Short Writings

I haven't posted much here lately.  I kept meaning to, but I couldn't be bothered to do much the whole weekend.  It's a wonder I got the post about being sick up.  I think that's only because I like the outlet to complain.  Luckily I'm feeling much better now, so I'm finally getting a post up.

Way back towards the beginning to the semester (probably September or October), I wrote a few journal entries in the point of view of the main character of the story I'm writing.  These journal entries aren't part of the actual story.  I just wrote them for the fun of it.  There's no mention of the main characer even having a journal in the story.  However, the entries are supposedly written while the story is taking place.  There are two of them, and neither one really reveals much about the story.  There just normal things a fourteen year old could potentially write in a diary.  I mean, they incorporate events in the story into them, but it's nothing particularly big or spoilery.

In attention to those, I also wrote an incredibly short scene that includes several of the main characters.  This scene involves a field trip they went on several years before the story takes place.  (I never actually specified how old they were, but I picture it as being fifth grade or so.  They're in eighth grade in the actual story.)  This scene is absolutely pointless.  I just wrote it in school because I wanted to write, but the actual story is saved on my computer.

I've tossed around the idea of posting them online.  It could kind of be an extra thing.  I could post them before the story to kind of meet the main character, guess what happens, kind of thing, and then I could post the actual story after.  I don't know.  They're incredibly short (probably less than 500 words each) and basically pointless.  I'm not sure if I should do something with them or not.  Does anyone have any ideas?

Writing Takes Time

I've been writing a story for over a year now.  It takes me forever to finish longer stories.  I wish I had more time to write, but on a good day I usually only get about half an hour to spend writing.  I do manage to write almost every day except when I'm not home (or sick and unable to focus on anything like yesterday and today).  I've been lucky enough to get a bit more time lately.  Not because I actually have more time, but just because I've learned to quit doing other things to write instead.

I'm so happy to almost be done with the first draft of this story.  I know a year is an insanely long time to be working on just the first draft, but I would like to point out that I was working on Avatar: The Next Generation as well for about half of that time.  (That makes it sound a little better.)  I wish I had more time to write, but school and homework just takes up a majority of my time (plus actually leaving my house which has happened more recently).

Once the first draft is done I plan on working on a Hunger Games fanfiction (which I am incredibly excited about) before going back to edit this story.  It'll probably be posted online at some point in the future, but I wouldn't count on that for maybe a year or more.  It'll all just depend on how much time I get to write.

My Pencil Got Stolen in the Bathroom

I got the pleasure of beginning my day by standing out in the rain waiting for the bus.  I was also alone because my sister stayed home sick.  I'm so glad that the bus actually came early today.  Normally, I would mind the rain, but being stuck at school with wet clothes and hair isn't fun.

All of the seniors with a certain GPA or above had a meeting this morning about a scholarship.  One person in our county gets it, and the winner recieves full tuition for four years at any college in Indiana.  It's a great scholarship, and I'm going to apply for it.  It's just that I don't want to go to college in Indiana.  There is one college (that I really like) that I applied to that's in Indiana, so I'm still applying for the scholarship.  We'll see what happens if I get it.

This meeting ran into our first class, which meant I had less time than normal to complete my AP U.S. history test.  Thankfully, I got done on time.  I think it's because I knew I had less time, and I made myself focus more than usual.  (I'll admit that I sometimes zone out in the middle of tests.)

We got to peer edit papers in AP English.  Basically every problem that was pointed out in my paper is stuff I already know.  The problem is I'm not sure how to fix those problems.  This paper is proving to be very difficult.  When I'm finished writing this, I'm going to go through it and do some editing myself.

Here's an interesting story:  Whenever I go to the bathroom at school, I always leave my books and things sitting on this ledge thing over the sinks.  I've been doing this since freshmen year, and I've never had a problem.  Today I did the same thing I always do, and when I went to get my books, my pencil was gone.  My eraser, book, and notebook were all still there, but the pencil was gone.  I looked around, thinking maybe I dropped it, but it was nowhere to be found.  I think someone stole it.  I wasn't too bothered by it.  I just went to my locker and got a new one.

I really funny part of the story was during econ.  Some people started complaining about how they'd had bad days, so our teacher started going through every person in the class and asking them how their day went.  When he got to me, I was just going to say that my day had been fine when Jordan mentioning that I did actually have a bad day.  I don't know if she was referring to the pencil thing or what happened while peer tutoring (I'll get to that in a minute.) as I had just told her and Haley both.  I kind of stammered for a bit before just saying, "My day was fine, but my pencil did get stolen in the bathroom."  Everyone in the class, including me, burst into laughter, and I turned bright red, which Haley pointed out to me.  After a few minutes, the teacher said he wasn't even going to ask for that story, and we moved on.  It was interesting though.

As for what happened during peer tutoring over at the middle school, I was put in charge of helping three sixth graders with a math worksheet today.  They were doing really well.  They were each dividing up the problems and doing them on the board.  Then, the boy got frustrated over something and decided he wanted to do them himself, so he went and sit at a desk and worked on them alone.  Then, the two girls got into an argument because one girl didn't think the other was being fair, so they insisted on working the problems alone.  It was kind of dissapointing.  I remember at the beginning of class being really impressed by how well they were working together, and by the end of class that had fallen apart.  At least all three of them had a pretty good idea of what they were doing.  That was the point of the worksheet.

On a bright side, the pouring rain had stopped by the time I went over to the middle school, so I didn't have a problem with that.  I also got a ride home with Ji instead of riding the bus.  That was especially nice since I was lugging home books for my sister Regina, so she could get homework done.  Overall though, it wasn't a bad day.

Notebooks and Stories

I don't know what the first story I ever wrote was.  I had a lot of noteboks that I scribbled small notes in here as a kid.  There was one notebook that I had all sorts of "important" stuff in, and I remember keeping it with me almost all the time.  Nothing in it could be classified as a story though.  Don't get me wrong, I came up with stories all the time, but most of them stayed in my own head.  I was a bit older before I actually started writing stories down.

I still have most of those notebooks.  It's interesting to look in them now and see some of the things I wrote.  Sometimes I just have to wonder what was going through my head when I wrote something.  You can definitely tell that I've always had an active imagination.

Even though nothing in these notebooks can really be classified as stories, these notebooks really helped me get to the point where I actually wrote.  In a way, a lot of the stuff is exactly like things I write down when I'm coming up with a story now.  I plan on keeping all of these notebooks (and the ones I use now).  They should be fun to look back on years from now.