I have a new job!

Ladies and gentlemen! I have very exciting news!

Starting Monday, Dec. 14, I will begin my new full-time job as a technical writer at ERC!

Of course, I will be very sad to leave my friends at my current job at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, but this is a very important step for me. I've been applying for jobs since I graduated with my Bachelor's Degree in May, and now I finally have a job that's related to my degree. Without going into too much detail, the pay and benefits are far more than I was expecting for an entry-level job, and I am more than grateful for this opportunity. As an added bonus, everyone at the office seems really nice!

I have a lot to learn about technical writing, but I'm eager to get started. Here we go!

New Milestone: The Big One-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh

I hit 10,000 words on my NaNoWriMo project!

So, including all the words I wrote before NaNoWriMo started, my novel is at 19,680 words. That's crazy, you guys. I would have to go back through my old laptop, but I'm pretty sure this is the longest thing I've written since my first "novel" that I wrote in middle school.

The novel I'm working on now has significantly fewer sudden rainstorms.

New Milestone: OVER NINE THOUSAAAAAAAAAND

My word count for NaNoWriMo 2015 is, as many Dragon Ball Z fans might say, OVER NINE THOUSAAAAAAAAAAAAAAND!!!!!!!!!!!

I haven't really watched Dragon Ball Z much, but I can appreciate a good meme all the same.

Of course, I am ridiculously behind on NaNoWriMo. I'm supposed to be at 28,333 words right now, and I haven't even broken 10,000 yet. I don't think I'm quite done writing for tonight, though, so perhaps that will change! At the moment, the NaNoWriMo website is telling me that I can still finish on time if I write 2,902 words per day for the next two weeks, as opposed to the 1,667 words that I would write per day if I were actually on target.

Will I make it to 50,000 words this year? You know, I'm not sure. I have family coming later this week, and you're not supposed to go and hide in your room when you have family visiting you from all the way across the country. I'm going to really try, though. I've been bringing a notebook with me to work so I can write during slow moments (although I maintain good customer service practices!), and that's actually helped me get a lot of work done.

Writing by hand and adding the words to my Word document later has been a really good technique for me. Sometimes I have a hard time getting started when I'm typing, but it's almost always easier to write with a pen.

If nothing else, I'm going to beat my all-time NaNoWriMo record! Surely I can beat 12,360 words. Surely.

NaNoWriMo Problems

That moment when you've stayed up late trying to reach your NaNoWriMo target for the day, but then you realize that it's after midnight and everything you've been working on for the past half hour actually counts for the next day's word count.

*sigh*

On the bright side, the past few days have been very good writing days for me. I found the right kind of inspiration and managed to put down my Xbox controller for a while!

Welcome to the Museum

My mild-mannered alter ego gives no warning that she is about to explode into a career a bit more closely related to her undergraduate studies. She might seem like a friendly guest services rep who would be more than happy to sign you up for the 1:00 bus tour, but hidden underneath that smile and all the "Yes, Sir" and "No, Ma'am" is someone who is itching to sink her teeth into a full-time job in which she throws the English language around like a deadly weapon.

Outlines Don't Actually Have To Look Good

Many people who write papers for high school and sometimes college English classes have to turn in an outline with their paper. This practice creates a lot of hate for the practice of outlining.

I mean, I can see why. People plan papers in many different ways. Not everybody plans their paper with an outline. For some people, having to make an outline is just more work. It's kind of unfair to force everyone to turn in an outline (unless you're actually trying to teach someone how to make an outline, in which case there shouldn't be an entire paper attached to it).

Personally, I don't think teachers should grade outlines. They're supposed to help you organize your thoughts and make a solid argument. They're not supposed to be shiny and perfect.

I make outlines for all my papers, but since I don't have to turn them in, they are certainly not pristine examples of wonderfulness.

Fun fact: You don't actually have to put that much effort into an outline. You just have to put in as much effort as is useful to you.

I had this thought earlier today as I was looking through my downloads folder and happened across a file entitled "The Flaw in Ragged Dick." It was a paper I wrote for a children's lit class I took once. Since I couldn't actually remember what the flaw in Ragged Dick was, I opened up the folder to take a look.

I found it was a very early version of the paper which was mostly just an outline. It was probably something that I'd started at the library and then emailed to myself to finish later.

But I just had to laugh as I read on, because the amount of effort I put into that outline decreased drastically as it got to the end, and it was kind of goofy. Here:

You can kinda see where I just kinda said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get the picture, whatever, moving on."

See? Outlines. As much effort as you feel like putting into them.

And if you feel like not putting in any effort at all, that's just fine. Your paper, man.

Catch-up

Hi! So, yeah. I had a couple of nights when I just reeeeeally didn't feel like blogging. I was also doing some legitimate research for a writing project, so there's that. My apologies. I'm going to cover a lot of ground in very little time, because I have to get up and do stuff tomorrow.

This dalmatian is my aunt's dog Fuego. I was responsible for watching him and his brother Shadow (see below) for almost two days while my aunt was out of town. Fuego and I became buddies.

This Weimaraner is named Shadow, and he and I had a bit of a fight over who was the leader of the pack while my aunt was away. I had to turn to Cesar Millan for some advice, but I came out on top in the end and Shadow doesn't hate me.

I used to get these out of the vending machine when I was studying in France. So why do I have one here in America? Well, when my aunt returned from her trip, she took me to this AMAZING candy store called For the Love of Chocolate. It. Has. EVERYTHING. I was seriously overwhelmed by the candy amazingness in that store. I could hardly decide what to buy. I decided that I would just have to go a couple times a week and sample something different every time. As long as I walk there, it'll be okay!

I also got this Irish creme truffle from the big truffle case. Mmmmm. So good. I might have to start a blog series about all the candy I get from For the Love of Chocolate.

As a side note, I also tried Thai food for what was either the first or second time in my life (I can't remember, but I think I might have eaten it once before). I got Pad Thai, and it was amazing both in the restaurant and in leftover form. We got veggie tempura as an appetizer and I loved that, too! Especially the asparagus.

This is a tapestry of Louis XIV, my favorite French king (and a lot of other people's favorite French king, too) and it is located at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where I chose to spend my Saturday afternoon. The museum was awesome! It was a lot bigger than I expected it to be. I wasn't expecting a whole heck of a lot because general admission is free, but I was blown away by the size of the museum and the variety of art on display. I mean, it's no Louvre, but what the heck else can be a Louvre? I had a great time, and since the admission is f-r-e-e-that-spells-free, I think I'll go back a few more times. I mean, if nothing else, they have a pretty cool art library that I'd like to poke around in.

When I look at art exhibits, I don't just wander around, glance at a few things, and think, "Oh, that's pretty" or "Eh, I don't understand that." My mind has been trained to go much deeper than that over the course of my education in the English language and literature. 

I scrutinize. I analyze. I read the information signs. I look at the art from a few different angles. And then I think, "Oh, that definitely represents the mindset of the time" or "I wonder if the hands are missing thanks to weather or people or what" or "Eh, I don't understand that."

Although it took me about 0.51 seconds to recognize that the figure in the photo above was Saint Denis of France. He's the only headless saint I know of (The guy supposedly was beheaded and then picked his head up and walked away with it), so that was a pretty easy one.

I had no idea who this was from looking at it, but the sign told me that it's Saint Barbara- who, as far as I know, having a father who was in the military most of my life, is the patron saint of things that go boom. Which is pretty cool.

Virginia folks, I don't wanna hear anything about Alabama people being rednecks. These are some crazy Confederate protesters I saw through the museum windows. They're apparently there pretty often. EVERYBODY'S GOT SOME REDNECKS.

Okay, okay, it's not really politically correct of me to call people who wave the Confederate flag rednecks. What I should really say is that I disagree with just about everything they're fighting for under the stars and bars.

(I had written out some specific reasons for my disagreement with Confederate flag-wavers, but with each reason, I had opened up a big ol' can of worms that I realized could cause me some problems. So... playing it safe. On with the show.)

This garden display outside the museum reminded me of something I saw in France.

As I mentioned briefly before, I'm currently researching names for a story/thing I'm trying to write. That's taken up some of my free time over the past two-ish days. The names are for a fantasy world, but I'm struggling to come up with the right names. After doing some research about mythology and fairy tales and stuff, I began browsing through Ancient Scandinavian names and started coming up with some results. I'm going to check out Old English and possibly some Russian names, too, and I'm definitely going to raid some roleplaying websites for ideas.

I also reached out to my Facebook friends about the rules of making up names. I mean, I feel so stupid stringing together a bunch of letters that don't make a real name, but you've seen the fantasy and sci-fi names we have in our culture: Legolas, Frodo, Gandalf, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Han Solo, Darth Vader, Voldemort, Aslan, and so on. We don't question those names (or at least we don't question them much). We just take them as part of the fantastical world into which we are delving when we read a book or watch a movie. But somebody had to sit down before that book or movie came to life and string a bunch of letters together to make up new, weird names.

My question is- how do they do that? How do they make names that sound foreign and fantastical but don't sound completely stupid? Do they research and combine words from old languages together? Or do they seriously just put a bunch of syllables together until they find goofy names that they like?

I don't know. I'm trying to figure it out, though.

And now I really gotta go to bed, because I have a little roadtrip tomorrow to meet an old friend for lunch. Later, gators!

Throwback... Wednesday.

I was just looking over something I wrote when I was in middle school, around eight years ago. So many laughable things. So many cultural references that didn't age well. So much awkward dialogue. All of the nonsensical moments that showed I really had no idea how the world worked.

Here are a few trends I've noticed from things I wrote in seventh grade:

-Really ridiculous names that I made up and for some reason thought were acceptable.
Like Mrs. Dunderead, or Joseph Landtro, who also went by "Jet Lawless" because he was the quarterback and all of the quarterback characters I ever wrote had flashy nicknames like that.

-Names that started with the letter K.
Katrina, Kaylee, Kyle... I just had a thing for the letter K, I guess.

-Characters who were bullied or who otherwise suffered from the wrath of the "popular" kids.
All the time. Even if the character in question was rich, friendly, and ought to have been one of the "popular" kids herself. This was a recurring thing in my writing, and I feel it had everything to do with the way TV shows and movies back in the day portrayed the bumbling teenage hero or heroine and the "popular" kids who were bound to be their antagonists. It baffles me how long it took me to realize that "popular" was not a good term for kids that everybody else hated. These movies and TV shows were all the experience I had about high school, so basically everything I wrote in a high school setting turned out cutesy and awkward.

-People who hiss things a lot
I had a creative writing teacher in middle school who taught a lesson one day about how much better it was to use creative verbs for dialogue instead of just using the tag "said" all the time. I still have very fond memories of this teacher, but basically every other creative writing teacher I've ever had has argued the contrary, and all of the books that are worth anything say the same. Unfortunately, since I picked up that habit so early in my writing career, I've had a hard time shaking it. I admit that my characters still hiss things sometimes, and it always sounds a little bit awkward.

-Many, many, many adverbs
Historically, I've used a lot of adverbs in my writing. And I never even imagined that there was something wrong with that until I had to read Stephen King's On Writing my senior year of high school. In one of the chapters in which King gives you writing tips, he tells you to limit the number of adverbs you use and try to use more descriptive verbs instead (although he admits that he, himself, is guilty of adverb use). When I read this, I was outraged. What on earth had adverbs ever done to Stephen King?! I filed this piece of advice away in my ever-growing "Stephen King Is Full Of It" file and continued to write as I normally did. At some point during that school year and in the months afterward, I began to notice how cutesy my adverbs made my writing feel. I tended to use them to make my dialogue tags sound more interesting (since I knew "hissed" wasn't good, but "said" still sounded too boring), and they made me sound like a really inexperienced writer. I've been getting better about the adverbs in the past few years.

-Sudden rainfall.
Rain that goes from zero to pouring in two seconds. No warning.

-Lots of cliches.
Cliche forehead-slapping, overused punchlines, scenes lifted out of every Disney Channel show ever (even when the shows were good)... A lot of the cliches were laughable.

-Strangely absent parents.
One reason that a lot of child protagonists are orphans is that the absence of attentive guardians makes it possible for them to go on their adventures. My protagonists' parents were not always dead, but they were often not around for dumb and nonsensical reasons, and they also didn't provide suitable caretakers to look after their children in their absence, leaving the child protagonists with much more freedom than any realistic pre-teen ever had (or should have).

-Characters who scream and yell things.
Lots of people screaming and yelling things. Like, come on, already. Inside voices. Stop freaking out. No wonder you're not one of the "popular" kids.

-Characters who gasp all the time.
SO DRAMATIC!!! WHAT A TWIST!!!

-Characters who sigh all the time.
Sigh...........................................................................................


A lot of my writing issues in seventh grade boiled down to my lack of worldly experience. They say that you should write what you know, and I knew nothing about high school, but insisted on writing about it. Despite living in the world, I apparently also knew very little about how normal people talked.

But at least I was writing! The best way to improve your writing, as eight years of data suggests, is to keep practicing and to always experience or research something before you write about it.

There are some things in my old stories that are laughable just because they were outdated. For example, characters using Internet Explorer. By choice. Ha! "How the times have changed," Rebecca hissed, rubbing her hands together and cackling evilly at the unused Internet Explorer icon on her desktop.

New Headphones

Look! I got new headphones! These ones aren't falling apart, and they're not even cheap ones that a flight attendant gives you for free!

Now I no longer need music for long drawing sessions... but I could still use exercising and writing music!

Let the tunes commence!

I kind of cheated a little bit...

So... I accidentally cheated on my NaNoWriMo a little bit. I had penned out a beginning to my novel a few weeks ago and included it in my word count. But then I read through some of the FAQs and realized that was cheating because you're supposed to only write the novel during the month of November.

I realize that there's no NaNoWriMo police that's going to bust down my door, but it's a matter of pride, you know? I took out the 200-ish words that I had written before the official start date. It set me back a little bit, but 200 words isn't going to make or break me. I want the satisfaction of knowing that I wrote 50,000 words in one month.

...if I make it, that is. I've got all kinds of academic obstacles in my way. I've got papers galore for my actual required classes, as well as that graphic novel project I keep talking about, and on top of it all, I'm also applying for internships for the spring and summer. If I don't get to 50,000 words this month, it won't be for lack of trying, but I really, really want to finish this novel. It's been forming in my brain for two or three years, now.

I'm making progress, I guess... Almost to 2000 words. That's about how much I need to write every day in order to finish on time. According to the stats on the website, if I keep up my current pace, I'll finish in February of next year. Well, that's better than October of 2016 like it used to say!

NaNoWriMo Word Count: 1711

The Process of a Paper

I had a paper due on Friday. The topic was the way certain feminist authors handled the perceived relationship between gender and reason. The texts I worked with were "The Awakening" by Kate Chopin, "The Yellow Wall-Paper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and "Trifles" by Susan Glaspell.

I did not like this paper at all. I wasn't overly fond of the texts and I wasn't completely confident in my analysis. None of the other topics appealed to me any more than this one did, though. Neither did most of the other texts that we've read so far in this class. I am most definitely not a fan of Modernist poetry.

Buuuuut I did the best I could. It was a process. Here's what my process looked like:

That's a lot of paper.

Here's Step 1:

Reading the various works, underlining and marking the pertinent quotes with Post-Its, organizing the quotes into an outline. Usually when I write papers for my lit classes, I take a very long time making my outlines. I make them very organized and detailed, and the only thing left for me to do afterwards is to turn the outline into complete sentences. I skimped on the outline this time- and BOY, did I suffer for it.

Step 2:

The first draft. My attention span is not good when it comes to making the first draft; I usually end up sitting at a computer for several hours while mentally whining and complaining. But it gets done. Eventually. My professor asked us to bring in two copies of our rough drafts for our classmates to workshop. I'd never had an analysis or close reading paper workshopped before. Usually I only do that kind of thing in creative writing classes. However, I found it very helpful- especially when my classmates suggested some different/better vocabulary. Yay English majors and their thesaurus brains!

After my professor and my classmates marked up my rough draft a bit, I went home and tore it to pieces. My professor had given me some very specific advice about things I needed to include- like, the kind of advice you don't turn down if you want a decent grade on a paper. So I took some things out and added in other things (we had a word limit/target). I was feeling rather benevolent that evening, so I made my edits in purple instead of my usual red. Editor!Me is vicious, especially when editing or revising my own work.

Step 3:

I moved so many things around and wrote so much completely new material that it became necessary to transcribe it all onto another sheet of paper. It was ridiculous. But that particular evening, I happened to be better at writing when I did it with a pen instead of my laptop, so it was all okay. Afterwards I transferred the changes onto my digital copy. Sometimes I'm more productive when I write things by hand and sometimes I'm more productive when I type. Not sure why. It just happens that way.

Step 4:

Another draft. I have never done so many drafts for one paper. But this one was less intensive than the previous one! It was unusual that I had to reorganize and rewrite so much of my first draft (probably happened because I didn't have a good outline), but this step is a normal part of my paper-writing process. Usually I end up writing the entire first draft the night before the paper's due (I don't recommend it), sleeping for a few hours, then getting up early and scribbling all over it with a red pen. That makes the paper better. I don't know how- it's magic! And then I transfer all the changes onto my digital copy. I highlight my red edits when I've fixed them on my computer so I can make sure I've fixed everything.

And that's how I write a paper! Ta-daaaa!

Although sometimes there's a lot of caffeine involved.

Paper Nightmare

In case you've ever wondered what English majors' nightmares are like...
That and running around in 1920's Paris in a flapper dress and blue Converse.

I guess this is why I shouldn't write papers or watch Midnight in Paris before bed.

(ALTHOUGH MIDNIGHT IN PARIS IS AMAZING AAAHH!)

Tools of the Trade

When you write, you have to have some kind of writing utensil, whether it be pencil, pen, or word processor. But they don't have to be boring writing utensils.

For example, I have a quill pen. It's not a real quill that you have to dip in ink and all (but I actually do have one of those, too). It's basically just a ballpoint pen stuck in a feather. But it's cool! It's great for when I'm feeling more Shakespearean or like less of a Muggle than usual. I bought this pen in England a few years ago. Unless I'm much mistaken, it came from a gift shop in Stratford-upon-Avon. So it's legit.

I mean, as legit as a fake quill can get.

Notebooks

I love notebooks. I absolutely adore them. I have tons of them, too. I don't even always use them- I just like to have them. I use notebooks for a variety of purposes. Some I use to take notes in class, while others I use for more creative purposes. Here are a few of my more creative notebooks:

This is my journal. I haven't written anything in it since the beginning of last semester. I've never really been able to commit to a journal. This one contains bits and pieces of my freshman year. I was really good about writing in it every night at the beginning of freshman year, since that was a rough few weeks for me (band camp... so intense), but then I got out of habit. I wrote intermittent entries that were weeks apart from each other, and then for a few weeks I wrote one every night. That was fantastic. I completely let loose in this journal and wrote honestly about my feelings. I complained about my friends, my roommates, my teachers, my life... If you've never done this, I really recommend it. It allows for a lot of harmless venting and self-reflection, which I consider very important. Just don't let your journal fall into the wrong hands.
The great thing about personal journals is that you get to make your own rules. You don't have to write every night if you don't want to. If you want to rant and rave about people, you can. It's better than saying it to their faces, anyway. And if you happen to get so mad one night that you feel your journal would catch fire if you tried to write in it, you're perfectly at liberty to take a hiatus until you've beaten up whichever dumb friends pushed your berserk button.
Not that I would know about that.

This is my Poetry Notebook, capitalized because it is a project for my poetry class. I have to write poetry in this bad boy for fifteen minutes every day for a hundred days. The goal is to generate a bunch of raw material to work with and to develop good writing habits. I've had many a creative writing teacher tell me it's a good idea to sit down and write something every day. Now I have to. It's been kind of fun so far. I've come up with some pretty strange poetry, that's for sure. A lot of it sounds like a stream of consciousness. If I come up with anything good in here, maybe I'll share it on this blog.

I feel like I've had this notebook since the dawn of time. It was a gift when I was in sixth or seventh grade. It's full of doodles, sketches, maps, character details, plot points, notes, quotes... I used it for planning and reference. It's a really good idea to keep one of these around when you're writing. If you forget something, you can just look it up. If you're having trouble describing or visualizing something, you can reference your sketches. I don't pull this notebook out very much anymore. Every now and then I'll pull up an old project and need to look something up in it. It's very good for when I'm feeling nostalgic about my early writing career.

This is the more modern and mature version of the pink notebook above. I call it my Little Black Notebook, and yes, that is houndstooth. I take this notebook with me on trips and sometimes around campus. If I think of something important or hear something interesting, I write it down in here so I won't forget. Like in the pink notebook, I keep character notes, plot details, and quotes in the LBN, along with a smattering of poetry and observations. I only write in it with black ink, usually with the same pen. I will be very distraught if I ever lose that pen. I'm very protective of this notebook because it's brand new- I got it for my last birthday and I love it. I never take it with me if it's raining and I most certainly don't let other people look inside it.

I have tons of other notebooks and journals that I use at various times, all depending on the circumstances and subject matter. But if I told you about all the notebooks I own, this would be a much longer and more boring blog post, so I'll just spare you all and end it here.