My Illustrious Writing Career

Hannah #1 and Hannah #2 (fight amongst yourselves for who gets which position) both kindly donated the Somethingorother award. Thanks a bunch! Rules, abridged: List seven facts about yourself, then give it to seven people, then keep on being awesome. No comment to the last instruction, and just about everyone I would have given it to has already gotten it or will very soon, so I'll skip to the other part. Which I am totally cheating with. Aren't randomly inserted numbers at paragraph breaks wonderful?

1. It’s 12:30 on a Saturday night. I am sitting with my (beloved, new-to-me, Internet-less) laptop on the floor of my room, complete with very bad posture, and listening to Nickel Creek (also new-to-me, and not beloved but well-liked). I have finished my daily word count, leaving my main character frozen in the middle of a fistfight and a secondary character on the verge of being shoved into an oven.

So, since certain other people have taken up the practice of putting their story synopses and covers in their sidebar, and it looks very impressive and all that, and I like reading about other people’s stories, and I conform easily, I decided to do it too. Except not on the sidebar, because I can’t bear the thought of my summaries glaring at me every time I open my blog, so I shall stick it in a post that hardly anyone will read and it can fade into happy obscurity. Here we go.

2. Nameless NaNo 2007—Coriander and…I can’t remember her brother’s name. Something like Aelric, Aedric? go out to seek their fortunes after the convenient tragic death of their father. They find that they were actually related to the royal family or something like that. Rambling adventures ensue, involving the Titanic, mathematics anthropomised, Rapunzel, and a revolution. I’m more proud of the fact that I wrote the entire thing by hand WHILE pulling a good mark in Physics than anything else. The story is horrific. I decided to do NaNo at 9:30 PM on October 31 that year and it’s painfully obvious.

3. No Safe Home (with Krys and Miss Ethel G. Keynes)—Three London children are evacuated to the country, where they meet people of varying degrees of nastiness before coming home forever scarred. Yeah…pretty much. I have no idea how we made 45K out of this—it doesn’t have much plot at all, now that I think of it. But it was loads of fun (for me at least—sorry Krys), and my first “real” story that I finished AND actually didn’t hate it by the end, plus it got me interested in the Blitz and from there, WWII as a whole. Our part was only a smallish part of the real thing, which mushroomed and mushroomed—one branch is the very awesome Through a Rain of Fire.

4. The Exiles—2008’s NaNo. I had a smashing futuristic dystopian plot worked out for several months before, and then for SOME REASON decided to do a random idea I came up with in biology class on October 28. It was an unsuccessful attempt at steampunk, about six kids who are sent to a boarding school where sinister goings-on abound and eventually they discover that they’re all being used as scientific experiments. Unfortunately it didn’t turn out nearly as cool as this sounds. Also my attempt to make two interesting INTPs and INFJs flopped because their ISTP brother completely took over. I always lose when my ISTPs rebel.

5. Day of Ashes—sequel to No Safe Home, 2009’s Rebel NaNo, my OYAN novel, and my magnum opus, oh yes. Will (one of the three kids) joins the Fire Guard as a messenger, while his friend/enemy/neighbour (it’s complicated) Una discovers her forgotten past etc etc. Things burn, bombs fall, people occasionally die, that sort of thing.

6. Untitled Epic—2009’s other NaNo novel. Sort of an adventure/fantasy/parody thing. Dainail insults Greoghar Risteard’s hat and Risteard doesn’t take it well, so Dainail must flee the country. He meets a blind girl, falls in love with her stunning beauty blah blah blah, but can’t marry her until he finds a cure for her blindness. The quest that follows involves pirates, a lost king, and other things that have yet to be decided. The other plotline involves a bureaucracy bent on (as they see it) restoring sanity—i.e. making things the way they used to be in the days of fairy tales—so they keep throwing obstacles in Dainail’s path.

Please throw shoes and tomatoes at me for not learning my lesson in what happens when Kelsey tries to write fantasy, or stories on the spur of the moment, or (the especially brutal combination) fantasy stories on the spur of the moment. Bad idea. Very bad idea. Very, very bad idea.

7. I have about half a million other ideas and half-finished drabbles that I’ll probably ruin when I eventually get around to writing them. If only I could be like Alexandre Dumas, who supposedly came up with the ideas and got someone else to pound out the words, then stuck his name on it.

So, not so illustrious, but that's ok. I've met a lot of people, mostly online, who are truly serious about writing...I'm not, sad to say, although I love learning the theory of it, and applying that to what I read. I write because I enjoy it, but I doubt I'll ever get anything published, and that's quite all right.