These Summer Days

The first official day of summer has dawned according to the calendar. Although according to the temperatures outside I’d say it has already been here for a while.

I sort of have a love/hate relationship with summer. I hate hot temperatures. I open the front door and go, “Nope” and cower back into the lovely air conditioning.

And yet there’s something appealing about the long summer days. There’s a sense of excitement and freedom that comes with summer. During fall, winter, and spring months I always feel this drive to be productive and enjoy staying busy. But it’s different with the approaching of summer.

These are the days to flop on my bed and read an entire book in one day.

To feel inspired and spend hours blissfully working on writing my novels.

Have competitive Mario Kart races with my siblings on the Wii.

To paint my toenails fun colors.

To drink Kool-Aid like the kid I am.

I want to go jump in the pool at whatever time of day and spend the rest of the day watching TV show marathons and eating ice cream.

Or blast my Owl City music loudly while lazily perusing pinterest.

Or simply lay upside down on my floor, staring up at the ceiling fan, and just daydream.

These are the days to go have lunch out with friends or catch a movie with the family or eat an entire bag of potato chips in one sitting.

These are the days to be lazy and blissful and exciting all at the same time.

Sometimes I dread the summer’s heat and boring days, but you know what? Summer is a glorious time. Endless of possibilities.

I plan on thoroughly enjoying this summer.

What about you?

P.S. I suppose the sudden change in my blog is pretty obvious. Yesterday I got on to publish this post only to discover my other template had completely messed up. Thus I had to spend the entire day trying to set up a new template. Inconvenient, yes, but in the end I actually decided I like the new layout better. I’ve been wanting something simpler for a while now anyways. I still have quite a few adjustments I’m going to make, but overall I’m rather pleased with it.

When Life Gives You Lemons…

Duck!

Okay, let’s face it. Sometimes life doesn’t just give us lemons, sometimes it chucks them at us and they smack our foreheads and juice drips into our eyeballs and it’s all very painful.

As we rub our stinging eye and wince at the bruise forming on our forehead we can get pretty bitter at life and its flying lemons. We might even throw in the towel and give up altogether.

But you know what? That bruise on our foreheads is a reminder, a lesson.

When life gives us bruises we shouldn’t give up on it, we should just learn to duck next time and keep trekking forward. Because there is always going to be deadly lemons hurling towards you in life, and yes, there will be some that smack you, sometimes very hard, but we can’t let them stop our journey. Each bruise is just a reminder to avoid the next one. The more bruises we get, the better skilled we become at ducking, dodging, and evading those pesky lemons like ninjas as we walk on.

And who knows, we might even get so skilled that we can catch the lemons that seek to cause us pain and instead use them to make a refreshing glass of lemonade. Take that, lemons.

So don’t give up, don’t let the pain stop you from going forward.

Learn from it.

(And I probably shouldn’t post things I came up with at midnight.)

My Big Adventure in the World of Editing

I’m going to let you in on a little secret.

I shudder at even the mention of rewriting.

Ever since I knew what rewriting even was I ducked my head at the thought. Avoided it at all costs. Wallowed in anguish many an hour realizing I’ll never be a true writer because how could I ever rewrite?

I spend so much time and work with first drafts, the idea of having to just scrap most of it and keep rewriting and rewriting and rewriting is enough to send me in depression. The fact that most people do not get published until they’re practically on their 10th draft is nightmare-inducing to me.

I don’t want to rewrite. I’ve spent enough time writing it the first time as is.

Rewriting, editing, changing things, adding things, taking things away… The horror!

…Or so I thought.

I have a story that I really want to make into something. It’s special to me and I just have a great desire to completely perfect it. I want to honestly get serious with writing and maybe (maybe) attempt looking into that terrifying thing known as “trying to get published”. Now how scary is THAT?!

So, on March 29th I took a deep breath and actually started editing this novel of mine. I have done some very minor editing before, but nothing like this. This is a major editing project and *gasp* quite a bit of rewriting. *gulp*

But that first day of officially beginning the process, a Friday afternoon, as I went sentence by sentence of my prologue, attempting to do my best to change it into the best it could be, I realized something.

Rewriting is…fun.

What?! This can’t be. I’ve been terrified of the idea for nearly my entire life! You mean it’s not actually that bad? My whole life has been a lie!

I love this story. I love these characters. Probably my favorite tale I’ve ever written. Not to say that’s it’s even that good, but something about it makes me happy. Whenever I work on this novel I feel like I’m home, surrounded by loves ones.

I first started this novel somewhere around February or March of 2011 and I think finished it by August. Since then I’ve been working on other projects. So returning to it after all this time truly felt like returning home after being gone for far too long.

Rewriting isn’t scary, it’s just a whole other level to writing. The first draft is meant to explore the surface of the story. Rewriting allows you to delve into the inner depths of it and make it truly something—revisiting old friends and discovering a much greater understanding of their stories. It’s a beautiful process, not a scary one.

That’s not to say rewriting and editing isn’t hard. I’m only on Chapter Five of the first edit through and I’ve already stumbled across some difficulties. But those always come with writing. Writing is hard. But it’s also wonderful.

To me writing is an adventure. We’ve all read enough stories to know adventures are full of hardships and all means of scary things. But they’re also full of wondrous things as well.

I don’t know if anything will ever become of this story of mine, and that’s okay. But I’m not going to stick it in the dark crevices of my laptop and let it gather cyber dust. I want it to be something, even if it’s just for me.

I’m taking one sentence at a time. That’s not so hard. Just one sentence, slow and easy. As a perfectionist, I find satisfaction in, well, perfecting things. So the fact that editing has always terrified me is almost funny. Now that I’ve started it, I’m rearing to go on other stories that need rewriting as well! I’m excited about it.

I’m not scared anymore.

I’m ready for an adventure.

Bloglovin’ and Other Alternatives to Following Me

So you’ve probably all seen the rumors running rampant about Google Friends Connect, that lovely little thing that allows us to easily follow each other’s blogs, being taken away July 1st (I think that’s the right date). Originally they were saying they were only taking it away from non-blogger blogs, those of us using Blogspot would still have it, but now I’ve seen multiple things claiming it’s being taken away from blogger as well in order to promote Google+ instead.

Now I’m one of those people when I hear these rumors go, “Psh, whatever, it’s probably all nonsense,” and go on with my life. But I do enjoy blogging and all my blogger buddies and just in case there is that teeny chance the rumors are true, I decided there really would be no harm in taking some precautions. Couldn’t hurt anyway. I personally have no desire to get a G+ account, just personal preference, so…

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

For some reason it forced me to put that link on my post. *shrugs*

Anyways, you can follow me through there. It actually seems to be a pretty sleek site and a nice alternative if GFC really does decide to disappear (which I’m still very suspicious about). Also, if you’re a Linky Follower user I have one of those on my sidebar as well. I’m not too crazy about that site myself though. And of course you can simply subscribe here through email. It’s all there on my sidebar.

Again, I’m not really worried bout GFC disappearing. But, in case I’m wrong (because I do tend to be wrong quite often in life ;P), I thought I’d take some precautions.

Blessings to every single one of you!

Beautiful People - Arodathan

Lately I’ve been working a great deal on a story entitled The Avriot which is the first book in a steampunk, time travel trilogy called The Traveling Library. It’s farrrr different from anything I’ve ever written (high fantasy is my usual genre), but I’m having an absolute blast with it!

I’ve kind of fallen in love with all my characters, but the problem is there are literally 8 main characters plus Moseley. The problem here is the fact that with so many people all together, it’s hard to focus on just a single one, so I’m sometimes having a difficult time discovering each of these characters personally. I think I’ve got most of them down pretty well, but there’s one I’m having a bit of a time with.

Arodathan Clickton, more commonly referred to as Arrow.

Before I even started the story. I thought I knew Arrow pretty well, but while writing I’m learning there’s far more to him than I ever knew. I’m loving discovering his personality, he’s quickly worming his way into my heart, but, again, with so many other characters it’s making it hard. Thus I thought: Why not do a Beautiful People for him? It’s been so long since I’ve done one and it really is a brilliant way to discover one’s characters. So I dug through the archive and found one that I thought would help me the best to delve into his characters.

So without further ado…

Arodathan “Arrow” Clickton

What kind of music does he like?
Arrow lives in an 18th century-ish setting, so the music there would be similar to what we had during that time period. I suspect he likes lighthearted, peppy-type music. Something fun with a good beat.

Does he like to go outside?
Most definitely! Arrow is far from one to sit around the house all day. He likes to explore and find excitement.

Is he naturally curious?
YES. He is probably the most curious one of the entire group. Everything fascinates him and he has this deep enthusiasm for learning. He wants to know everything.

Right, or left handed?
Well, I was first going to say right handed since that’s the norm, but, you know what? I could totally see Arrow being left handed. It almost makes sense. So I think I’m officially declaring him left handed. Thank you, Beautiful People! I knew this would help.

Favorite color?
Green I would think. And probably bright colors, like red, orange, and yellow. 
                                                                     
Where is he from?
Ahahahaha. Now that is a question. Ahem. Technically he lives in his and his sister’s clockwork shop in a little town known as Kervais but…well, let’s just say this story is very wibbly wobbly timey wimey.

Any enemies?
Perky, fun, enthusiastic Arodathan? He’s quick to make friends, not enemies. Unless someone messes with his sister, or really any of his friends (he’s very protective). And then of course there’s the antagonist of the story, but that’s also rather complicated.

What are his quirks?
Arrow is just pretty silly in general. I’d say he’s the jester of the group. He likes to tease everyone and make light of things. He tends to be only able to focus on one thing at a time, getting so absorbed into whatever it is he’s doing he’s oblivious to everything else around him. As far as specific personality quirks…I don’t know. I’m glad I got this question though, because now it has my mind churning. I won’t be surprised if he reveals many ridiculous quirks he has to me soon.

What kinds of things get on his nerves?
In general, he’s a pretty laid back fella, it takes a lot to ruffle his feathers. He does snap pretty quickly when someone is bothering his sister though. He’s also not very fond of dull people. Being such an enthusiastic person himself, it kind of annoys him when someone doesn’t really appreciate the beautiful things of life. He cannot understand personalities like that.

Is he independent, or needs others to help out?
Arodathan is very much a people person and will not push away a helping hand, but he’s also extremely self sufficient. It’s just been him and his younger sister for a while, thus he’s had to take charge and stepped into the position well. I think he enjoys being a leader and capable of doing things himself.

So that’s Arrow. I still think there’s way more to him than what first meets the eye, but I have no doubt his personality will reveal itself fully over time. This sure helped me get a better inside look at him though! Beautiful People is marvelous.

Happy Thursday, everyone. I hope you all have a simply fantastic Memorial Day weekend!