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.
   

Girls and their Hair

From Baby Summer

Girls and their Hair

“I hate my hair!” That's Ana, every morning when she looks in the mirror. She has the same hair as me. Long, dark, straight. The only difference is I love my hair.

“Why don't you hate your hair Dee Dee?” She barks at me.

“I love it because I can braid it, and put it in pony tails, or just one, or just leave it. I can do anything I want with my hair!”

“Ugh,” Ana sighs and shakes her head. “Everything I do with my hair it looks just the same- ugly.”

“Who are you calling ugly?”

Me and Ana have the same hair but we see it in different ways. Ana only sees the bad- like when she wakes up every morning and it is tangley and hurts to brush out. Or how it looks flat when she has been berating it for a few minutes. Hair does that. It's right next to your ears- it can hear you. 

Stories

   My stories are like my children. Right now I have 11 children in the home and I need some of them, one of them at least to grow up and move out. I have two grown children- Once a Girl and the Perfect Generation but Perfect Generation had a baby- my grand baby- the sequel and I got to raise it. So finishing that one didn't help me any. Freakier Friday is an 18 year old but still in high school and still needs a new name.
   I just found an old notebook full of a few of my abandoned children and they were a lot cuter than I remembered, a lot cuter than the other ones I have. I couldn't help but take them back once I saw how cute they were. I want to spend time with all of them, but if I spend time with all of them it's going to take 11 times as long for one of them to grow up.
     When I get a new idea for a book it's like getting pregnant again. Oh no! Not another one! You can't finish the stories you already have! I do not need this other mouth to feed. Let's think about this and try to come up with a good reason this would NOT be a good idea for a book. But it's already here, it's too late I love it already.