8 - Frost and Snow

   It's Friday. We have two weeks of school left before Christmas break. I was sick for two days this week, which means I will be having no weekend, but I'm going to see Rise of the Guardians tonight because of Jack Frost. Hmrrr. :3

Please ignore me. Just being attracted to an animated character over here.

My creative writing teacher must think I'm so weird.

   But anyway - when I was home sick, I sat on my bed and read The Hobbit and drew some Homestuck characters and watched Once Upon a Time. That show is really awful, but also really addictive. There's all this painfully obvious green screen-ing and cheesy characters and so much kissing. Not to mention someone should really handcuff Snow and Charming together so that they quit losing each other and the plot can go on. Goodnight, every ten seconds one of them is complaining about how they can't find the other. And every other ten seconds Regina is doing something infuriatingly evil. It's just so annoying.

    Now leave so I can watch another episode. :3

    Gahh, two more weeks until Christmas break. I don't think I'll be able to last. 

    You know what would be awesome? Lots of things would be awesome. I was going to say that it would be awesome if Jack Frost actually existed so he could run around outside in the winter and things, but that would just be irretrievably weird of me. 

     So now I leave you.

     . . . With another gif of Jack Frost. :3

7 - Half, pt.3

    Silas always felt that he was different, in ways that he couldn't discern. There was something in how the classmates who walked the halls of his high school treated him - some sort of masked defensiveness. People avoided his eyes. Among a sea of similar faces, he was the only one who wasn't accepted. But at the same time, he wasn't entirely rejected either, so he was left to dangle on his own, on the edge of a precipice where people saw him about to lose his grip but didn't bother to help him. Instead they turned away, turned a blind eye to him.

    He was ashamed to realize why, but deep inside himself he knew the reason. It was his bionic arm. Complications at birth had left him without his left arm, but his parents were good to him, and throughout his life he had always been provided with a fitted robotic alternative. It worked fine. It didn't limit his abilities at all, and he never pitied himself.
    But there was the catch that, in society's eyes, was worse than the fact that Silas didn't have an arm. It was that he didn't have a clock on his wrist. He was the only one in his class, in his school, in his city, possibly in his country. And while the fact had never really bothered him, he disliked how people treated him because of it. He felt that all this talk of soulmates, all this talk of magical clocks and predetermined futures, was garbage. He wasn't going to let disapproving eyes and dwindling numbers tell him who he loved. 

6 - Having entered the Nanowrimo winner's circle

May I just say. . . 

Wham bam chicken jam.

     I have finished Nanowrimo, with a final word count of 50787, for the first time since I first tried in 2010. I've been doing nothing but writing for the past few days, and now. . . it's over. I don't know what to do with myself.

     My novel is about a zombie apocalypse, with a lot of depth and insight and obscurity. xD It doesn't have a title yet, although I wish I could use the most likely copyrighted John Green title An Imperial Affliction. My protagonist is a 16-year-old survivor named Aster. She has become as much a part of me as I am to myself, and I love her a lot, even through all her flaws and whining. I'm not even done with the novel yet. I have more to add, more characters to introduce, more zombies to slay, and an ending to bring about. But I'm just happy that I've gotten so far. :D Now I'll put it aside for a while until Christmas break, when I'll finish it and begin editing. Sounds like a plan. Yes, good. And tomorrow I'll get to copy and paste all those words into the official word count validator. Heheheh. I AM EXCITE. THIS IS EXCITE. I'M EVEN USING A WORD THAT ISN'T EVEN A WORD TO EXPRESS MY EXCITEMENT. 

     I WROTE A FREAKING NOVEL. 

    And now I leave you with a small excerpt from my novel.

  Now I’ve entered the city, padding carefully down the street and staring up at the once magnificent buildings, which are empty and cold. Shards of jagged glass litter the road, along with twisted rods of metal and splintered wood. I don't know what could cause a city, a place so strong and invincible, to become so desecrated, as if some large and violent has ripped it apart.

   A terrible inhuman scream shatters the air.

   I spin toward the sound, my whole body tingling and alert as I aim my gun. My eyes are wide, taking in the tall gray building in front of me. It sounded like the scream came from somewhere behind it. Then, with awful suddenness, a cacophony of roars and moans rises through the air, setting my teeth on edge. My eyes widening, I back up slowly, leaping a mile when my back hits an old taxi. Somewhere close, there are a lot of zombies. The sound of their relentless hunger enters my ears at a low volume, telling me that they’re not too close. But they’re not too far away, either.

   And then, in an instant, my life is changed forever.

   A zombie comes tearing around the back of the gray building, which is about three hundred feet away. I ready my gun to shoot it. But the zombie has something large and black slung across its back and is running at a breakneck pace – not shambling. Not sprinting and roaring. Just running. Those movements are much too fluid, much too desperate to belong to a zombie. And then I catch a glimpse of dark hair, of limbs that are whole and skin that is unscathed -

   And, in the heart-stopping, earth-shattering, bone-crunching space of a single moment, I realize that it’s not a zombie.

   It’s a human.

   A real, live, unharmed, existent, tangible human being.

   A survivor.

5 - Spontaneous book review: Delirium by Lauren Oliver

    The other day, I did a thing. I walked into the bookstore prepared to buy a book. In my pocket were three battered five-dollar bills that I had hand-picked from my money stash for this purpose. I was hungry for words.
    I wandered into the Young Adult section (which is never a good idea. Gosh, who coordinates all those books, anyways? Why do so many bad ones exist? Why do people assume that teenagers only want to stuff their brains with paranormal mush and awkward teenage drama? What's with all of the almost-but-not-quite inappropriate book covers?) For whatever reason, I walked past all the books that I really wanted, like Paper Towns and Leviathan and that gorgeous signed copy of Looking For Alaska. I came across a copy of one of my favorite books, Lauren Oliver's Before I Fall. I hugged it in a moment of remembrance and sentimentality. That is one good book. Then I noticed that Lauren Oliver had another book out - a dystopian called Delirium. So I bought it. Before I Fall was amazing, okay?! And I guess something possessed me to buy Delirium. I had high expectations for it.
     I cannot express how much I disliked this book.
     There are many factors which led to this sad excuse of a bestseller falling right into that abyss within me set aside for the Books We Do Not Speak Of. I don't even know where to start. 
      So the book is set in the future, or, like, an alternate present or something. I don't know. Meh, who cares? What matters is that in this future or alternate present or unestablished time period, love is considered a disease and everyone at the age of eighteen receives a procedure to be rid of it. The Hunger Games seems to have spawned a lengthening line of dystopians with age-related climactic events. Anyway, the main character is totally hunky dory with this until - gasp - she falls in love. How did I not see from the start just how predictable this plot is? I don't know. 
     First off. . . where to start. . . okay, so the main character. Her name is Lena. She is endlessly boring. There is nothing in the least that made me excited about her or made me like her or even felt relatable to me in any way. At the beginning of the book, all she really does is complain about how love is a terrible sickness and she's really nervous about her procedure and oh lord her best friend is so much prettier than her when boom - in comes the dashing, charming, enchantingly handsome young man, with a cookie cutter personality and an unrealistic eye color and a really boring name - Alex - to steal the heart that she didn't know she had. And now she is completely, eternally, absolutely in love with him 5eva and she wants to overthrow the government and she'll even forsake her family but none of that is worth it any more because this is twoo wuv, right? A random hormonal obsessive infatuation between two dull people, teenagers nonetheless, certainly is a great example of true love, the kind that makes you want to overturn mountains and scream until your lungs burst, which might just be better for all of us because you are annoying in the first place. Right?
      What annoys me about Lena is that the enormous change she goes through - this whole idea of "falling in love" and realizing that love is not really what everyone tells her it is and realizing that the implications of this will change her life - seems at times to be nothing more than the flicking on and off of a light switch. She simply doesn't evolve like she should, and her change is so . . . forced. 
      The next problem I have is with the authoritative government that exists in the book. If it is as oppressive as Lauren Oliver wants us to believe it is, then Lena most definitely would have been discovered on one of her random illegal nighttime outings. This sort of conflict did not arise until much later in the book, and it didn't seem likely when one considers how cruel Lauren Oliver's government is made out to be. It doesn't make sense.
       I don't even want to get into this any further. Bottom line: Delirium wasn't worth my time, and now I don't really want to read any more YA literature any time soon. I've had enough sappy, cliché love stories and stale dystopians, that's for sure.

4 - memories, moleskines, and stephen chbosky

     It's nearly the end of Thanksgiving break. I remember that last Thanksgiving break, I read Across the Universe by Beth Revis (one of my favorite books) and then threw the book at the wall when a certain character death took place. I remember that last Thanksgiving break, my mom lined the banisters with multicolored Christmas lights. We put up the Christmas tree early, and every time you stepped around that corner at the top of the stairs the sight of it would hit you and take your breath away. I remember that my friend H came over a few times and her whole family came along and we ate chocolates and laughed in the living room and her little sister watched Frosty  with me. I like remembering things, measuring how much time has passed since I last remembered them.

     I can't wait for it to be Christmas. I've just got three more weeks of school and a few AP Bio tests to get through.

     On Friday, I bought the unabridged Les Misérables and a limited edition Hobbit Moleskine. It's brown with a shiny red-gold Lonely Mountain etched on the cover. It came with a map of the Wilderlands. My brother bought Assassin's Creed III and I played it a little bit yesterday and today. It's such an interesting concept. I quite like Connor Kenway's sassy classy father. 

     I just googled Hobbit Moleskines and discovered that there's an unruled version in black with a shiny red dragon. Want. 

     And now I leave you with a quote from The Perks of Being a Wallflower: "I think that if I ever have kids, and they are upset, I won't tell them that people are starving in China or anything like that because it won't change the fact that they were upset. And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn't really change the fact that you have what you have."

3 - excursions in digital art

 OMG I DID AN ART.

I've been dying to experiment with digital art lately, so I randomly downloaded Sketchbook Express from the Mac app store and then this happened. I somehow did it with the macbook's trackpad. I'm hoping for a drawing tablet for Christmas. :3

How are you, blog? Long time, no see.

It's Nanowrimo season! Woot. I'm powering through. Planning on finishing this year. My story's about a zombie apocalypse. Those journal things - Aster's journals - they're written by the main character. She's quite interesting. Keeps surprising me with her random coolness. Just yesterday she socked my male main character in the jaw without my consent, but I'm okay with that. She's just asserting her independence. ^.^ 

I should write a story about this mysterious turquoise-haired girl who just manifested herself as my first-ever piece of digital art. She reminds me of a My Little Pony. I have no idea why. 

Her name is now Starlynn.

Yes, good. :3

I want to do more art. 

*looks at blank sketchbook nearby*

Meh. 

So tomorrow's Thanksgiving! Let's do the elementary thing and make a list of what we're thankful for.

Or just me. 'Cause I'm only one person. Who does not have schizophrenia. 

Anyways.

STUFF I'M THANKFUL FOR:

- Art.

- Music.

- Air.

- Hope.

Look at me being all vague and hipster.

- Fluffy blankets.

- The smell of baking cheesecake.

- Mechanical pencils.

- The ocean.

- Sparkly unicorn stickers.

Happy Thanksgiving!