A Modern Novel

I went to a museum not too long ago. It was quite a large museum, with some very nice exhibits. There was also a large blank canvas with a black border around it and a note explaining that the whiteness of the painting contrasted with the border and made the colors more bold. It's modern. It's in right now. With that in mind I was inspired to come up with a modern novel which I will include a sample of here:
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Do you see how the difference in letters makes them more bold? It goes on for two hundred fifty more pages but the last 80 are blank so you can imagine what words would fill them. 

Writing is hard

Sometimes I hate writing. And by sometimes I mean often. It is hard. Some days I like what I have written. Other days I can read the exact same thing and hate it. Sometimes I know why and that is easy to fix, sometimes I don't know why- I just hate it today.
I don't know what it was like to be published a long time ago because I wasn't born yet but I think it had to have been easier than today. Before the internet was invented, or TV, or the radio. Before there were 7 billion people in the world. It seems like writers just typed up their manuscript and changed their name to a guy's name (if they were female), hand delivered it to a publisher (or got their brother to do it if they were female) and presto book-o! I think all classic authors of the 1800s would have a hard time being published today.
But now we have self publishing. This is both a good and bad thing. It is good in that it gives new authors a chance to be heard, it gives the power back to the writer, but it is scary! To be successful it is good to be professionally edited first. (Though a lot of published books I read seem to have skipped this step, hmmm) This process is scary too because you get to find out every tiny little thing that is wrong with your book, and there are a lot of tiny little things. After getting an entire manuscript back that you have spent countless hours perfecting you realize how imperfect it still is, and always will be. Because nothing is perfect.
Dang it why is writing so hard? I should have been a painter. Do paintings get edited? Is that a thing?

Sims 3

This game has been around the block awhile, hell it's gone to Egypt, Paris, some tropical island, but I just started playing it a few weeks ago.
Or maybe it is playing me. You know you've been playing the Sims too long when real life reminds you of the sims. IE- that person looks like a sim! I wonder how many athletic skill bars I have? I wish I could find a job as easy as my sim. You can do so much on the Sims now. My sim is an ultra runner. But I swear- she volunteered! I told her to run on the treadmill and she ran for 12 straight hours, before she got tired and decided, meh, I think I'll take a shower. I was impressed. And also jealous- she only has about 5 athletic bars, why is she so much better than me?
I sent her to college. College quarters are only a week in simville! She kind of pisses me off sometimes though- like when I am trying to get her ready for class- which is in an hour, and it takes her about an hour to get to class, go figure, and she has to stand in front of the fridge for 20 minutes before sitting down to eat a yogurt- which takes at least 40 minutes. Actually I changed my mind- no food for you! You don't deserve to eat! Ooh you just threw a tantrum for thirty seven minutes? Well I guess you can't go to the bathroom now because that 37 minutes was your bathroom time ( that's how long it takes her to go to the bathroom.)
But you can run for 12 hours, hang Snowflake day lights in the click of a button, have a juice keg party, prank the neighbors and get arrested, "woo- hoo", but only in the shower, or die in a freak fire place accident.
RIP Sim. 

NaNoWriMo

I just finished my NaNoWriMo yesterday. NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, where participants try to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November.
I'm going to try for 60,000 words.
Really I feel bad because finishing was easier than I think it was supposed to be. Maybe because I have run 100 miles a week for a whole year (which is the running equivalent of doing NaNoWriMo, every month, all year i think), but I think NaNoWriMo should be hard. Even though I had writer's block I wrote too fast usually only working on my novel for an hour to and hour and a half a day, usually writing 1600- 2000 words an hour.
I think my novel is awful- because I didn't know how to say anything and I just said it anyways and it will probably take me until next November to edit it but that's what I get for being such a slacker!
The good thing about NaNoWriMo is you don't have to worry about whether your novel is good or bad, and that is a nice break that I don't want to be over. 

Childhood Diary

I found my childhood diary while cleaning out my room at my parent's house. I was always the writer.
10/13/1994
"Toaday was a half day. We had milkshakes. Annelise is Mean to me and wount share here candy. And I share candy with her.
It inst fiar."

#8 year old problems


I was smart enough to know that when I turned 9 I would think 8 was little so I wrote my future self a reminder.

May 10, 1995
"I think 8 is big."

I was not found of segues.

June 28, 1995
"I hate my sister. I also read Cookie McCorkle and the case of the Missing Castle. Yesterday we saw a trian and hiked 2 miles."

April 2, 1996
"Me, Tiffany and Kathryn are in this club called the Tigers. We make money and give it to the humane society. (True story, it took me 2 years to raise 100$ to donate to them) (this next part is crossed out) I have known for a long time that Annelise is a dope."

because I have known things for a long time, riight, not even ten.

I did not write it in very often. Note to self- make future kids have a journal and write in it more so they can laugh their butts off at themselves at age 27.

4 books

It took me 22 years to finish one book. I wrote a lot of short stories as a kid but never was able to make them into novel length works though I always dreamed of doing that. At fourteen I used to add completely unnecessary scenes that had nothing to do with the plot of my works to them just to make it longer. I used to try typing in bigger font, having more chapter breaks. The longest I got was only about thirty pages on the computer. I would get so frustrated because they would be so much longer than that in my notebook where I wrote everything down. I didn't have my own computer. When I was in college I thought- okay I can finish this book since it is my school project, but it will probably take me three years to finish it. Then I made myself work on it everyday for an hour. Not a super lengthy time but substantial. It started to get done. I finished it mostly in one year. But boy I did not want to work on it sometimes. Sometimes writing is fun, but sometimes it is so hard I'd rather be running. That was what I did for awhile, or cleaned my room, or looked at my split ends. I could do that for hours a day. Hours plural. Finishing a novel was hard, really hard, like running 5,000 miles in a year hard in a different way. I didn't want to write another one.
But I did, want to. I just didn't do it. I wanted to want to do it. Until I was sitting on the beach one day with my notebook, thinking about the Uglies books I had just read. I wanted to write an adventure like that. It spoke to me on the beach, write me. And even though that novel was almost one hundred thousand words I finished it from start to finish in about a year.
I had another novel that was almost done that whole year, one that would remain in that state for over two years. I looked over it from time to time and I just didn't like it so I worked on other things, or nothing. Then one day I realized how many children I had living in the house and it was like a switch- I suddenly had to work on them until they were grown up. I worked until I finished that almost done one- about one hundred hours of work later and didn't stop typing.
My fourth book, Baby Summer, was in fragments in an old notebook that wasn't rediscovered until about two and a half months ago. It was about eight thousand words- most of them usable, a thousand or so not. In a month it had expanded to 50,000 words. In three weeks I liked all of it so much I stopped editing it.
Wait? That doesn't happen! I don't like them even when I have spent months editing them sometimes. Sometimes I never like them, they are unlikable. This was a novel writing break.
It took 22 years for 1, 3 years for the second, 1 year for the third, and one month for the 4th!
Only 9 to go

That's Hard to do With an Ice Cream Cone

        I decided to make a picture book for my niece- it's about a girl with an ice cream cone. Right before she is about to eat her mom calls to say she is coming home early and the girl suddenly remembers her chore list. She has to run around doing her chores while dripping ice cream over everything.
        I thought drawing would be easier than writing but I was wrong- drawing is hard! It was hard with a pencil so I tried using the computer. That was hard too so I switched back to pencil- that was still hard.
        Especially when I found a picture book I had made when I was thirteen that was super cute, and one I had made at like age seven that was the same. Grown ups don't draw.
        Anyway here's a picture from it.