Neat resources for character building

First we have the Personality Scale Descriptions from Archetype Writing, which is pretty amazing. Basically, it is a big check list of personality traits. You can download it (in .rtf format) here: http://www.mediafire.com/?sco900g3ryx5myn

There is also the Character Motivation sheet, which I've had for so long that I can't remember where it's from. To quote the creator: "...with it you determine the motivations of the character, then you derive
the personality to go along with those motivations. You can have a truly evil bastard who is doing it all for love!
The key to the system is the idea of separating the actual form of the motivation from the “direction”. This allows us to compress over a hundred possibilities into a small space."
And that PDF is right here: http://www.mediafire.com/?mx900c4wv1g7bax

So hopefully you find these useful!

Edit Minion!

So Dr. Wicked (who created the wonderful Write or Die) has come out with a new writing program, which is pretty brilliant. It helps you weed out adverbs, weak words, passive voice, "said" replacements, endings with prepositions, and misspelled words. It's still in beta, but it's really great! Here's a screenshot:

Full-size version
And I will stand by that "nice" and "very" to the end.

So yeah, you should check it out. :)

If plots were playlists

Then this is what my NaNo story would sound like so far.
(If I did this right, the whole thing should just play in that little window.)

Awesome thing: How to Steal Like An Artist

This one is really long, but it's probably some of the best writing advice I've read.

Here's what it covers:

As always, I highly recommend you check it out.

Insomnia. Why.

Hey, remember that time when I was all insomnia'd up and had Google Earth?

Yeah, it happened again this morning on Facebook when I became drunk* with the power of being able to make status updates that nobody else could see.

*In the figurative sense only, though I can understand if you don't believe me now.
Also, The Glass Toaster is a very real, very emotional song. It changed my entire life and the very way I look at toasters.
I might still be completely exhausted while writing this.

And while these shenanigans are happening, what am I doing in another window? Yep, I am reading AWESOME FANFICTION rewriting a story from ninth grade. Why? Because Story Nostalgia, that's why.

Do you know what I'm talking about? You write this story, then years later, you have this inexplicable urge to go back and read it. And it is so bad but you love it anyways. Not because it has any literary merit... but because nostalgia.

And that is why there will always be print.

/This concludes the most poorly thought-out post on this blog.

Double rainbow all the way...

...across the sky...

 It really is a double rainbow; my cell phone just couldn't handle it. I was just trying to take the pictures, and my phone was like, "DOUBLE RAINBOW, what does it mean? So intense."

OK, I'm done making stupid jokes.

We've had some crazy weather up here! (Read: completely normal.) It was in the upper 80s and 90s for a few days, then yesterday it dropped down into the 60s. Oh Michigan.

Replace book titles with bacon

^ That's one of the trending topics right now on Twitter. I'm not actually logged in at the moment, so thought I'd share some titles here.

The Bacon Games
Catching Bacon
Baconjay
The Lord of the Bacon
The Fellowship of the Bacon
The Two Bacons
Return of the Bacon
Fight Bacon
Baconormalcy
Bacontastic
The Scarlet Bacon
How the Bacon Stole Christmas
Charlotte's Bacon
Memoirs of a Bacon
Baconborn
Baconbreaker
Baconclimber
Trickster's Bacon
If Bacon Stay[s]
Where Bacon Went
The Lion, The Witch, and the Bacon
Prince Bacon
The Voyage of the Dawn Bacon
The Silver Bacon
The Horse and His Bacon
The Magician's Bacon
The Bacon Battle
Baconlandra
Bridge to Terebaconia
The Bacon Bride

And by "some", I meant "a bunch".

OK, now your turn!

Swoon, Blogger, swoon.

Seriously, Blogger's new layout is really nice. Much cleaner-looking.

Anyways, today's the last day of Camp NaNo. I'm probably not gonna make it (close to 31K right now, soo...). But I don't feel like this month's been a loss because I got a lot of short stories written. They're just... really short. :) Plus I've been experimenting with style, which is always fun. Swinging in between third person and second person, and present and past tense. Still hate writing in first person.

I think a big part of it was that it didn't really feel like NaNo, so there wasn't really a big rush to write more than usual. So... yeah. Still planning on participating in November, and hopefully winning this time.

Finally, you guys should check this kid out. He has crazy talent.

Hmmm.

Is it just me, or are there a lot of YA trilogies lately?

...That's all.

Lost five hours today on a reading binge

Paranormalcy by Kiersten White, you guys. I didn't think it would be that good.

And it was incredible.

I thought it was going to be another typical YA supernatural romance with vampires and drama and angst and blablabla but no. It's actually charming and funny and exciting.

I was not prepared.

No, it's not without its flaws (explaining jokes, some typos, the awkwardly used word/phrase here and there) (pot and kettle, I know) but the pros largely outweigh the cons. And that character arc! Let me just be a fourteen-year-old so I can do this real quick: <3 <3 <3 And there's no love triangle! I mean, there's a psycho ex-boyfriend, but the main makes it very clear she wants nothing to do with him, so... <3 And the main love interest guy has flaws, too! And there are very real stakes! And you actually kind of feel for the main villain! And - and - and -

*Cries* I'm just so happy, you guys. This book is so awesome.

Friday Fragments

(Geez, when was the last time I did this. I'll try not to spam you guys with videos again.)

1) I'm a bit behind in Camp NaNo, but hoping to catch up this weekend. I've pretty much accepted that this has turned into a collection of short stories instead of something super exciting. Oh well. I'll save the super exciting stuff for the main event.

2) Something amazing happened the other day! I thought I lost the main files for my NaNo '10 story because the computer screen broke and it was all glitchy and terrible, but miracles happened and the files were saved! Don't you love it when that happens? :)

3) I'm feeling a reading binge coming on in September. So many books:
-Memoirs of a Geisha
-Trickster's Choice
-The Light Fantastic
-The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
-And Then There Were None
-The Scoop & Behind The Screen (two stories in one book)

Considering adding Divergent to that list.

4) OK, this one's for The Hunger Games fans. Spoilers ahoy. What did you think of the epilogue in Mockingjay? I thought it worked pretty well. It showed that the world changed, the survivors were trying to move on, and all that jazz. The only part I was kind of unhappy about was that Gale and Katniss were never really friends again, and that was pretty lame.
My friends Kirstin and Courtney weren't really happy with the epilogue in general (but Courtney's never been happy with an epilogue :P). They both thought Katniss sounded really depressed (PTSD anyone?), and there wasn't enough explanation about Panem and their new government and such.
So yeah, what do you think?

Have a good weekend, everybody! :)

It's been a while since I've spammed y'all with pictures and videos, hasn't it?

Let's fix that. :D

Haha, hipsters are hilarious.

Saw this the other day and got the feeling that in time, I'm going to have to make a similar ridiculous promise.



(Pfft. "Once you jump into a tub of marshmallows, you really have to savor the moment.")

And lastly... guys. Did you realize that the main NaNoWriMo event is less than three months away? (While I try to figure out what the heck even happened to my plot. Where'd it gooooooo...)

Let's talk about cursive

There was this post over at Daily Writing Tips talking about how people don't really write in cursive or by hand anymore because of computers and tech and all that jazz. (It's like a sillier version of the hard copy v. ebook debates, except hard copies are definitely better than ebooks. :P)

I don't mind writing by hand at all, but I really hate cursive. It's always seemed to be a really ridiculous way to write, not to mention it gets harder and harder to read the more often you use it. It's like print writing's horrible inverse. Plus, thanks to some school-hopping between second and third grade, I had to learn it three times. Kinda loses its charm after the second time.

*Looks at blog banner*

...

Week One in a nutshell

So I started off the week feeling pretty good about this story. Loved my characters, thought the plot line worked pretty well, all that jazz. The first chapter basically wrote itself, which was nice. Also had a lot of fun writing some future parts with the nightmare sequences. Those are pretty fun, too.

Then somewhere around Thursday, I got to the part where the antagonists were introduced and just wasn't feeling it. So I wrote more nightmare sequences! And then realized how action-light this story really is when I was imagining something really exciting.

And now it's turned into a completely different story (different genre and everything), but with the same characters. It'll be fun. :D

There is no way I will regret redoing the entire story at the end of the month.