Live-Blogging Nano

Hello Blogosphere. I have a confession. It is a terrible and heart-wrenching one. It is the kind of confession that makes you weep copiously while pounding the carpet with your hands as your family members look on in shame, wondering how on earth they could be related to you.

I am behind on NaNoWriMo. Like, way behind.

Now, this is my fourth year doing Nano. I'm used to being behind. But I've never, and I mean never, been this behind. I am currently 25,000 words behind where I'm supposed to be. Let that sink in a minute. 25,000 words.

This is a bit disheartening. But because I have this thing where I cannot imagine failure being a distinct possibility, I SHALL PREVAIL. It's the holidays, I'll just chug out a few 5,000 word days and be back on track! No big deal, right?

Well, it's not that much of a big deal when you don't have shopping to do, or family to visit, or knitting to catch up on or tv to watch or posses the most amazing procrastination skills on the planet. And so I have decided to take a cue from Beth Revis's live-blogging of her Nano experience and try it out for myself. Maybe public shaming will spur me on to my first 5,000 word day of the month.

So, I will update this post throughout the day with my writing stats. And, without further ado, LET THE NANO DAY OF AWESOME BEGIN.

Word Count at Start of the Day: 10,969 (Even though it's not really the start of the day, seeing as it's already 1:30 in the afternoon...DON'T YOU JUDGE ME. Sleep is important for good writing...right?)

Round One: 10,969
Time: 1:40
Status: Time for the important scene of importance that is filled to the brim with nightmares, ghosts, romantic tension and endless shipping. I am going to tackle this scene LIKE A BOSS.

Round Two: 11,505
Time: 3:40
Status: Well...oops. The good news is that I wrote 500 words! But the bad news is then I ate lunch...and cleaned the kitchen...and did laundry. Who knew cleaning could be a procrastination tool? But now I have tea and a cool scene to write. I AM BACK ON TRACK.

Round Three: 12,214
Time: 4:20
Status: THE CHEESY ROMANCE HAS ARRIVED. And it has arrived with a vengeance. It's literally like I've taken spray cheese and sprayed it all over my novel, you guys. It's so hilariously bad. Part of me is proud of my ridiculous levels of cheesiness. The other part is horribly ashamed.

Cover Reveal and Giveaway: EXHALE

Hey everyone! I'm happy to be a part of the cover reveal for Jennifer Snyder's upcoming YA novel Exhale!

(Isn't the cover gorgeous? It was created by Once Upon a Time Covers! Go check them out!)

Summary:

Inhaling in life is easy. It’s the exhaling—the letting go— that’s the hard part.

Katie Elliot has always known the Conner twins. For years she secretly pined after one, while playfully averting the advances of the other.  Once upon a time, she was fine with that. Then came the moment when her twin of preference kissed her and changed everything.

As if realizing love can be complex—even when it’s reciprocated—isn’t hard enough, tragedy strikes, tearing Katie and the boy she’s always desired apart.  Finding herself torn between love and guilt, Katie must learn when it’s acceptable to let go—when it’s finally okay to exhale.

Release Date: December 10th, 2010

You can find Jennifer over on her blog, twitter or goodreads!

 

And look! A wild giveaway appears! Enter to win an eARC of Exhale

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Save a Word Saturday

The lovely bloggers over at The Feather and the Rose have started a cool blog hop! It's dedicated to saving old and archaic words from disappearing into the dust of history. You can sign up and learn more about it here!

Here are the rules:

1.  Pick an old word you want to save from extinction to feature in your blog post. It really must be an old word, not just a big one. We are trying to save lovely archaisms, not ugly giants (for example, "Dihydrogen Monoxide" is not an acceptable choice). Luciferous Logolepsy is a great database of lovely words, if you're having trouble coming up with something on your own.

2. Provide a definition of your word. Use your word in a sentence (or even a short paragraph) vaguely related to the theme we have chosen this week. You may also add visual or musical interpretations of your word or your sentence. In fact, add anything that moves your creative spirit.

3. Use as many of the words as you can on the people in your life. Do leave us a note or add something to your own post to let us all know what wonderful old word you whipped out to befuddle your friends and relations.

 This week's theme is:

Tea

My word is vade mecum
n. - a favorite book carried everywhere

And here is my sentence (well, it's more like a paragraph...whatever):

Miranda sat on the banks of the river, cup of tea clutched in hand, and watched families float by in their little boats. They all laughed as everyone failed rather spectacularly at steering in a straight line. She looked at her book where it lay in the grass and mused about how funny it was that even after ten years, her tattered (and quite tea-stained) copy of Lord of the Rings still remained her vade mecum.

Stacking the Shelves #2

Stacking the Shelves is a meme hosted by Tynga's Reviews. You can learn more about it here! It features books I've received throughout the week, whether they're physical books or ebooks I bought, borrowed, received, etc.

 So here are my lovely books (That I'm super excited to read when I finish all the others I'm supposed to be reading...)

Received for Review:

 (eARC from NetGalley)

Won:

 

(Thanks again to all the authors that participated in The Apocalypsies YAmazing Race! It was a lot of fun.)

I'm super excited to get to read all of these! I have a good friend that loved Starters, and The Dark Light looks really cool. Haven't heard much about A Shimmer of Angels, but look at that cover. I mean seriously, how can I not read that?

 

What do you guys think? Have any shelves of your own to share?

Feature and Follow Friday #3

Feature and Follow is a fun blog hop hosted by Parajunkee's View and Alison Can Read. It's really easy to participate, and it's a great way to meet new blog friends! Go check it out here. 

This week's question: Books are turned into movies all the time! Turn it around. What movie would make a great book?

Hmmm...this is a hard one. I'm a bit of a movie junkie, but I've never really thought about it before. Martin Socrecese's The Departed is one of my favourites, so I'll go with that one. It'd be cool with alternating perspectives, what with all the spying and undercover stuff going on. We'd get a whole different look into the characters' heads.

What do you guys think? Leave a comment so I can go check your posts out!

Stacking the Shelves #1

Stacking the Shelves is a meme hosted by Tynga's Reviews. You can learn more about it here! It features books I've received throughout the week, whether they're physical books or ebooks I bought, borrowed, received, etc.

Without further ado here are the books I've somehow acquired this past week:

Received for Review:

(An eARC from NetGalley)

Won:

 (Thanks to the awesome authors over at The Apocalypsies for their YAmazing Race!)

I've heard a lot about Venom on the web so I'm excited to read that, and Freakling looks awesome! Pantomime looks really cool too. So what books did you all get?

Save a Word Saturday

The lovely bloggers over at The Feather and the Rose have started a cool blog hop! It's dedicated to saving old and archaic words from disappearing into the dust of history. You can sign up and learn more about it here!

Here are the rules:

1.  Pick an old word you want to save from extinction to feature in your blog post. It really must be an old word, not just a big one. We are trying to save lovely archaisms, not ugly giants (for example, "Dihydrogen Monoxide" is not an acceptable choice). Luciferous Logolepsy is a great database of lovely words, if you're having trouble coming up with something on your own.

2. Provide a definition of your word. Use your word in a sentence (or even a short paragraph) vaguely related to the theme we have chosen this week. You may also add visual or musical interpretations of your word or your sentence. In fact, add anything that moves your creative spirit.

3. Use as many of the words as you can on the people in your life. Do leave us a note or add something to your own post to let us all know what wonderful old word you whipped out to befuddle your friends and relations.

 This week's theme is:

Snow

My word is Aurated

          adj. gilded

And here is my wonderful sentence:

Alice woke up early that morning. The cold seeped in from outside and wrapped her in thin tendrils. She jumped up and raced the window, her toes curling up as they touched the cold floor. The front yard had been covered with a blanket of white, aurated with glittering snow and untouched by anything alive.

(Just a random note, my original word was "Tarchanjan", from Old High German. It meant "to hide, to conceal" but I can't speak German, so I was unable to use it in a sentence :(  It's a cool word, though. It's theorized that it's where we get our word "dark" from, which is originally from Old English.)

Feature and Follow Friday

Feature and Follow is a fun blog hop hosted by Parajunkee's View and Alison Can Read. It's really easy to participate, and it's a great way to meet new blog friends! Go check it out here. 

This week's Question: Do you mind books with similar ideas to other books? Similar concepts, backgrounds, retellings or pulled-to-publish fanfic? 

Hmmm, this is a hard one. I'm one of those people that believes that there's not really anything new under the sun. But it's not really the basic idea that's important, it's what you do with it. Basically, I don't mind when an idea is similar to another, as long as it's spun in a different way. There were stories about magical boarding schools long before J.K. Rowling came along, what made her so awesome was that she managed to do something entirely unprecedented with the idea. Do something crazy, and new and completely awesome with an old idea and I won't hate you for it, in fact it might even make me love you all the more! As for retellings-- I love retellings, especially fairy tale ones (however, this may be in part due to my love of fairy tales in general. So bring me ALL THE FAIRY TALE RETELLINGS).

Published fanfic *sigh*. This is a complicated topic. I, quite adamantly, find nothing wrong with fanfiction. The fanfic writer isn't making any profit of another author's work, and so it doesn't negatively impact anyone in any way. And for that matter, there is a lot of beautifully written fanfiction out there (sometimes it's just a little hard to find). Now, when a fanfiction story is re-vamped and slated for publication, things get a little bit tricky. If the story is a completely different one, where there are similar themes or origins (like Cassandra Clare's Immortal Instrument series) that's fine. But when you get a story where basically only the names and some slight aesthetic details have been changed (like another story I won't name here), that's when you get into dangerous territory.

So, in short (even though this wasn't short at all), similar ideas are fine with me. As long as the authors do something cool with them.

What are your thoughts on the question? Leave a comment so I can go check out all your awesome posts!

The Year I Turned 18 Blogfest!

Cally Jackson is celebrating the release of her YA novel The Big Smoke! Hooray for her writerly wonderness!

She decided that to celebrate the release she was going to host a really neat blogfest. Since the two main characters of her book both turn 18 during the book, all participating bloggers are writing about the year they turned 18! (Or, if they haven't reached 18 yet, what they hope it will be like.)

You can find out more about the blogfest here, and add the book to Goodreads here.

So without further ado, here is my post:


When I was 14 years old, my family packed up our house in Virginia, hopped on a 24-hour plane ride and moved to Singapore.

By about the first week, I knew what I wanted to do for my birthday: eat at Morton's steak house, the nicest and most delicious steakhouse on the island. Unfortunately, the food there costs a small fortune.

My parents adamantly refused.  "Maybe next year," they said, "for your 16th birthday."

Well 16 came and went, and so did 17. By the time my 18th birthday approached, I had turned into a Morton's steak-craving zombie monster.

"But moooom! I just want a steak! It's all that I want in the whooole worrrllddddd."

Somewhere along the way, I managed to convince them that this would be a wonderful coming of age present. My parents decided that we would go out to eat on Saturday night, even though my birthday wasn't actually until Monday. They planned it all out-- my dad would take me to the restaurant bar before dinner started,and buy me my first-ever legal alcoholic drink. (In Singapore, the legal drinking age is 18. However, this does nothing to stop the crazy partying that goes on. Not that I was ever a participant of said parties...)

So, dressed in beautiful clothes, we walked through the fancy hotel lobby, over the fancy bridge of the fancy koi pond, and ascended the hotel in the fancy elevator.

Morton's bar was closed. They weren't open on Saturdays.

Feeling a tiny bit dejected (and at least for me, a tiny bit nervous, as I had never ordered an alcoholic drink before) we walked across to another bar where I nervously ate a bunch of snack mix and my dad ordered me my first ever "legal" Cosmopolitan.

The bartender didn't even look at me with a single ounce of suspicion on his face. (I came to the conclusion that this was because I was a master of deception. Clearly this meant I should become a spy.)  I felt so freaking sophisticated there are no words to describe it. I was in a bar, with a real Cosmo in a super fancy-sophisticated Cosmo glass, and I only tripped over my heels once and also there was A KOI POND IN THE LOBBY and the Cosmo was surprisingly good and the bartender was cute and I turned 18 in two days and everything was awesome.

And that is the story of my first ever kind-of-maybe-sort-of-not-really-legal alcoholic drink on my almost-18th birthday. It was a good birthday.

So happy book-birthday to Cally! And happy (belated) Halloween, everyone!

Do you guys have any cool 18th birthday stories to share?