To want to write.

Well, I did it.

In spite of three nursing classes, a 6:30 AM clinical and two, small jobs, I have officially finished a rough draft of my story. Yes, it’s just a short story. Yes, it is just a rough draft. But it is something that I have finally finished.

I honestly think it’s a pretty awesome story. I had to change a few things from when I first started. Like, I added a section onto the beginning to more set the scene. And as I wrote, the characters talked to me more, so I learned a lot about their government. (That is particularly of excitement, since the characters are so difficult in talking during the school year.)  For example, the king’s children are elected to be the heir, so that way even though the main character, Avda, is the youngest, she may very well be the heir.

I also know I need to develop things a lot more, since I really want to build up Avda’s loyalty of government and all, and her desire to rule.

On a side note, I began to watch Firefly. That is such an awesome show, to be quite honest. But, the very interesting thing is that it made me start thinking about my pirate story again.

If you don’t know what Firefly is about, it’s basically about space pirates who are trying to survive in the world. Now does that make sense why I keep thinking about it? Let me give you an example as to why this helps. In the show, the people are very poor because they have a hard time getting a job. In my story, they’re actually rather rich, just because they aren’t picky. So the whole entire concept of my own story is being questioned by this show.

What makes that very strange is I didn’t want to watch Firefly when it first came out, because the conditions on the ship very closely resemble that of Shad. I figured that the ideas of Firefly would merge into Shad and I didn’t want that. Now… I’m not too sure.

I like that, because it makes my life actually easier. I might actually start writing it again soon.

On a more personal note, if you are reading this post, that means that I have broken 3,000 readers!

You guys also broke the record last month (September) for the most amount of visitors per month which is the second month in the row, and based on the current stats, we’re looking really good for this month too. So thanks ya’ll!

(And yes, I like the word ya’ll. It makes a plural second person, which we don’t have in English.)

books vs. movies

Supposedly, Americans watch 28 hours of TV per week. I find that slightly hard to believe, consider that I watch about six and think that is high and I should be watching less. Then again, I barely watched thirty minutes when I was a child.

Anyway, I don’t mind TV. One thing that’s really nice about TV is that I can do something while watching it. I like knitting but to sit on the couch and knit for forty-five minutes seems like a waste of time. However, sitting on the couch for forty-five minutes knitting and watching TV does not.

What I don’t like is when people decide to make books out of movies. Yes, there are some really good books to moves out there. Princess Bride is very good. (But what do you expect with the author, who had previous screen writing experience, writes the script?) Lord of the Rings is good. I’m sure if I thought harder, I could come up with other good ones. However, the fact is they aren’t all that common. (Well, neither are really good movies.)

Now, what I have seen happen is a really good movie is out there and I find out it’s a book as well. Never would have guessed and probably don’t even want to read it. It would ruin the movie. In all practicality, books and movies should never cross.

So why do I bring this up now? I was reading an article about “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” is going out to movie (never heard of the book to be honest) and it reminded me of all the really bad books to movies out there.

Ever read Eragon? I, will admit, was being hard on the book due to the negative reviews I’ve heard but it was not that wonderful. Maybe a 2 on a 5 star scale. The movie was worse. It didn’t even resemble the book and they felt like they had to add tension by showing what was going on with the bad guy, only, it came up lame and like an evil maniac.

Unfortunately, I can’t think of any more really bad book to movies right now besides Sense and Sensibility, and I have to take my sister’s word on that one.

The fact is though that books-to-movies don’t really come out. This becomes hard because sometimes, as i write, I can almost imagine my story as a movie form. Natlie’s there, in the pouring raining, trying to rebuild the crossbows and the dragon lands behind her. The poor little creature looks so miserable. She cautiously steps towards it. It would just be so perfect!

Never will happen though. Why? Because I’ve seen too many good books ruined by bad movies. Moreover, movie makers want to ruin your book. I’m convinced of it.

I heard a book intro from Orson Scott Card about trying to get Ender’s GAme made into a movie. Besides the problem of there isn’t enough children actors that are good, movie companies want to make Ender about 16, instead of the 12 he is in his book. Card is determined to have Ender be 12, because otherwise the story doesn’t work well and they want to have him have a love interest. A love interest in that book will not work.

So, from my position on my living room couch as an unpublished, unknown writer, I don’t think I’ll never agree to get my book turned into a movie, no matter what they say to me.

What I do think would be awesome to do, however, is take some of those older books that were writing in the 1800s, and make them into a TV show, one season for one book. Books by people like Charlotte Mary Yonge, that took my mom almost a month or two to read to use aloud every school day. (You can download a copy of one of her books there. Highly recommended, especially if you like Jane Austin.) If they were done well, there just might be enough people watching it.

because of star trek

Reading usually precedes writing and the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer. –Susan Sontag

Yes, I loved reading as a child. I read so much and loved it when school gave us so much of good books to read. I didn’t read the lame books, like goosebumps, but the good ones, like Journeyman Painter and House of Sixty Fathers and good, good books.

But I didn’t write because of what I wrote. I started writing because of a TV show.

See, when I was about fourteen we had cable for the first time in my life. Many of the small towns don’t have many, if any, TV channels without cable or satellite.  With cable came our watching of a new TV show–Star Trek, original series. Yes, it is rather lame compared to the other TV shows now, but then we thought it was pretty cool and we liked it a lot. It came on every day at 5 pm and by the time we moved, I had watched every episode, all 70, except for one half of one.

I loved Star Trek. I thought it was awesome. And I wanted to be a part of it.

So I wrote myself in. It began as a small story, about five pages. The grammar didn’t even obey basic grammar rules; I wrote quotes one after another without a return. The first person, from my own point of view, severely limited the story line and the pen and paper made it impossible to edit. But guess what? I began writing.

It took me about three or four short little stories to realize I wanted to do more. So changed into writing into a three-ring binder and wrote it in third person, with proper grammar, but still on pen and paper. My mind buzzed with possibilities of what I could do with this.

Another thing happened. with me writing these fanfic books, I also got other ideas. I began to tell them to my sister as a bed time story. It was a long story, that I’d tell a little at a time and when she got tired, I’d figure out a way to quickly end it for the night at a cliff hanger. She loved it, I enjoyed it, and we did it just before we fell asleep at night.

That limited me in another way. I couldn’t tell her the story as fast as I could fill it out in my head. I desperately wanted to tell her another story while telling the current one. So one day on a trip to Springfield, I began to write the story.

From that February to when I moved that August, I wrote six stories in length of about 60 to 80 pages. Each one of the grew in interestingness and length.I’d write one, read it through once, call it done and sent it to my brother to read. It was a blast. I always had an idea in my head and I wrote it down almost as quickly. I

At this time, I mostly wrote stories about someone about my age. I experimented with first and third person, experimented with journeys, and just wrote, fast, long, hard.

Everything began to change after I moved. Where I moved, there was a writing contest. Up until this point, only my brother read what I wrote. I wasn’t ready to enter in something quite yet. I wrote something anyway. I actually wrote four stories and entered them all in.

And I won. Third place.

I won’t go into all of the details but I loved the feeling of it and I kept writing for the writing contest. And I learned the value of doing a paper edit.

Within the next four years, things really changed. I began to understand character development and dimensions. Characters didn’t have just one side, they had three, and I learned how to figure them out. I learned how to let the characters talk to me. I learned how to write for characters other than my own age. All that I learned from role playing with a friend. Those role plays that we started in jest became something very important to my writing.

The other thing that changed was I began to write something a bit more realistic. True, aliens invading Earth and making us their slaves, although we didn’t know it, seemed a little outlandish but I thought it more or less worked. Some input for someone else and I discovered that it was a good idea to not have a faceless villein, so I developed the character as a villain but also as someone who I ended up finding rather interesting.

By the time I finished with the writing contest and moved (again), I felt that instead of it being awesome that I won second place, that my story was actually better than the girl who won first place. I felt more confident in my ability to write, and more willing to admit that, yeah, I write. No, I’m not perfect in what I write and not everything I write is wonderful but yes, I write.

I haven’t even looked at the story I originally wrote. I’ve been too scared of the horror I would find. But I don’t write now because I want to put myself into a fictional TV show. I actually write now for two reason. REason one is because I have too many ideas in my head that all float around all happy and want to get out. Reason two is, excluding classics, I can’t find anything decent to read. Whenever I go through the science fiction section at Barnes and Noble, I hardly find anything worth even looking at.

So I suppose she is right in saying that “Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.”