Looking Back & Forward

Howdy!

This is last blog post of 2019! I cannot believe we are now embarking on a new journey. I know everybody (or most likely) will have different resolutions for the new year. I think with every passing year, people will make these lists and have good intentions but as time goes on, we seem to forget everything we wanted to accomplish in the beginning! I was like that for most of the year. I published a blog post at the start of 2018 talking about some of the goals I wanted to do, and only managed to do two on the actual list. However, I think this is a win because I completed two specific plans during the whole year!

The goals I was able to do this past year were:

• Make time for other stuff

• Write Out Ideas

Everytime I tried to plan out my blogging schedule or anything something would happen. There were a lot of different obstacles in the way and it wasn’t until the end of summer that I just gave up with planning and just let everything slide!

At the start of the year I got sick for the first time since probably 2012 and I wasn’t allowed to do anything but tightly wrap up in my fleece blankets to sleep and sweat it off. I was basically scrambling to get material written and scheduled on here and my social media accounts for you guys, but somehow in the mist of it all I just decided that I needed to stop stressing myself out so much that could wait until I was healthy enough to officially be ready to come back, thus I made time to recover and enjoyed being lazy and watched television for hours on end!

As you might remember, my sister was originally due to give birth to my nephew on the 4th of July weekend. Well, I had some ideas on what kind of content I wanted to release during the month of June and parts of July too. The only one that never changed of the first plan were the baby shower and nursery tour. Well, since little man was born kind of early, my whole schedule was basically put on hiatus; and I relished on the fact that I was now an auntie to this little human but after I took some time off to love on him, I wrote the only post that went up after his birth in the summer before my mental health took a downhill and where instead of being awake at night because of my drippy nose and uncontrollable coughs, I was in the middle of a depression spell one week after being put on antidepressants.

As I suffered every hour of those 31 days, Netflix and I began fast friends in that time period as I binge watched The Flash, Arrow, Supergirl and every nature documentaries I could find that was hosted by David Attenborough. After two months went by, I suddenly had my energy back and was able to write blog posts again. I even started to read again, and I was really enjoying reading “To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before” by Jenny Han. I really wanted to get it done before the movie premiered but I still haven’t finished it or “Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children” by Ransom Riggs, but I’ll get to it and they can be something I can do this year!

After September, I was just me again. I had no issues, other than the increasing back and knee pains but mentally I was doing better and that was okay with me! I have had slower weeks and whenever that happens I just let myself give in and take some time off of everything and when I feel good enough, I jump back in again but now I’m at the point that I don’t try to fight it. I need to make time to create better ideas and ultimately material for you all and I like being able to scoot away from everything every once in a while. I’m never totally offline during the break, but I am out for three hours at a time so that’s a big thing for me!

Would you like for me to do a separate post of my favorite blog posts of 2018? 

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For 2019, I have a few things I’d like to do but I have a new project for GMB!

I really want to challenge myself to come up with as many disability themed pieces as I could for my blog. So, I have created an A to Z Disability Challenge to get me through half of the year. I don’t know what really inspired it, I just felt like I needed to talk about these themes on here a little bit more. A lot of the articles will be things that I’ve personally went through in my life. I think it’ll give people, of various ages a totally different outlook on how one disabled person’s life should be, and it also shows the parents, grandparents, etc ideas on how they can give their disabled child or young adult a chance to be proven wrong.

I am very excited about this project. I’ve actually been thinking about it since the end of July, which is a little odd considering I did not want to think of anything blog related, but managed to come up with this anyways. I asked my Facebook friends of ideas on letter suggestions, so every letter is represented by a certain disability theme, like B is “building trust” so I’ll be discussing how a person with or without a disability should develop trust with people. Another example is the letter H and the theme is “Asking For Help” and we’ll be talking about why you should ask help and most importantly teaching others how it’s better to ask a disabled person if they need help with anything, before you go ahead and do it for them.

I’m hoping that these posts will be starting next week, but it would all depend on anything big happening in the meantime. My family is in the process of moving into our new house, and it’ll whether or not we have internet when those pieces will be published, but they will go up on a start of a new week, so hopefully everything will work out well enough (but so far nothing’s been on time) but who really knows!

Are you making any resolutions or goals for 2019? What are you most looking forward to? 

NaNoWriMo | 2 Week Mark

Hi 🙂

Today marks two weeks after I started on NaNoWriMo or NaNo as I keep calling it! I wanted to write this post as a way to give others who are considering on doing it next year. I figured by the time I was going to write it, I’d be saying “let them figure it out for themselves” but luckily for you I’m not that mean! I made a second commitment to do this post for you and that’s what I’m doing today.

I watched a couple of a NaNo related videos on YouTube throughout the first full week and I watched one by Felicity of GoWithFlick – she is also doing NaNo and even though she’s never really heard of it, but she’s decided to give it a go this past month.  In the video where she announces that she’s participating in it, she says something that really hit home for me. She read a quote for an author that described her sentences to author John Green’s “perfect” sentences and how much we wish our sentences looked liked his and we sort of feel really down about it when our stuff doesn’t look like it should basically, at least this is how I took what she was saying in this section, it made perfect sense though.

During the first day, I was pretty proud of myself on how much I went on to describe about my main character and what had been going on with him for most of his childhood, because that’s one of my issues is that I’m not good at describing things that I’m seeing in my head as I go along. Another thing is dialogue. In almost every story I’ve ever written in a notebook or on here, I’ve tried to leave it out. I’ve been somewhat content with what I’ve done so far. I’m describing what the characters are seeing; my MC has ADHD and so I’ve been told that people with this have a hard time focusing, can be easily distracted and notice almost everything around them. He’s also pretty vocal though, so this has been an interesting experience so far! I will I might’ve picked the perfect condition to test this out or I will either hate myself once the month is over.

I am in the middle of writing the sections between ACT I and ACT II right now, and I haven’t exactly started on my antagonist’s story. I do think I should add it in somewhere, because he was the real reason why I never finished my outline in the first place! I’ve been told from other people to not edit anything while working on NaNo, but right now it’s all about the main character’s story, which isn’t bad because so far his story is easy to write and I know where I want it go, but I still feel like my bad guy needs to be in there, as he has a big role in the telling of the story too. Has anybody have any tips for me do to? In a random chapter, should I just add a section about him and see how it goes with the plot itself?

Okay, now it’s time for some of my own tips that have worked for me!

One of the things I had decided about two days before I started writing my novel was I wanted to figure out a system of what part of the day I should write. I thought about what times would be good to reserve for writing and I kind of quickly realized that as long as I was fed and went to the bathroom before 1pm then I could start there and if I wasn’t able to do it at that time, I figured I needed a back up time so I picked 4pm for a later session.

The first day I put the time start into effect, I actually wrote for about two and a half hours and I was so shocked! It was after the weekend that everything kind of went to hell. I don’t usually write anything on Saturday and Sunday, and even though I did write quite a bit I am glad that I didn’t force myself to do anything on Sunday, as my sister and brother-in-law came down that afternoon. I’ve seen a lot of people say that the weekends are perfect to “double up” your word count, but self-care is important too whenever you’re doing something like this that requires a lot out of you everyday. So as I’m not entirely okay with breaking my rules for this, and if I don’t feel like writing that day, then I need to step back and wait until I am ready to write again.

So okay, the last thing I wanted to share on here was my daily word count.

In my first post, I told you that to be able to hit the 50,000 word goal at the end of November, that you needed to get to 1,667 words daily. A lot of aspiring writers actually make goals of how many words they wish to hit everyday for NaNo, but I knew early on that  I wouldn’t be able to do that so I just took whatever amount I did was good. I mean, at least this way I didn’t put so much pressure on myself and I was still feeling good what I had written so far too.

I even decided to stop writing the very beginning of my story. I got through two chapters, before I realized that I wasn’t exactly ready to explore the next section so I actually moved on to a distant chapter that I knew I was ready to work on and I’m really glad I did that because I was discouraged before this and I knew if I had continued, I would have stopped working on it entirely. So unfortunately, my word count as a whole is a bit different since I had two different sections now. I didn’t add today’s word count as I schedule my posts so early in the mornings, so I will include it in my final post at the end of the month!

Day 1: 2,615
Day 2: 1,285
Day 3: 143
Day 4: 1,525
Day 5: 0
Day 6: 346
Day 7: 933
Day 8: 483
Day 9: 1,431
Day 10: 1,344
Day 11: 1.056
Day 12: 0
Day 13: 956
Day 14: 0
Day 15: 545

If you’re on Twitter, I’ve been trying to post my word counts and I’ve been doing pretty good at not feeling too horrible whenever I look at the progress everybody has been making on theirs, but I feel pretty happy for everyone who has been working on their novels too. This is all I have to say about the last two weeks of doing NaNoWriMo, I hope you all have enjoyed this!

If you’re doing NaNo this year, how are you doing so far? What kind of tips do you give others who are thinking about doing it too? 

Writing Essentials

Howdy!

If you had read my first installment of my monthly write up review post from January, then you will be familiar that I am doing something different this year. I am writing a story, except I’ve been calling it a “project” to not put extra pressure on myself–that didn’t work as good as I thought it would!

I mentioned in that I was doing this old school. As modern writers would use laptops and special softwares to keep everything together, whereas I have decided to basically write out everything. I had given it some thought and just figured it was safer to do it that way for now! However, my poor dad went and bought me a printer for Christmas, despite the fact he is the actual reason why I’ve become so paranoid about using my laptop to write the project! And like I had mentioned in the write up post, once I get sections of my first draft done I will probably only type it out on an old typewriter!

In a way, this will be about what I’ve been using to keep things together! Some things are hand-me-downs and the rest were gifts from both of my parents! The “hand-me-downs” are just little things that my nana wasn’t using anymore so she just gave them to me instead!

My nana has a whole drawer full of different stationary stuff! I know about it because I’m the one who organized it for her! Since doing that, she’s given me a few different sizes of notepads here and there. I keep this green one for longer things, such as playlists! I’ve tried to write it songs on the thinner one she gave me that has lines on it, but unfortunately it is too small and you can hardly read my writing on it! I will probably have to use this with my project because since it doesn’t have the sticky stuff on the back I can use both sides of it!

I have two sets of post-notes. I use to have three, but I have no idea where it went to! These are handy if you wanted to remember something and it’s short enough that you wouldn’t need a bigger sheet of paper and a paperclip to keep everything together! I also like to write on them in the middle of the night, if I ever get ideas for both the project and/or future blog posts and I just stick them on the side of my bookshelf!

My nana gave me this small box of paperclips. Now these are bigger than your avenge paperclips! I like them this way actually, I mean, there still a pain in the butt to pull through the papers, but at least I can grip and see them! The last item she let me have is a stabler and she has another one in her desk, in case I ever needed it there! And yes, I can use a stabler! It’s the actual stable gun I cannot use! However, you should have seen me stable two sheets together one afternoon, not only did I miss like four times but in the one time it worked, the stable only went through one piece of paper, so I had to take it out and start all over again!

What I’ve had my mom buy for me are a package of pens. Yes, I am writing with pens instead of pencils. I don’t think I can grip regular pencils anymore and I don’t want to keep sharpening them every other day because of the amount of writing I’ve done in the past, so I thought pens would be an easier route! She also got me two packs of little tabs. They’re like post-it notes but these are small and skinny, they go on the edge of the book or anything and will keep tabs on what page you were on than just a normal bookmark.

Now this is where it’s going to sound weird, but in a way very helpful too!

One night I wasn’t able to sleep and I decided that since I couldn’t find anything to watch or drift off to dreamland that I was going to write a little bit. I have actually done this in the past, but I don’t necessarily recommend it. I’ve had to use my TV as my only source of light and after some practice the only thing that gives you enough lighting are cartoons. The bright colors work great for this, it’s the quick change of scenes that tend to mess with you!

I had mentioned this to my mom one afternoon and she felt bad that I couldn’t turn on my light so I could write, so she randomly left the room and came back five seconds later with a mini light that you press on top and you get a nice light for a small amount of space. Well, once my dad found out about this because I did try it out a couple of times. I have to say his solution came as a surprise because he doesn’t necessarily approve of me getting up in the middle of the night – he thinks I’m going to hurt myself, which I can understand.

They went to Wal-Mart one day and he bought me a small LED flashlight. This sucker is powerful! I guess I had never paid that much attention to how much space a LED light can brighten up but it works! I’m still trying to figure out where to place it whenever I write at night because since it is so bright, I don’t need to blind myself nor do I need to let my folks know that I’m awake at night either, but I’ll get there!

So these are my writing essentials, what are yours? 

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Monthly Write Up | Research & First Draft

Howdy folks!

I have decided to do something different this year!

I feel like a fish out of water with this. I’ve been fine with being just a blogger; working on interviews for Disability Horizons has sort of changed me in the last year. I’ve also missed participating in the different writing challenges I was doing two years ago, but majority of them have stopped so I’ve had to fight between the ideas that would only last a couple of scenes and a few that would last a few months and slowly fade away!

I’ve started a new project. It’ll go on for at least a year. I’ve decided to give myself room to explore and write what I please, it’s nothing for my blog or Disability Horizons. It’s just something that I’ve been thinking about for a while and I’m just now figuring out how to make it happen.

I started researching at the end of October and mainly it was just my curiosity. I wrote up a small plot of what was floating in my head that at first took up eight pages in my notebook. They were just random ideas I had in the beginning of what I thought I wanted for my project, lots of things didn’t exactly pan out but I thought they could be interesting if I had went into a sci-fi direction.

Since my characters are very complex, I have sort of used my newly interviewer skills to find out more things about these characters. I don’t want to talk about them a lot on this post, but I’ve had to interview quite a few people in the last three months. Thankfully, everybody has been very helpful and welcomed the pretty personal questions I had for them. I’ve used their information to create what I think are some realistic characters!

For my birthday, we went to Barnes & Noble as a family celebration and I spent a good chunk of my money on books I thought would help guide me through this process. I purchased this book because I figured it would be a good investment and it honestly was, because it gives you a lot more information that you may not even think you would need to know, like your target audience.

Another thing is that it’ll give you tips on how to research. The most important thing I got out of this section was that your research is never going to be complete! I have over 20+ pages of research and I know I could include more but I can’t add everything into the story. It’s impossible to have that much included into it without overwhelming your reader!

I think one of my main issues was figuring out the plot, which is different from the one I mentioned earlier. As I was in the middle of writing out information that I thought I would need for the characters and story in general, I didn’t have an exact lineup of how everything was going to go, it was just like scraps of images of different parts scattered in my mind. So in November, I stopped working on my research and began writing my plot. In this book, it shows you how to write it in a three act structure. Here are my rough explanations of the three acts:

• ACT I – is generally your beginning for your main character. What life is like at that moment and then what suddenly changes for them.
• ACT II – is what your character is working for, but is basically failing at; by the end of this section they must figure out what they really want and work towards to reach it.
• ACT III – is where you are leading your character(s) to the end, a climax is added to give him/her one last disaster to figure out how to decipher. This is when your character finds out who they are.

In the mist of not only figuring out your plot, you have align the whole thing into this type of structure plus include three different disasters that are worse from the last that affect the main character and/or characters in your story! By the second day of writing this, I had a nervous breakdown and cried like a baby! 😦

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I had made myself a little rule at the start of December that once the new year came along, I would start writing out my first draft. I was actually pretty content with that decision until I caved because just working on research alone can get a little boring. A normal person would probably figure out the very beginning of their story and then write it out – I still haven’t found a way to write it so I decided to work from ACT II to hopefully think of ways on how to create a great beginning for my main character Heath. I think I will continue on with the story from starting in this direction and if I finish it, I’ll go back and figure out a good introduction.

My nana gave me a medium size binder that belonged to one of the aunts in the late 1980’s and at first I stored my plot inside because it was skinny enough. I thought it would be a nice fit, but it’s not. She also gave me a lot of loose leaf paper to get me started with the first draft. I’ve had a lot of people freak out on me about the fact I’m not using my laptop for this. I like writing things out and it’s more dependable for me right now! I’ve  had to use 3 notebooks and 1 binder.. I feel like I’m back in school!

I gave myself a deal and it isn’t a New Year’s resolution or anything. I decided that I would write a little bit everyday, whether if it is research or my first draft in general. I would get something done in that time period. Unfortunately, I can only write 2-3 pages at a time because my lower back gives me a lot of problems. It’s always been like this, I had this issue whenever I doing art both at home and in school. I also decided that if I was still committed to it in February, then I would do the same thing and just continue like that until I finish it. God willing! 

If I am still writing next month, I might put up another write-up review. I don’t want to force myself to write, I like everything to flow organically. That is what works for my blog, then I’m going to do it here with this too!

So what do you think of my first monthly write-up review? 

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DIY: Holiday Project 2014

It’s been a while since I’ve done a DIY post. If you’ve been living under a rock lately, you’ve missed me talking about what my nana and I have conjured up for the end of year project. It’s strange how it all started with my dad and I and then somehow I managed to switch him with my nana. He kind of enjoyed doing the crafts the first year we did it, but he’s a very hands-on type of person. He also freaks out a bit if he sees me struggling in any way, and we end up arguing about it for like five minutes.I think he’s perfectly fine that I get my nana involved with these projects, I hardly make his head spin anymore! You all should feel bad for my nana though! Because if I’m in my thinking mood. All hell could break loose in a matter a few seconds. Sometimes it can get difficult for me to explain my thoughts out loud. I stumble on my words while I’m thinking about what else we could do. If there was a way for me to do everything and not have to ask for help I think I might actually get to do everything on my own, but I don’t think it would be that much fun!

This idea came completely organic and I decided on it in about a day or so. When I get really cool ideas, sometimes you just gotta act on them! Most of my family will be coming down for Christmas and I’m so excited, but with that it also means the amount of gifts doubled. I’ve been thinking about candles, I’ve got a slight obsession with them recently. When my mom told me we were going to the mall the other week, I thought “well I wonder were I can find something that was cheap, but for a good amount of people.” I went on both Bath & Body Works and Yankee Candle. They each had different kinds of sales, but since I don’t know much about lotion, body wash, and wax melts. Everything looked foreign to me. I’m not much of a girly girl. I had to keep in mind of some family members and their living arrangements. My mom explained what a wax melt was and she told that majority of everybody got Scentsy burners for Christmas last year. Our most common presents were blankets, socks and Scentsy burners. We are a weird bunch of people! So I decided to go with my original plan of getting candles, I went online and saw the prices of the tart wax melts and they were cheapest! So my mom and I went in there and got different scents: Cherries On Snow, Cherry Chutney, Merry Marshmallow, Lavender,  Vineyard. All were $1.99 each!

Things You Will Need:

• Small Size Brown Paper Bags
• Plastic Wrap
• Scotch Tape
• Holiday Colored Yarn
• To and From Stickers

Since it was only the two of us. We kind of worked slow, but somehow we managed to get everything done in one day. Now that’s a Christmas miracle! She still had these brown paper bags from last Halloween/Thanksgiving or the one before that. I don’t remember but we never used them all so this entire project was inspired by that! We use small lunch brown paper bags as our packaging. If you’re read my last blog post about the cookies. You know that my nana and I made a LOT of cookies. She made the last two batches a couple of days after that. We have both sugar and chocolate chip cookies. We frosted and she put sprinkles on some of them as well! We decided on Tuesday that we’d just wrap a stack of cookies around in plastic wrap. My nana came up with the idea of after they’ve been wrapped in their little paper, that she’d put a small strip of tape around to secure it. And then added the new red yarn as a lively decoration to finish it!

That was her job to do! My job was getting each bag ready, placing a “to and from” sticker in the center of each one, and then I put whatever we selected for them in their bags. We actually did these for two different reasons. Instead of getting two presents (for each couple) we made them one gift bag. The men would get one thing and the women would get the other! Even though considering how many cookies we had left over, my dad might not eat the cookies that we stuffed in his bag! I originally had the idea of decorating each bag like we did on the mason jars last year, but I opt out of it because I love the plainness of a brown paper bag. If I could wrap my own presents, I’d only use this and a very sparkly blue colored wrapping paper! I know I’m weird. I really hope everybody has a great Christmas and hope my family enjoys their goody bags to take home! Next time my nana told me we’re getting to work on our holiday project in August! As much as I want to agree with her, I kind of like waiting til the last week. It gets my creative juices flowing!