It's Finally Here! (AKA LOL POST SPAM PART TROIS)

Today, my friends, it is October 31st. Halloween. Fright night. The time when the dead become living and the living become dead. Halloween Town's most special day. The holiday that launched a thousand costumes.

But, you see, to me and thousands of others, Halloween is just the beginning. Now, I've already pinned down Halloween as Day One of the Candy Season, but for me something much more sweet comes directly after. (Unless you count candy corn, to which everything sweet pales in comparison. Candy corn is my favorite kind of sugar.)

November 1st. NaNoWriMo. Inner Editors, Purple Elephants, Trebuchets, Blatant Lies, NaNoToons, the Traveling Shovel of Death. Cameos by a certain Mr. Ian Woon.

Thirty days and nights of literary abandon! Quantity over quality! No plot? No problem!

Eep.

Luckily, this year (unlike my three or four-ish other novels) I have a plot outline! And a character sheet! And everything is just as bland as it was last year. Also, I have to content with school and homework. But plot outline! Hooray for Zoidberg! (God, I need sleep.)

Anyway, to celebrate this happy occasion, I'm going to be having guest bloggers come in!

No, not anyone interesting. My characters (the wall-bangingly stupidly named Dragonwyck gang) will each be posting their own little diatribes each da—wee—whenever I have time. That ought to give me something to work with…

First Week o' School!

I cannot believe that I've neglected you guys for an entire week without regaling you on the details of my first week of school-school! So, yup, first time I've been to a 5-day-a-week school, first time I've been to a Catholic school, first time I've worn an actual uniform-uniform.

My previous school was a charter school that I only actually went to twice a week, and the rest of the week I had work at home to do. They had uniforms, but they were super lax about them. Sure, the rules stated that you couldn't wear big dangly earrings or makeup or anything like that, but nobody bothered with that. We just wore the colorful polos with the name of the school on, and we were good. At this school we have to wear white polos and plaid skirts, the boys can't have hair touching their collars, and you have to be able to see your socks over the tops of your shoes. This quizzicals me. (BOOM! I just made quizzical a verb!)

Also, 5-days-a-week.

So. Not. Used. To. This. It seems like every afternoon I think, "No biggie, I'll just work on this tomorrow—oh, no I won't." I guess part of the problem is that I have a specific schedule I'm following every weekday until the end of August (and hence the end of Camp NaNo!), and, due to my parents ignoring my schedule almost entirely, it's all mucked up. Still, I'M NOT QUITTING NANO.

It makes me happy. I love it. It's a great experience. So, no, I will not be easing up on my writi-magating any time soon. At least, not in the next five days. Which is a helluva long time if you're not used to, like, leaving the house on a regular basis.

ANYWAY, school. It's pretty great. If I had to rate all of my teachers, then my music teacher, my science/religion teacher and my homeroom/language arts teacher would be my top three. Also, teachers love me for some reason. It's not like I do anything besides sit in the back of the room and be quiet. But I suppose I'm a lot easier to deal with than, say…everyone else in the class. Heh.

Ooh, friends. That always has to get mentioned in a big rant about school. In most of my classes, I sit next to Caroline, who is like a slightly less nonsensical Vanessa in some respects. (Yes, I am identifying almost everyone from this school with people from my old school. Come on, Ariel and Bailey would be best buds if I could ever get them to meet! Sadly, I'm missing several people on which to *ahem* force identification upon. There's no Noah at this school, or Skittles. No one can replace my Skittles.)

Today we got to meet our kindergarten buddies for the first time. Mine is named Will, and he's the cutest little thing ever. *squee* We talked about Playmobile and San Francisco and Chicago and Lego and otters and cupcakes and the color green and how I double-knotted his shoelaces for him and Phineas and Ferb. In that order.

Well, this has been a long, rant-y post about school and stuff. I love my new school, but I still miss my old one from the bottom of my heart. I wish I could see all my old friends—and Mrs. Landers—again.

How 4-H Annoyed Me By Criticizing My Writing

*pokes blog* 

Well, I haven't really updated in a while. I must rectify this by telling you a fabulous (and pretty long) tale of adventure, writing, heartbreak, and revenge. The title of the story is How 4-H Annoyed Me By Criticizing My Writing, which also happens to be the title of the post. Fancy that. 

Still have no idea what those numbers mean. I got the picture off Wikipedia.

Yes, a few years ago I was in 4-H. It might just be me, but it wasn't quite as exciting as TV would have you believe. But then I found out that there was a category for the fair for creative writing, and everything was happiness and rainbows and smiling clouds.

And then I found out that for a first year in said category, the word limit was 400 words.

400 words. 

I couldn't write squat in 400 words. Well, it was a long time ago and my writing skills weren't that developed yet. I could write pretty long stuff, but short stories were kind of beyond me. What a foolish, naive child I was.

But I tried. In the end, I had to count some of the words as images and leave a few things out of my word counting in order to stay within limits. I think I had maybe 399 words after that. There's no rule against cheating a tiny bit, is there?

"Actually, there is. That's why it's called cheating."

I slid past the judges at the township fair, which qualified me to go to the county fair. My general outlook on the situation was "W00T! I'm the best!"

After judging was over at the county fair, I skipped into the fine arts building to receive my enormous trophy and check for $1 bazillion dollars. Imagine my surprise to find that my story—the one I had worked so freaking hard to make the most brilliant 400 word story at the whole fair—had gotten a red ribbon.

"Lacks character development," they said.

"Lacks brain cells," I said.

To be fair, it was pretty crappy. Probably the stupidest thing I've written since the Little Kitten books. *shudder* I just couldn't see it through my rose-tinted pride-glasses and childish hubris.

The next year, I was determined to win. I had been left a bitter husk by the critiquing of my little Cinderella story. Contributing to the bitter-husk-factor was the fact that the drawing that I had worked on for hour had gotten a freaking white ribbon. Because the stones were uneven. That's how they are in medieval castles. Geez… Looking back on it, I probably could have done the stones a little better. I think my nostalgia goggles are falling apart.

This year, I could write 500 words. Apparently, a hundred little words can make a huge difference. Or maybe I was just better at writing a year later.

I spent hours—or maybe it was only about twenty minutes, as I was quite an impatient child—writing up detailed character bios for characters I ended up cutting. For those of you keeping track at home, this makes the most character info I have ever written before actually writing the story. In the end, I didn't actually use most of the information I invented. I cut swathes of details, leaving me with three major characters and two minor, which is two more characters than I had the year before.

It paid off. I would have gone to the State Fair, that unattainable epitome of 4-H prowess, 'cept creative writing doesn't have a State Fair category.

Oh well. I got a purple honor ribbon in photography, at least.

We here at Newfallen Mystery Enterprises hope you have enjoyed this random and fairly self-centered excursion into Miss Clepe's backstory while she procrastinates on writing. Cheers!

Ireland, pt 2: Sleep Much Want

Sorry to leave you hanging like that, but I was really tired and stressed after being awake for 20 hours straight. Now I'm not as tired and stressing over only having about five thousand words done for Camp NaNoWriMo. Eep.

What's more fun than going through airport security? What's fun to pretend to crush while looking out an airplane window? What would I rather do than have jet lag?

The answer to all three is "anything and everything." It also pretty much sums up that whole thing that was happening that very annoying and stressful Tuesday.

Well, I left the plane minus one cell phone carrying pictures of the Epic Emily. (Which, I have recently found out, never actually made it on the plane. It's still in the States somewhere, and Friends are looking for it, after finding and losing it again. I love them.)

I waited and waited and waited at three different airports, a car rental place, and at the cottages for some reason I can't remember I was sleep deprived stop looking at me like that!

Anyway, cottages. Five of 'em. With a sheep/goat/cow pen adjacent. I just can't enjoy farm animals anymore, after having cleaned up after them for… Wait, was that only two years? Wow. Seemed like longer.

Not very much like that at all.

But that's a story for another day.

There's also the peacock, which makes this ungodly noise like my cat crying to be let into my room while I'm trying to write because I'm so behind on my word count *sob*, and a lot of other birds.

Pretty bird.

After pretty much passing out in my bed, I was dragged, feebly kicking and screaming, for a hike. Well, hike doesn't really do it justice. It was more wandering around with my parents and the lone other under-18-year-old of our giant group, trying to find a ruined castle.

Guess what. There wasn't a castle.

(Actually, my dad and I found the castle later, but that's another day. And it wasn't a castle, it was a church.)

So we walked back to the cottages and had soup and cheese and bread with the rest of our group. Then I kind of passed out in my bed again. The End.

Next time on Newfallen Mystery, Omnia climbs out the living room window and runs around the farm barefoot.