most of the time, when your average reader tries to describe a book to somebody, he does so in terms of the plot, characters, or subject — “It’s a book about a guy who goes to sleep in this cursed hall and fights a monster…” Because those are the things that make one book that is (thematically speaking) “about” class warfare different from all the other books that are “about” class warfare. But the fact that plot, characters, etc. are usually more obvious than theme doesn’t mean theme isn’t there, or isn’t important or interesting.

The trouble, for me, is that theme is very dangerous for me to look at directly when I’m writing. It has to stay below the surface, in my subconscious, or everything falls apart. This is quite frustrating, because often (in retrospect), some of the decisions I make in the course of writing would be much, much easier if I knew what my theme was. Even the ones that aren’t easier decisions would be more comfortable if I actually knew at the time just why I was making them. I can’t control how my backbrain works, though, and it just doesn’t work if I try to figure out my theme before the story is finished.

Another problem is that stories can have more than one theme; they can be about families and growing up and ecology and the effect of incompetence on public policy, all at the same time. And some of what stories are about, on this level, are things that the reader brings along, not things that the writer put in. Furthermore, if one tries to cram too many themes into one story, it has the same “kitchen sink” effect as trying to cram too many plots or characters into it—the story starts to give at the seems, and eventually splits open, strewing characters, plot, themes, and everything else in an untidy mess all over the floor.

Which is about where I usually stop worrying about this. I know what works for me, and thinking too hard about the theme of whatever I’m writing does NOT. But lots of writers do find it helpful, so I keep nudging at it from different directions, hoping I’ll find some approach that will make it all make sense (and ultimately, make my work easier).

OUTLINES
“Outline—1) A line showing the shape or boundary of something; 2) A statement or summary of the chief facts about something; 3) A sketch containing lines but no shading”—Oxford American Dictionary

If you want to be a professional novelist, odds are that sooner or later, you’re going to write an outline. In fact, I would go so far as to say that eventually, you will have to write an outline, which is an extremely rare sort of statement for me. But what I mean by “have to write an outline” is not what most people think I mean.

This is because there are two types of outlines that are commonly used by professional writers, and one of them is entirely optional. The first, and the one that most writers will have to do sooner or later, is the outline that’s meant to sell a book (which can be further subdivided into outlines of unfinished manuscripts and outlines of finished manuscripts). The second is the planning outline, which writers do for their own guidance. It’s totally optional; whether you use one of these or not should depend on whether it helps your process or not.

An outline meant to sell a book fits under #2 of that opening definition: it’s a statement or summary of the chief facts about the book, with maybe a bit of #1, a verbal line showing the shape of the book. If the book isn’t finished, the shape may be a bit vague and some of the facts may not have been determined yet; if the book has been written through at least a full first draft, the shape should be clear and the facts solid. Otherwise, the outline for a book that hasn’t been finished yet and the outline for a book that has are usually quite similar in form and general content—the main difference comes when you sit down to write the one for the unfinished book and realize just how much you still don’t know about what’s going to happen.

Note the emphasis on facts and shape, BTW. The two main things an outline-to-sell needs to do are: 1) name the main characters (not all the characters, not your favorite characters, but the main characters, which even with an ensemble cast usually means maybe three or four on the side of the protagonists and maybe two on the antagonist side. If you find yourself wanting to name more, you should stop and consider carefully whether you really need to name them. What’s needed in a 100,000 word novel may not be in a five-page plot outline) and 2) summarize the major events and key plot points of the story.

A sales outline is not the place to play coy games about what happens or how major plot events occur, if you know them. “Jack is imprisoned, but escapes the dungeon with help from a guard who changes sides” is acceptable, or even “Jack is imprisoned and escapes,” if you’re short on space. “Jack has many exciting adventures” is right out, unless there really are far too many to fit in five pages, in which case you give a couple of specific examples: “Jack is captured by pirates, marooned on a desert island, unjustly imprisoned and escapes, and has many other adventures before discovering that his real destiny is…”

There are also length restrictions on outlines you’re sending to a publisher: five pages is the norm, but a few publishers request one-page or two-page outlines. If they specify, give them what they ask for. There really isn’t a standard format for a selling outline, though some publishers will ask that specific points be covered. I just write a summary of the central plot, but some people prefer to do a chapter or section breakdown, or Dramatis Personae plus a paragraph of plot summary, or…well, there’s lots of variety. Again, if the publisher says they want a particular format, do it that way. Rewriting five pages of outline shouldn’t take that long, and you never know—looking at your story that way might tell you something interesting about it that you didn’t know before.

There is no point in writing a “sales outline” for short fiction. Magazine and anthology editors don’t want them; it takes more time to read an outline, send a form letter asking for the story, and then read a short story than it does to just read the short story in the first place.

When it comes to the second sort of outline, the one writers do for purposes of guidance and planning in actually writing the novel, all bets are off. I’m going to talk about that next.

As I said in our last exciting episode, there are two kinds of novel outlines writers do: the sort meant to sell a manuscript to a publisher, and the sort meant to help the writer write the book. This post is about the second kind.

The first and possibly most important thing to know about the planning-and-guidance sort of outline is this: It is entirely optional, and may be subject to change at any time at the writer’s whim. (Or, as my friend Lois Bujold puts it, “The writer should always reserve the right to have a better idea.”)

Alow me to repeat: Outlining is optional. It works for some writers, but not for others, and for still others, it is actively harmful. If it helps you, do it; if you try it and find out that it doesn’t help you, for goodness’ sake don’t feel guilty because you “aren’t doing it right.” There is no One True Way. And if you fall into the last category, that of writers whose work is actively harmed by outlining, feel free to sneer openly at anyone who tries to tell you that you should do so, and to ignore anyone who demands that you outline.

There; now that we have that settled…

When writers outline as a planning tool, all bets are off. There are no rules for doing this other than “if it helps YOU, do it that way.” Some writers do detailed outlines in advance (sometimes the “outline” ends up being longer than the actual book, because the writer includes all the background and backstory and worldbuilding details that never make it into the finished manuscript). Some write several chapters and only sit down to outline the rest of the book when they hit the “first veil”—that first sticky spot where things have to start invisibly coming together in the writer’s head, behind the scenes. Some do a sketchy outline as prewriting, then a more detailed one after they’ve written a third to half the book. Still others don’t outline until they have a first draft—they use outlining as a revision tool. Some do any and all of the above, as the situation demands.

What a working/planning outline looks like also varies from writer to writer. Mine usually look a lot like my submission outlines, only longer—they’re just narrative summaries of what I think is going to happen, set down as if I were telling the story to someone: “Kim finds out that Richard’s looking for this set of magical doohickies. The doohickies have been split up; he’s got one, and thinks he knows where the next one is. They head to the country house…”

(To be quite honest, that’s what my outlines look like AFTER I’ve written the story. Before hand, it’s more like “Kim suspects Richard’s looking for a Pegasus, but they leave for Egypt before she can be sure, and…” I can’t follow a working outline to save my life.)

Anyway… Some writers do a chapter breakdown; some do a scene-by-scene breakdown; some just do key points. Some use the sort of outline we all learned in school, with points I.A.1.a staggered with increasing indentations down the page. Some get specialized programs for writing (which can be fun if you can afford them and don’t take them too seriously); some use spreadsheets; some use diagrams (like Nicky Browne’s circle diagram [scroll down a ways to find it], or the “Big W” diagram, where you draw a big W on a brown paper bag and start with the opening “status quo” at the top of the first leg, put the first big crisis at the first bottom point, the mid-book turning point at the top of the middle, the darkest moment at the second bottom point, and the ultimate resolution at the top of the last leg, and then fill in steps up and down to get from each point to the next one). I like Post-It Notes and flow charts, which I later resolve into narrative summaries.

The point is, there isn’t a wrong way to do this, and the web is full of suggestions for things to try. If people have questions or want more detail on specific methods, please ask; otherwise I’ll go on to something else next.

REAL LIFE EXPERIENCES
Real-life incidents aren’t all that useful in fiction, in my experience, because real life just sort of happens. Basing a piece of fiction too closely on real-life events and experiences all too often results in stories that don’t work, and which the author justifies by saying “But it really happened that way!”

“It really happened” is just about the worst justification for having something happen in fiction that you can have, because fiction, unlike real life, has to make sense. People will believe things in newspaper stories that they won’t believe in a piece of fiction. Also, most writers don’t have terribly exciting and interesting lives (at least, very few people I know are interested in reading about somebody who sits at a computer and types for between four and sixteen hours a day).

Yet most people who have taught writing for more than a class or two have run into folks who object to criticism of their stories “because that’s what really happened!” We deal with it in various ways, from the over-stressed and rather nasty “Then perhaps you should be taking a journalism class!” to the more gentle “I believe you. Now make me believe your story.”

Whatever the approach, the it-really-happened folks always seem (in my experience at least) to be remarkably hard to convince. I personally think that comes about partly because they’ve bought in to the most literal interpretation possible of “write what you know” (after all, what do you know better than something that’s really happened to you?) and partly because they don’t trust their own imaginations enough.

The “write what you know” part is positively frightening at times. I had a student at one point who came to me for tips on how to ride a bicycle off the roof of his garage in order to “find out what it feels like to ride a dragon.” I pointed out that people who write murder mysteries do not go around murdering people, and also that no one has ever actually ridden a dragon and therefore any minor flaws in his description were likely to go unnoticed, and suggested that he simply sit and think about what it might be like for a while.

It took me a good half-hour to persuade him.

I don’t really know where this attitude comes from. I don’t think most people really believe it, deep down (if they did, writers who write “spicy” Romance novels would be in much more demand as dates), but when they get to actually trying to write something, they get all insecure and want to be able to point at something outside the story and say “see, I’m not wrong; this is how it really works.” The trouble is, the author can’t go around to every single reader and say “This is what riding a dragon really is like; I know because I rode a bicycle off the roof of my garage to test it.” The vast majority of readers will only ever have the words on the page, so it’s the words on the page that have to be convincing. Not “real life.”

WORLD BUILDING
Worldbuilding in some sense is a requirement for all writers. The people and places in fiction may have analogs in real life, but a writer in the U.S. cannot depend on every reader (or even most readers) being familiar with the Lincoln Park area of Chicago or the lower east side of Manhattan, much less the streets of Bombay or London or Ladysmith. The writer therefore has to recreate the real place in her fiction, choosing key details that evoke or imply a raft of other things that add up to that particular place and culture.

For those of us who write fantasy and science fiction, worldbuilding is even more of a necessity. The places our stories occur often have no real-life analogs; one cannot travel to Edoras or Cair Paravel to check out the sights and sounds and smells. One cannot look up the fashions of the Galactic Empire or the social customs of the kzinti or Klingons. The writer makes them up.

One of the first things you find out when you start paying serious attention to this is that every detail you invent implies other things, large and small. A codfish dinner served in a town far inland implies not only a fishing industry, but fast and reliable transportation (or the fish would spoil before they got to the table). The existance of such fast and reliable transportation means news will move as quickly as the fish do, so if you want it to be three weeks before they find out about the magical thunderstorm on the south coast, you suddenly need to come up with a really good reason why they wouldn’t hear about it a day later like everyone else. And so on.

Back when I was still getting the hang of all this, I discovered that one of my biggest problems with making forward progress was that I’d forgotten to make up some aspect of my imaginary world that I suddenly needed. The heroine arrived in a new town, and I’d forgotten to make up the architecture; the city guard showed up and I had no idea how they worked; a foreign diplomat arrived and I had no idea what he considered a proper, respectful greeting and what he considered an insult.

So I started keeping track. Fast-forward ten years or so. I had a twenty-plus-page list of things to think about, and it was still growing. I mentioned this on the Fidonet echo I was on, and people talked me into posting the list. One thing led to another, and my fantasy worldbuilding questions have been up on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ of America web site for … I think it’s getting on for fifteen years now.

Every so often, I get complaints about them. Interestingly, the complaints are always that I left something out, not that X or Y is not really important to worldbuilding. I always tell the complainers the same thing: The fantasy worldbuilding questions are my list of things I have a tendency to forget to think about. Stuff that I always remember to think about is not on my list. If they forget different things, they should make their own list of reminders.

But people persist in trying to make the questions into a prescription or a recipe. And of course, once again, there is no one recipe or set of rules that work for this aspect of writing, any more than any other. I know quite a few writers who do little or no worldbuilding in advance—they have the sort of brain that needs to not be tied down to a previous decision (and they also seem to have a gift for making everything tie together, even if it was made up on the fly).

1ST PERSON
As I’ve said before, the term “viewpoint” gets used to mean both the person who is seeing the action (viewpoint character) and the way in which everything is written (viewpoint type). This is going to be about the latter sort of viewpoint. Specifically, it’s about first-person.

First-person viewpoint is the “I” viewpoint: “I hate pickled beets. I’ve always hated them. But Ma thinks they’re good for what ails you, so whenever I’m sick, I get pickled beets.”

A lot of people jump straight to first-person when they start writing, because it looks easy. For quite a while, first-person was so over-used by beginning writers that it got a really bad reputation as something only an amateur would try. There are still traces of that around, some places.

But first-person isn’t as easy as it looks, and there are a lot of possible varieties. “Plain” first p

It’s been more than a month?! Wow, time passes really quickly when you’re having a good time. Life’s been great this summer so far. I went to the mall with Kirsten and I bought a cute top, two scarves, and a bunch of Bath & Body Works stuff.

Tomorrow Ashley, my oldest sister, graduates! I can’t believe it! She’ll be going to community college for the year then Geneseo fall 2010. I think she’s moving into an apartment with a few of her friends, but I’m not really sure.

I watched Seven Pounds and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas last night and I gotta say, BEST MOVIES EVER! They made me cry, but I love them. Seven Pounds made me cry really hard at the end, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas made me cry when I realized what was going to happen to someone, and then when the mother cried out and started sobbing that really made me cry. Great movies—watch them! I was going to watch Slumdog Millionaire too but my 9 year old brother Matthew (aka Anchovie) was in the room and my dad made me turn it off because it was inappropriate. Sure, he can watch Friends and a bunch of other heavy-language, sex-oriented shows and movies but not Slumdog Millionaire, a movie with a bunch of awards for being so good? So what if there’s a little torture at the beginning and if a few people get set on fire? That’s as far as I got before my dad came in, took my spot on the couch (I had the corner with the armrest and I was laying down!!) then made me turn off my movie. Now it’s 8:30 PM and I don’t have enough time to finish it without being fined (it’s from RedBox so it had to be brought back by 9). I’m frustrated so I come in here and just hang out on Facebook.

My grandparents are in town! I forgot to mention that. They came in especially for Ashley’s graduation.

Okay I really feel like just writing a bit, so see ya later!

I have just discovered Polly Scattergood and gosh I love her music! It is so unique. My favorite songs are Untitled 27 and Please Don’t Touch.

New layout! Who’s happy? Anybody? I know I am. That other one with Lady GaGa (when her hair was dark) was just too boring and it doesn’t meet my expectations anymore. I just made this new one today. I got the stock image from aiamsaiour (http://aiamsaiour.deviantart.com/art/green-paper-118214322) on Deviant Art and the brushes are from none other than miss Jess (http://swimchick.net). There was another layout I had ready but I decided to make a new one because it wasn’t as good as it could be.

There’s not much else to say right now. I’ve been working on a resource page. Right now its only brushes and textures and I might have some avatars, too.

See ya’ll later!

I am really freaked out and really angry…

Freaked out because:
My friend is being abused by her mother and I don’t know what to do? What the hell can you do to stop an abusive parent when she acts perfectly normal, nice almost, around other people?! I am so scared for her right now. She has a cut on her lip and a bump on her cheek because her mom pulled her hair, pushed her down, and started hitting her, all because her mom thought she got a stain on something, which she didn’t. I really don’t know what to do and I’m just so scared for her!!

Angry because:
Some retard on Yahoo! Answers said that the Catholic religion should be outlawed (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Aki2qvArORRwEX4KL_W5DwrW7BR.;_ylv=3?qid=20090521063041AAwrqEf)!! I am freaking pissed off! He/she said:

“With the child abuse recently uncovered in Ireland, should the Catholic religion be abolished and outlawed?

It seems like the catholics are all crack pots. The damage they have done to society and to these children they have abused around the world is unimaginable. We must put a stop to this CULT !!!!!!!!
Because that’s exactly what it is…..a CULT !!!!!!!”

Someone answered:
“It should have been abolished 1,900 years ago. It has been exposed as a violent, harmful fraud so many times that it becomes more and more insane to be a part of it with each passing year.
ENOUGH! This church, this organization, this religion is garbage. It should be outlawed and all the wealth collected in the Vatican should be returned to the desperate, uneducated people from whence it was stolen.
You cannot defend this. If a benevolent “God” were supporting this church as “His” “representative on earth,” then “He” would never permit such things to happen in “His” name.”

God has better things to do than stop every obnoxious, rude, terrible idiot from being pretty much racist. This is racism, but with religion instead of races. I don’t want a freaking World War III over Catholics, like WWII was over Jews and a bunch of other religions and groups of people. I’m a pacifist, but I would fight damn well if someone tried to take away my religion.

I am PISSED. I am a crazy person, but I’m not abusive like these people seem to think all Catholics are. And this is even more upsetting with what is happening with my friend.

I am just having a really bad day today (plus it was like 85 degrees and I hate weather over 70 unless there is some wind). My friend told me about her mom during gym and I was worried about her the rest of the day.

God I am just so freaked out inside.

My dad is freaking pissing me off. I am listening to my music at a considerably low volume. Dad reaches his hand into the room and starts snapping like there’s no tomorrow. That’s his God-damn-annoying signal to shut up. He seems to think that his client or whoever he’s talking to on the phone can hear every little dang thing. Everyone always wants to freaking strangle him when he does this, and I have no tolerance for people when they are being unfair, unreasonable, annoying, or rude. And I bet the person on the other end can’t hear anything over his freaking loud voice. He talks like six times louder than you have to to make someone go deaf.
And it doesn’t help that he seems to think that we should all worship and agree with every single word he says. He says that Obama shouldn’t be President, I disagree, and he starts getting all pissed off and insulting Obama when Obama hasn’t done a damn thing wrong. And if I “raise my voice” or “talk back”, he gets all pissed and I swear he looks homocidal. One time I told him that he was being unfair or something (I don’t remember why) and he come over and tipped the chair I was sitting in sideways and shouted at me! Then I shouted at him back and he said “don’t yu raise your voice to me!” as if he is God. He sure as hell is not God. He may not think I’m showing him respect, but maybe he should show his children a bit more respect and set a good example. How am I supposed to respect and obey him if he acts ridiculous and expects so much from me when I am merely a 12 year old girl that is stubborn and won’t take being disrespected. If you don’t want to be disrespected, try respecting other peoples’ feelings. I’m a very sensitive person and I cry pretty easily. He usually makes me cry at least every other day. I think I cried yesterday because he was being so frustrating.
And he doesn’t repesct my privacy. I write novels and he just went into the history in Internet Explorer and found the website that I posted them on for TEENAGERS to give critique on. They aren’t meant for his eyes, and I don’t want him reading them. And he had no problem reading my EXTREMELY PERSONAL poems.
If I don’t do as he says exactly when he says it, he immediately takes away the computer and starts yelling.

Now I have to clean up because he’s having a damn client over.

HEYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’m am dying with this new layout! I made it before I raised my expectations. If you wanna see what I expect from myself now, check out my Deviant Art @ http://23paces.deviantart.com. I’m am definitely making a new layout! This one is driving my crazy.

I’m going on this girl scouts camping thing on Friday! Yay? No. Why? Because it is the same day as the 6^th grade dance! The first dance we get to have! I’ll have to wait for like another 6 months until 7^th grade for one! I am pissed!! But the camping will be fun, too. I’m in the cabbin with Kirsten, Robyn, and Kelly, which is awesome because Kirsten is my best friend, Robyn is a crazy girl which will make it more entertaining, and Kelly kinda makes Robyn more hyper. So I’m hoping for a stay-up-till-4 kinda group. Though we have to get up at 7:30, so maybe we’ll go to bed at like 12! LOL

Today @ our girl scouts meeting we were practicing this thing we have to teach the little Brownies, and we had cornstarch there for making this goo stuff. Then Robyn discovers that if you put a bunch of cornstarch on your skin it feels really soft… next thing you know, the starch is on her face, arms, hands, clothes, and in her hair. She packed the starch on so thick on her arms that is was soooo smooth, but also kinda gross. She put it on her BARE back, too. Then we had to clean it all up… it sooo hard to clean it up! Wet paper towels don’t work for cleaning cornstarch up from the tiled floor, so if this ever happens to you, I suggest you get a broom. We did not have one.

Soo… making the layout! Yayness! Huzzah!! Oh, gosh, my friend Matt (the one I showed “eating” the bouncy ball in early April) always says “Huzzah!!” whenever something is accomplished well. It makes me wanna slap him (which I do anyway), but I’ve started saying it too!! And he keeps making fun of me for saying “WHAT?!!” really loudly when I have no clue whats going on. Its because I don’t listen, but they act like I’m a clueless person, which I kinda am part of the time. But still… Mackenzie said “what?” and Ben said that she was turning into me! I heard my name so I looked up and said “what?” and Ben said “I rest my case.” How annoying is that? Especially when it lasts 45 minutes or longer… sometimes an hour and a half.
And they say I have the swine flu because I’m so pale. Matt said “It all adds up! Just like 6+6=13!!” Idiot.

I’m trying to find a good picture on Deviant Art to use for the layout. Anyone know of any good photographers that would allow me to use their picture on here?

Peaces!!

I feel like I am completely ditching this blog! But I will not apologize because it’s my blog, and if I feel like not posting anything for 10 days then so be it. Heh. Yeah, I’ve been so lazy lately, and it feels like teachers are piling projects to use as torture.

I’ve got a big ELA cultural project (my subject is Spain) (my flag of Spain is due on the 5^th), a Science project (I have to make a thermos) (due the 7^th), I’ve got a S.S. test and paragraph both on the 7^th (test on Ancient Greece, paragraph on whether I would have wanted to live in ancient Athens or ancient Sparta more, and I would want Sparta because women get more rights and can be actual citizens). I don’t think I have anything in Math. Math has been a breeze lately, which I am loving. But Colleen isn’t getting it, so, naturally, I am the one that is helping her, which makes me delay “doing nothing”, which makes me push back all the projects I have to do. My daily “doing nothing” usually comes during Math (the easiest subject) but I’ve been having to help Colleen (and Phoebe a bit too) which is getting annoying. As much as I want them to pass, it is annoying. And Collen doesn’t need to learn this yet. This is 7^th grade math in 6^th grade and she’s gonna be in normal Math next year, so she’ll just learn it then with all the average people. Being average and normal is overrated. Weird people are the best!

Speaking of weird, I’ve got my wedding planned. I’m marrying Sarcasm. In Narnia. With Perry the platypus as the minister. I’m thinking that Imagination can be my Maid of Honor. Sarcasm doesn’t know who to pick for his best man; he has too many friends.
My dress will be made of my own hair (dyed white, right? No brown wedding dresses allowed!!) and my shoes will be made of wheat. Cool, right?

Okay it is almost 2 in the morning and Moe wants me in bed. I don’t feel like going to sleep. I’m not tired. I am so destined to be an owl or some nocturnal animal in my next life… OR THE MOON! I’m gonna be the moon in my next life! Or a talking beaver that helps four kids escape from the “Queen” of Narnia.
Man, what is with me and Narnia? I have only watched the first movie once or twice, and I feel asleep during the second one (BOOOOR-ING) and I haven’t read any of the books. I guess I’m just cool that way.

OOOOHHH! Websites//linkkss alert!!
Twitter
Deviant Art
Wordpress
Worthy of Publishing

EDIT: I put up a new layout but I’m starting to feel really sick again (I haven’t taken any Tylenol since 11 this morning) so I’m gonna go get some Tylenol, eat a snack before dinner, then watch a bit of TV. I’ll probably be back either later at night or tomorrow to put up the CSS and make sure everything looks right. Sorry if it doesn’t, but I’m starting to feel really ehh and my ear is starting to throb again, so I need some Tylenol (for ear & my headache I feel coming on). Peaces <3

Okay so my first sickness is gone, but starting Monday I’ve got an ear infection. And the area of my neck right below my infected ear hurts for no apparent reason. Daddy says it is probably how I was sleeping two nights ago or something. Moe thinks I was sitting looking at the computer too long, but I look at the computer too long every day and my neck doesn’t start to hurt.

I’ve got a new Twitter account!! Yayss! I had another one, but my e-mail account got closed by those dang Yahoo! people. I hate them. So you can follow me on twitter now. Yay. Let’s celebrate. You guys get out the champagne while Moe gets out the amoxicillin and Tylenol for me. Yippees.

New layout soon. I’m bored of this one, so I’m going to make a new one.

Oh crapppss. Tessa just “had” to listen//sing to Gives You Hell. It is giving me a killer headache. I don’t think she understands the concept of SICK. Or YOU’RE A SUCKY SINGER SO SHUT UP concept that she hears often. My head is literally pounding. Tessa really just doesn’t understand that I’ve been sick since last Wednesday and I don’t have the patience to listen to songs where A.) the actual singer yells, B.) Tessa yells to the song, and C.) the songs inflict pain on me.

I feel terrible!! Literally!

Yesterday was Tessa’s birthday so we went out to eat at Applebees. I’m feeling miserably tired when we get there, but it is Tessa’s birthday so I don’t complain until Moe starts complaining too. I get boneless chicken wings (soooo good any other night!) and start to eat, but I start to get kind of queasy…

Now I’m starting to cry from being nauseous (can’t spell it!!) so Daddy takes me home and I lay down on the couch. The nausea is nearing pain.

Then my heart starts to beat really quickly and I grab a bowl and… yeah.

But I feel much better. I can finally lay down comfortably and sleep, but I miss Tessa’s cake and I am barely awake as she opens her presents (she loves the sunglasses and earrings I got her). I go back to sleep after she opens her presents (they watch American Idol and I’m awake for a little bit of it).

Next thing I know I’m woken up at about 2:00 in the morning and Moe is trying to get me up to bed. So I get up and Daddy helps me up the stairs to my room. I replace my fleece pillow that my friends gave me while I was in the hospital with a plain old pillow. I move my blanket and call down to ask for a blanket to use (my blanket was sewn by Moe and can’t be washed like normal blankets and would be too hard to wash if anything got on it).

A few minutes later it happens again, so I wash up and go to bed (around 2:30-3 ish).

I wake up and I discover that Tessa didn’t go to school because she felt sick to her stomach, so we’re both at home just hanging out. And damn am I starving by 12:00 in the afternoon! The last time I ate was at like 6:30 the night before!

Moe comes home from work around 12:45 and she find me a popsicle and makes Tessa and I some rice. It felt so good to eat.

So I missed my last day of tech and math, which I’m having a test in tomorrow. Hopefully I didn’t miss anything that would be useful for me on the test.

And I have gym tomorrow. I will probably get a note to miss it. Being sick and all the day before gym will probably not help with nausea.

I have a terrible headache/migrane too. I get terrible headrushes whenever I stand up, even if I get up slowly. I remember this happened a few weeks ago, too. I had a really bad headache and headrushes and a cold and I felt so congested, which is how I feel right now but paired with being sooo hungry. I’m just too afraid to eat. All I am going to eat for now is toast and rice and popsicles. I’ll drink some water or something, too, but that is all my stomach can probably take right now.

Hopefully this will be a one-day thing. I don’t really know how long stomach bugs usually last because the last time I thought I had a stomach bug it was really my appendix. I can’t remember the alst time I really had a stomach bug.

On a happier note, I have joined the Portrait Wallpapers team! It isn’t like officially posted or anything, but I have access to the request forums and all that. I made one wallpaper for this summer thing and I’ll be making more for Portrait soon!

Hola! I just made a totally new look for New Soul. What do you think? I like it, but I don’t know if I will like the major simplicity of it for too long, so you probably shouldn’t get used to it. I’ll probably keep the CSS simple like this for the next layouts, though.

So happy almost Easter!

We had an Easter egg hunt yesterday in mine and my next-door neighbor’s backyards. There were only 5 people in the hunt (Shorty, Tessa, Angelina, Keith, and Jennie), but they had fun. I didn’t do the hunt, but I got Reese’s eggs from Tessa and Lina and some regular chocolate from Tessa’s bag (while she wasn’t looking). I also stole some Nerds from Shorty while he was turned around.

After the hunt we kind of had a party. There were all the kids and their parents and then Lindsay and her mom and dad and Ashley’s friend Ally’s parents.

We played Scattergories and I discovered just how badly I suck! In one list I got ZERO points. Can’t get much suckier than that, can you? I don’t think you can really get negatives, but with my luck I’ll somehow end up with -5 points next time I play.
But Lindsay was like amazing! I don’t get her… she is such a strange 9^th grader.

I felt so lonely being around adults, teens, and little people! I mostly hung out with Tessa and Lindsay and I watched Jennie and Lina a bit too, but I was pretty bored for most of it.
On the bright side, we got Little Caesar’s pizza and breadsticks, which are both ahhh-mazing! I couldn’t get through the crowd of adults to the breadsticks so I had to send Jennie and all her adorability in to break the crowd.

In the end it ended up just being Ed (Lina and Keith’s dad), Kyle (Jennie’s dad), and my family just hanging out. It was really hilarious after a while…
I walk away from Ed attempting Shorty’s yo-yo and I come back and I see Ed spitting out part of an eggshell into our sink then chewing… He ate one of the eggs I decorated earlier that day! I was just kinda like “Okay whaaaaa??” I walk away for TWO SECONDS and I come back and he’s eating my dyed egg (which also had some olive oil on the outside for a cool effect I think). I was kinda pissed because it was the coolest egg that I did.
Ed goes “YOU AREN’T ‘POSED THE DYE DA INSIDE!!” at me and all we do is laugh hysterically. He just happened to choose one that had a major crack in it.

So Ed ate my pretty egg I dyed (shell and all) and attempted yo-yo earlier (didn’t go down too well).

Sooo is anybody else in need of a shopping trip to Ulta (or some makeup store) or is it just me? I’ve been DYING to go to Ulta and get some foundation, concealer, and mascara. I’ve been taking Moe’s foundation and mascara for like the past two months and nobody in my house uses concealer so I NEED to go to Ulta! I hope Moe is reading this… I’ve only got $13 though, so I’ll probably only get mascara and maybe concealer. I can deal okay without foundation I guess…

Hola! I have signed up for CSS Naked Day, the day when you strip your website of all CSS to see how it looks! Check out http://naked.dustindiaz.com to nude-ify your website, too!

“The idea behind this event is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words. It’s time to show off your <body>.”

So I don’t know if it is active yet… it shoudl be soon! I’m kind of scared to see how it looks!

Wow! It has been such a long time since I’ve blogged! My life has been more boring than ever, even with April Fool’s Day. My pranks weren’t that good, but I couldn’t think of anything else:

1. To Colleen: Warn her that there is this amazing prank that I’m gonna play on her on April Fool’s Day… then do nothing whatsoever! That’s the prank.

2. To Matt: I took a pic of him biting his edible cell (science project… you had to make an animal or plant cell only out of edible things) that I found on our science teacher’s website and replaced it with a bouncy ball. I printed it out and put it in his locker.

You want to know the bouncy ball story? Because that prank is a lot funnier if you know the story: During lunch one day, Courtney was sitting with Matt and she was playing with her bouncy ball. It ended up going all over the floor and eventually Courtney caught it under her foot. So Matt reached down to take it, but before he could get to it Connor grabbed it and grabbed the back of Matt’s head. Matt started yelling, and, with Matt’s mouth wide open mouth, Connor shoved the bouncy ball in Matt’s mouth. And now Courtney has that story ready to go in the school newspaper… excellent, right?

Do you guys want to see the picture of him “eating” the bouncy ball?

Did his face, though barely visible, hurt your eyes? It hurts mine. Haha actually I would have major headaches all the time if his face hurt my eyes. He isn’t ugly, but he’s got really big teeth. I say that he has buck teeth then he hits me then I grab his pencil and threaten him with it… then he stops. I am a very threatening person, aren’t I? Jenna says I’m violent.

I can’t say I disagree *evil grin* MWAHAHAA!

If I creep you out, I totally understand.

Did you guys hear about Natasha Richardson’s death?!
I just can’t wrap my head around it. I remember her mostly from the Parent Trap starring next to Lindsay Lohan (and Lindsay Lohan again) as her mom and… wow. I just can’t get myself to understadn that she is dead! I wonder if she would have been okay if she had been wearing a helmet when she was skiiing.
I was the same for Heath Ledger, too. It took weeks for me to get used to it and everything. I’m still not used to it… “what happened to the cute guy in 10 Things I Hate About You? He died? Nooo!!” That was my reaction pretty much.

SHE CAN’T BE DEAD! SHE’S TOO YOUNG! SHE’S TOO FAMILIAR A FACE IN MY HEAD!

This really sucks. I can’t imagine being anybody who actually knows her… oh, wow. I would be dead inside.

W-O-W. IT’S IMPOSSIBLE. IT REALLY IS.

EDIT: LAYOUT IS UP! I STILL NEED TO EDIT THE CODING, SO SORRY IF IT LOOKS ABSOLUTELY ATROCIOUS. I’M HAVING SOME PROBLEMS WITH IT, BUT I’LL TRY TO FIX IT.

Kelly’s new album is awesome. My favorites are two bonuses Can We Go Back and Tip of My Tongue and then Ready, a song that is on the regular album.

I am planning to have my portfolio on my DeviantArt profile thingy instead of having an actual site. My username is 23paces, so if you want to look me up, go ahead. I don’t have anything on there right now, so don’t really expect to find anything if you look me up. I might put some parts of my novels on there, too.
I haven’t finished my better ones yet and they aren’t edited. Nothing is edited. I really need to edit my first one I wrote. It is about 300 pages long and needs some major editing. The first half was written without thinking about the ending plot. I’d bet, after editing and everything, it will turn out to be, like, 200 pages. I really need to adjust some things so that it doesn’t just have a problem that seems bigger than it is then have it become fixed in two sentences.

So I will be adding some things to my DA account.

OH! And I will start to make brushes and avatars and such available to you people soon! I will probably take the stuff from my old design site (which is on an open hiatus), Acid Rain Designs (at http://acidraindesigns.e-fans.net). There are lots of tutorials and avatars and all that crap. Okay, it’s not crap. Actually, most of it is pretty good =] I don’t like some of the signs and stuff, though. I might not put those up.

Sooo… a to-do list:

— Add stuff to my DA account
— Add resources and crap
— Edit my only finished novel
— Tell Colleen about my blackmail about Matt

Okay, don’t ask about that last one… I’ll tell you guys I guess. It’s pretty funny.
I have two things on Matt (aka Radish Boy) that are hilarious:

1. In a school play in 4^th or 5^th grade, Matt was Puck the Fairy (in Midsummers Night Dream by Shakespere). He had purple wings.

2. Mackenzie punched Matt and made him cry last year (5^th grade).

I can’t add more details because Moe is calling me for dinner… so CIAO!

I’M CURED!

. . . . . MOSTLY! I still have a cold, but the whole throat and headache thing is all gone. And now my ears are being annoying again. First my right ear hurt a bit for a few hours, and then it went into being all plugged up and making me half-deaf. Now my other ear is in the painful stage. . . . Yippity diddley doo =[
So I’m half deaf and I’m talking all loud apparently. It sucks when you are trying to whisper during math and your seats are all seperated for the upcoming state math test (see below for the moaning). You can’t just lean a bit and barely make any sound. I have to first get Miranda’s attention, and then attempt to not be too loud. Yesterday Mr. Brown almost threw Miranda out of the classroom for talking.

Okayy. . . . moaning-about-math-test time!!
NOOO! I DON’T WANT TO TAKE A MATH TOMORROW! OR THURSDAY! WHY DO THEY HAVE TO DRAG IT OUT, THOUGH?!!

Okay. On with life. . . umm. . . Matt and I kept killing each other by flicking one another (him on the ear while he would flick me anywhere he gets a chance… I’m much more attentive than he is). At the end of the day, Danna and I were waiting for the bell to ring and so we were standing at the door. Then Danna goes, “be right back. I need to pinch Matt.” So I’m just like, cool! I gotta pinch him one last time! I owe him a flick. So then the bell rings right when we reach him so I run after him and flick him on the ear twice as he walks out the door. Everyone was cracking up.
I know. I’m just that hilarious. . .

How boring am I right now? I’m guessing very. It’s just that, when you’re only in 6^th grade, and you’re only a 12 year old girl, your life isn’t very exciting. Maybe I’ll have something better for you two and a half¹ people that read my blogs.

1. I only count Tessa as a half a person. And I just realized that I was kind of indicating that I like the show Two And A Half Men, which I have never watched. Please do not get confused and believe such rumors. Thank you.

Hola!
I noticed I haven’t blogged in a while… nothing very interesting has happened. Plus I’m not feel well at all. I have had this headache all today and I get a bad head rush whenever I stand up, even if I stand up slowly. Moe gave me Tylenol (or something like that) and I’m due for another dose at 9… ahh! Just 20 more minutes! My head KILLS!
The Tylenol is for kids 95lbs and lower (3 tsp for 80-95lbs I think) so I just took 4 tsp since I’m probably… 120lb or something. (I haven’t weighed myself in like 6 months. I was weighed at the hospital, which was almost 6 months ago, but I don’t remember what it was.)

So I’m not feeling too well. I don’t like to blog while I’m not feeling good because, for some really weird reason, I do my best writing when I’m not feeling good. It’s kind of weird. It’s like I’m not all happy and hyper and energized, so I can write the parts that are more dramatic or need to be less happy and everything. Yet I can still do happy parts when I feel sick.

Sooo… I’m off to write! Peace & <3

EDIT: I have been ATTEMPTING to look up symptoms on strep throat (stupid parental blocking thing!) and I think it is possible that I have strep or pharyngitis or something along those lines. I have a sore throat and runny nose and bad headaches. I don’t know if this has anything to do with it, but the back sides of my neck have been kind of sore. If any of you know anything, it would be great if you could help me out! I’m not exactly a doctor…
It said online that pharyngitis usually goes away on its own, so I’m hoping for that! Everyone think PHARYNGITIS (THAT WILL GO AWAY BY MONDAY… I hate missing school because then I have to go around to all my teachers get do all the work I missed… and Monday is an even day and therefore I have all 4 subjects to miss). It said that viral infections or something are helped by fluids, pain relievers, and gargling warm salt water (ew, but if it will help, I’ll do just about anything!). It’d better not be strep throat because then I actually have to get antibiotics and everything, which would suck. Plus I hate the strep throat test. I was tested once (negative, thank God!) and a little bit of vomit came up, but I swallowed it with my water.
So everybody think PHARYNGITIS or SORE THROAT AND A COLD THAT WILL GO AWAY BY MONDAY! Will that jinx it? Will what I just said jinx it? Oh well.

I love-love the covers by Natasha! I found a This Love by Maroon 5 cover that she did and it was awesome.

I don’t really have much to say… My Odyssey of the Mind competition is on Saturday (Sunday if the weather is too bad) and I’m so excited! We did all the paperwork crap stuff today and thats all taken care of. Tomorrow I have to finish the painting of Colleen and do the crystal ball. I just have to paint the painting (I already have it sketched out) and I have to add, like, sparkles and paint and everything on the styrofoam sphere… Isn’t it so riviting and exciting?!!!

My life has been pretty boring lately. Nothing much has happened.
I mean, it’s not like I’ve been bored this past week or so. It’s just that the things that have entertained me aren’t really that worth blogging about.
Oh but one thing funny happened today!
I was working on something in social studies with Courtney, and Nate and Alex were working on the same thing at the desks next to ours. We’re working for a bit and I notice that Alex keeps looking at me.
Finally he comes out and asks, “Did you get contacts?”
So we discussed contacts instead of Ancient China for a few minutes, then went back to work. Then a few minutes later Alex says that he can touch his eye with his pencil, but he is kidding, of course. But he does say he can touch it with his finger.
“Oh my gosh, so can I!” I say and Alex responds, “I doubt you can. Prove it.”
We had JUST discussed my getting contacts and now he’s saying that I can’t touch my eye. It’s not like a bird comes down from a cloud and magically puts little lenses on my eyes! I have to actually touch my eye.

Oh! And there’s a new layout featuring Elle Fanning. It’s a screencap from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and it came from elle-fanning.org’s gallery I think.
Soo… that’s it. Ciao!

I’m supposed to be going to this condo place to ski for two days with my family. But Shorty just HAD to get sick! He has an ear infection =[
And my ear is messed up too. They checked my ear and they said its pretty much swimmer’s ear… but I don’t go swimming. I haven’t since early September. It’s weird. But I’m supposed to soak my ear a few times a day with warm water and it should go away soon. But it’s painful to touch it!
So I’ve got swimmer’s ear minus the swimming. Lovely.

So I’m being bored sitting here talking to Julia (partner in crime since kindergarten) and attempting to write. But I’ve got major writer’s block. I wrote sooo much yesterday and now today… nothing!

This is my random ranting of today.
I’ll probably be “absent” for tomorrow and possibly the day after that. I will probably have some things to blog about by Saturday.
And I’ve got this awesome new layout planned. I just can’t seem to keep one layout up for more than 2 or 3 weeks. I like constant change.

Terra never fails to disappoint with her songs. Her songs are very… I don’t know the word. Not exactly inspirational but… I dunno.
This song says “Up here I’m making you aware that if you don’t like me well I don’t care”. It’s awesome.

Okay so I got my contacts today! Yay! No more annoying-as-heck glasses!
It didn’t take me too long to take them out/put them in either. Only about 5 minutes, which is pretty good for not being good at touching my eye and plus its only my first time putting them in. I remember that the place was trying to close and Tessa still hadn’t been able to get her contacts out. They don’t have you leave until you’ve figured out how to get your contacts out so they had to stay open a little bit longer for her.
I’m guessing it will be sooo easy soon.
Right now I’m like completely aware of the contacts in my eyes, though. I feel them on my eyelids when I close my eyes… it’s kind of like having a retainer in (not that I’ve ever had one, but from what I’ve heard I’m guessing it’s similar). The contact is a foreign object in your eye and your body immediately thinks it shouldn’t be there then bugs the hell out of you when you know it SHOULD be there!
They said that that feeling should go away soon, though. It already it, but I’m still pretty aware of them.
I can only wear them for up to 5 hours tomorrow so I can’t wear them to school =[ I told Colleen that I would wear them, too. I might put them in at, like, study hall. Just ask to go to the bathroom. Moe says that I should go to the nurse to put them in, but she doesn’t know that nobody wants to go down to the nurse to do something that you could just do in the bathroom. She says that at least there’s somebody there if you need help or you hurt yourself or something, but I could force Jenna to come with me.

*singing terribly*
I see the lights are turning
and I look outside, the stars are burning
Through this changing time it could have been
Anything we want, it’s fine
Salvation is just a passing thought
It was just a passing thought…
*time passes*
*still singing*
And though they say it’s possible
To me, I can’t see how it’s probable
*stops singing*

That was terrible, right? because that’s what I was aiming for.

I found a book report book. Olive’s Ocean by Kevin Henkes. I’ve read it in, like, 4^th grade and I loved it. But for the report we have to fill out this thing about the plot, problem, solution, climax, characters, setting, etc.
But there really isn’t a climax (most exciting//important part) or a problem//solution thing. I guess the whole Martha almost drowning when Jimmy passes on the beach could be the climax. I don’t know what to do for the problem//solution, though. I’ll probably be taking a trip to Yahoo! Answers soon. You can get answers to anything there! I swear to… well, not God because maybe you can’t… so I swear to my socks.