Thursday, November 29, 2012

50077



Happy Thursday!

Guess who's got a follow up interview on site next week!!  This guy!

Guess who finished NaNo a day early!!  This guy!

That is all.

-Steph
If the video didn't embed right, it's this http://youtu.be/HgzGwKwLmgM

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Deutschtag

Happy Thursday!  Or, as we like to say around these parts, Happy ThursgivingDay!  Ours was pretty low-key, just biking and then languidly prepping for dinner.  I made cranberry sauce and apple pie ice cream and cranberry-orange sherbet and pumpkin pie, and supervised the beans.

Other than that, I spent the day helping Beth get a start on learning German, which is ridiculous because I can hardly remember anything useful. 

When I was sick last weekend I watched about thirty episodes of Naruto, which really reminded me that what I really want is to learn Japanese. 

NaNo took a turn for the worse.  I finished the bulk of the fairytales I'd planned beforehand, and decided I'd give my novel a try.  But now I'm practically two days behind.  It's just that I left it off in an awkward place and even though I've sorted out what happens after, I still have to deal with what's going on right now.  But I'll give it my best shot to be done by December!

Na ja, ich gehe.

-Steph

Thursday, November 15, 2012

25052 or The Boy with Big Dreams


 
Happy Thursday!  Halfway there!!!!  I haven't yet written Faris, the Strange, or The WhisperSon, but I'm a little ways into the Watchmen and all the others are completed.  Today I wrote the entirety of the Lad with Big Dreams, which I'm about to share with you.
 
Week two of the Surface, and while I can't say I'm without complaints, it's certainly a useful tool.  Not only has it saved my life doing NaNo at school, it gets me out of my room to write and do internet.  I also used it to document the pie I made when my camera battery died.  I moved both Mumford & Sons albums from my desktop to my SkyDrive to here without ever leaving the couch.  Which is where I am right now, a sicky sick.
 
Now, on to the story:
 
The Lad with Big Dreams
 
When mankind was young, and the Ivywoods old, there lived a particularly young lad who lived in a mossy village at the edge of the Mountains.  Mumford, he was called, was a dreamer.  When he was very small, he dreamed of being the star of his classmates.  Later, he dreamed of being the star of his mossy village.  It wasn’t long at all before he set his heart on the mysteries beyond the village walls, and then he dreamed of becoming the star of the world.
 
Mumford, in order to achieve the renown after which he sought, tried his hand at this and took up that, every skill and task and art in turn, looking for the one that would make him famous.
 
He tried carpentry, and ended up building a cabinet with the drawers on the outside.  He tried being a fisherman, but all he caught was himself.  He tried spinning yarn and tangled himself to the spindle.  He tried working the fields and grew nettles.  He tried tending children and got bitten.  He tried selling maps and got lost.
 
Mumford tried sweeping floors, singing opera, painting doorjambs, writing plays, shoeing horses, caulking boats, building fences, slaying demons, and selling vegetables.  But no matter what he tried, or how hard he tried to do it, Mumford just couldn’t do it right. 
 
But Mumford was a wishful lad, and knew he would find his talent someday.  Even as he was wandering the Ivywoods, lost after trying to survey the nearest mountain, he kept his head up and dreamed of everyone in the world knowing his name.
 
“That Mumford,” they would say, “why that lad is just the best at…”
 
Just then he felt the forest shift in its atmosphere, the ground taking a different quality, the woodsy sounds becoming muted.  The change drew him out of his daydreams, and he paused to take stock of his surroundings.
 
He had wandered off the path, all right, and was now deep who-knows-where in the Ivywoods.  Yet he did not feel so much afraid as elated, for the spot where he had stopped just happened to be a faerie circle.
 
A ring of white and gold toadstools, arranged in a large circle wider across than the lad was tall.  The lad stood at the center, spellbound by its magical aura. 
 
Now the boy knew of all the Ivywoods tales, and knew that any so lucky to stumble upon a faerie circle would be granted one wish.  So the lad eagerly knelt on the mossy ground and wished for all his heart to be gifted something by which he could make a name for himself.
 
True to tale, right before him a tiny mushroom split the earth and sprouted with a little “pop!”  Mumford plucked the little thing carefully and ate it, as the tales had told him he should do.  He chewed it and swallowed, and waited for the feeling that there was something big for him to become.
 
But there was no feeling on its way, and Mumford sank down with a frown.  It had been such a tiny mushroom, he thought, eyeing the ring around him.  Maybe if he just sampled another…
 
So thinking, Mumford crept to the outer circle of toadstools and pulled up one of the white and golden sentinels.  Eagerly he devoured the whole thing, ignoring its stinging taste, and pulled up another to take home, just in case he needed another boost.
 
Mumford arrived home in record time, so quickly in fact that his mother and father did not even have to say, “It’s about time you showed up, lad, we thought some spook of the Ivywoods had got you at last.”
 
He said goodnight to them and went immediately to bed, dreaming of waking up the next morning a changed man.  Someone whose name was known across the land, from head to tail.
 
As he slept, though, Mumford found that he had a dream of a different sort.  In the dream he felt the white and gold toadstool swell up inside his belly.  Then his own skin became deathly white, with raised bumps of gold all up and down his white skin.  Then his form began to expand, and in no time at all, Mumford was completely transformed into a giant walking toadstool.
 
Frightened, the lad leapt out of bed, hurling his mushroom body out of the house.  People in the street pointed and stared, awed by the creature toddling by them, all white and gold with a puffy domed head.
 
“That Mumford,” the towns folks said, “why that lad is surely the best at being a giant toadstool!  Let us tell of his legend for years to come!”
 
At that, when his fear could grow no more, the lad thankfully awoke.  Hurriedly he patted himself down, searching for the gold bumps and mushroom head.  As soon as he had made sure that he was in fact the same lad he had always been, he rushed from his bed, hardly pausing to dress, and dashed up into the hills without so much as a by-your-leave.
 
Mumford ran and he ran, taking ever overgrown trail and each branchy turn, just wishing to find his way back to the faerie circle.  In his fist he gripped the stolen toadstool, which, as he ventured deeper and deeper into the Ivywoods, seemed to be guiding him along the unseen faerie pathways.
 
All of a sudden he burst through a patch of thistles that cut at him, and he found himself standing by the faerie circle once more.  Blessing his good luck, he quickly took the pilfered fungus and stuck it back in the ground where he had found it.  The calm of the magical place swept the area at once, and Mumford breathed a deep sigh of relief.
 
Then he pushed his way firmly back through the thistles and headed down the mountain.
 
When he arrived back in his mossy village that evening, wild eyed and cut to rags, the people came out of their houses to see what had happened to him this time. 
 
“Don’t take a mushroom from the faerie circle,” the lad cried to the town folks who had gathered at his front step.  “I found a faerie circle and tried to wish for something that would make my name spread across the land, head to tail, but all I got was a bad dream about changing shape into the form of a giant mushroom!  It was terrible beyond belief!  In the dream I went toddering down the lane, with all of you staring at me, an unholy fusion of fungus and man!  So this morning I ran back to the faerie circle and returned what I took.” 
 
And after this he hung his head.
 
“Look at me,” he said forlornly, “I can’t even make a wish right.”
 
And as his mother and father hastily drew him inside, the towns people turned to one another and said, “That Mumford.  Why, that lad is certainly the best at dreaming big dreams.”

Thursday, November 08, 2012

13552

Happy Thursday!

 
So that's coming along.  So far I've finished The Stone Gardener and Atop the Dragon's Spine.  King Crow and Brother Turkey is wrapping up.  I'll probably do What the Rock Saw next, because that will be short and sweet.

Have you ever tried writing folk stories and fairy tales?  It's pretty simple!  They're short and not literary and people never have deep conversations and you get to put strange adjectives alongside weird nouns.  I promise I'll finish Epoch but right now I'm having too much fun.

Some of them can be moral good vs. evil stories, some can be adventures, some can be "and that's why we have thunderstorms."  I have some of each!  Let me share some of my favorite bits:

Luckily for King Crow, the problems of the bird kingdom were as simple as its citizens and sorted easily enough. If two sparrows fought over a seed, King Crow told them to split the seed. If two hens fought over a twig, King Crow told them to split the twig. If two hawks fought over a hunting field, King Crow told them to split the field. The quarreling birds would leave Sky Nest and do as King Crow had said, and were happy.


  and

Caerdyth came here from the stars, tracking his eternal prey, Aberwyth the heavenly dragon.  For all of time the great hunter had followed Aberwyth across the skies, tossing out his spectral lance to flash and spark against the black.  He sat astride the noble Doonhamer, a monstrous steed who snorted fire and stamped across the constellations, kicking up a trail of stardust with his thirteen legs.
and

 
Now of course the UnderKing knew of no greater warrior than himself, and he was angered by this story.  “Nonsense!” he shouted, and a great wave carried his voice across every ocean.  “Show me this warrior, and I will show you a corpse!”
Of course in addition to this fun stuff I got a good chunk into the time Bentley got lost in the Ivywoods as a kid and got saved by the WhisperSon.  And I slammed out this whole four pages about Bentley and Huxley's first proper meeting which isn't literature but you get the idea.  So it's coming along.  Eight days in and it's no where near over.

Meanwhile, I haven't been home yet today, but I logged 18k words and am currently typing up this blog.  HOW AM I MANAGING THIS WONDER you ask.  Well, dear children, I am this week a proud(?) owner of a Microsoft Surface, which is a Windows 8 tablet that comes with a cover that is a keyboard and it also has a desktop like a proper computer so I am unstoppable.

I'm at Starbucks right now watching Beth do her thing, listening to jazz and Mumford & Sons and indie classic rock covers and who knows what other madness they're pumping into the air supply here.  I helped fix some computers at school today and watched a 10 year old Canadian cartoon about bats with Carolyn.  And in a half hour I'm going to sleep.  Sometimes life is pretty simple.

I apologize for this line down here, it came over from my word document, and I regret putting it in at all because now it's just popping up all over and I can't get rid of it.  I hope you enjoy it.

-Steph

Thursday, November 01, 2012

1721

Happy Thursday!

National Novel Writing Month started today.  Here's my plan:

1.  Spent the last two years thinking about where I left off in my novel and what's got to happen in order to wrap it up.  Going to power through and put that into action, and onto paper.

2.  Spent the last two years thinking about what happened to my characters in their lives before the novel.  Got a good long list of side-adventures that need life.

3.  Spent the last few months coming up with stories to flesh out the mythology of the world.  Going to definitely commit a few to paper.

Here's the sort of thing I'm talking about:

1.  Huxley and Bentley have to get really made at each other before finally being able to see it from the other person's perspective.  Trueman throws everyone a curve ball and makes a speech.  The outcasts go on a journey to start their new lives and there's a cliffhanger. 

2.  Huxley and Derring go hiking and find pirate treasure while Bentley and Piper freak out and team up to "rescue them."

Similarly, the swords types vs. magic types in a fun baseball match, where Bentley and Piper team up to cheat in order to win.

Huxley gets mad at Bentley for being too overprotective and they help out Faris' team on a mission and find the true meaning of teamwork.

The time Bentley got lost in the woods and was rescued by the WhisperSon as a kid.

That time Huxley freaked out after the diaspora and Kaden talked her into going on a mission with him.

3.  The Stone Gardener aka Never Laugh in the Woods

The White Crow

The WhisperSon

The Watchman who looked too long in the fire

The one we made up about slenderman while we were camping.

As of today, I'm at least halfway through the Stone Gardener.  Not a bad start.

-Steph