Starting a New Chapter is Hard.

No, this isn't anything philosophical or thought-provoking; I meant it literally, as a writer. I'm not taking it so far as to apply it to life. I'm too tired for that right now.

I've always struggled with finishing things - stuff I mean to bless other people with, artsy projects, lesson assignments, stories. Every word that I write in A Maiden's Touch - the current work-in-progress - beats the record for most-words-Charli-has-written-in-a-single-story. I've never been this close to finishing, or even over half-way, really. So when the story arc finally reached the point where the major foreshadowing is done and I have to keep the ball rolling with some action, not just intriguing hints, I...

...did what I do best. Took a break.

Sometimes God uses breaks to rejuvenate people and get their gumption back. Sometimes He uses truth to combat the laziness and inspire them. And sometimes He lets them sit on their rears until they realize that they're not living according to His calling, waits while they kick themselves, and then none-too-gently pushes them off their rears and says, "Get moving!"

In the span of a few hours, I wrote what I call the EIKAMS (nicknamed 'eek'): Everything I Know About My Story. (Again, there could be real-life applications here that I'm too tired for.) Picking up from where I left off in the book, I typed out every single little detail that was foreshadowed and then some, finishing it on paper so that the ideas took residence somewhere other than my scatterbrained mind. I know exactly what to write now. I have no excuse.

But it's hard. I'm three chapters into fleshing out the eek and already I'm bored. Gah. But no more breaks!

~Charli Rae |Job 39:19-25|

Why I Write

1| it keeps me sane.
My brain has this awful tendency to scramble itself at the worst of times. Sometimes all it takes to clear it is a pencil, a scrap of notebook paper, and the rhythmic strokes of forming simple words. Sometimes it takes more - listening to my Irish music, staring blankly at the laptop screen, grappling with the process of forming a coherent sentence.

2| it keeps me {in}sane.
When life gets boring or out of control, it helps to retreat to my dark corner where I can laugh like a maniac without being judged and live someone else's life that I can control with my fingertips. Like a puppeteer. A puppeteer with a keyboard.

3| it's my guilty pleasure.
There's that whole live-someone-else's-life thing. I can fake so much in a book - in Kaylie's life, I'm a superhero with an epic hoverboard. I get horribly seasick, yet through Ana I can pretend I'm a pirate. I've got the flexibility of a cow, but I've got my 'writer's belt' in tai kwan do. And I have an awesome car that can change its paint job with a click of a button because of breakthrough-technology nano paint, of which I understand just enough to write about.

4| it makes me feel cool.
I'm known as a writer. To be witty (which often comes across as obnoxious). To be good with words (even though I'm about as eloquent as a... as a... oh, shoot). To scribble something about medieval torture devices at the most inopportune moments. I'm also known to have pencils stuck in my hair. (but that's not cool at all. actually, it's kinda weird.)

5| it gives me a sense of purpose.
Maybe I'm not wasting my time sitting in this chair. Maybe I'm not a complete and utter failure for waiting to go to college. Maybe, just maybe, my books will be published someday and provide for the demanding lifestyle that I'd like to live. Or maybe just one person will read my maniacal, obnoxious gibberish and be touched by the message that God weaved in there without telling me.

~Charli Rae |Job 39:19-25|

NaNoWriMo Strategy - Week 1

--get hyped up on leftover Halloween sugar.

--forget that you missed the first two days. they were well spent.

--hole up in little corners wherever you are. seriously. nobody cares what you're doing in those little corners.

--listen to Irish music.

--get frustrated 'cause you're a perfectionist and everything has to be just right before you move on and the whole quantity-over-quality thing isn't clicking at all.

--be satisfied with the way that you are and remember that you're not writing this book to win a challenge but to maybe publish one day and that better writing now is going to save you a lot of time later.

--then get frustrated again because you remember you're supposed to be saving time now and write better later because it would be so cool to win this challenge.

--get a massive headache when you realize math is somewhat involved with writing when you're trying to figure out how far your characters can travel in one day while going about 2.5 miles an hour.

--now that you're doing math anyway, calculate that you're not writing anywhere near enough to finish in a month. maybe half a year, if you're lucky.

--decide that math sucks. it's now telling you that for the entire seven days you've been writing, you've just barely managed two days of what you're supposed to do.

--let out a huge, dejected sigh and tell yourself that week two will be better.

~Charli Rae |Job 39:19-25|

NaNoWriMo

November's a month for doing things. Some people do No-Shave November (or, for girls, No-Makeup November). But since I have the fortunate inability to grow hair on my face and I don't wear makeup in the first place, those dares don't really mean much. So I've decided to participate in National November Writing Month, instead. For those of you who don't know, it's a challenge to write 50,000 words in thirty days.

'Cause I'm so dedicated to my writing and won't have a problem finishing a whole book in a month.

*cue insane laughter*

Yeah, okay, that said, I have no idea why I'm attempting NaNoWriMo. In fact, I'm really not. I'm doing the youth version, which has a flexible goal. The standard, however, is 30,000 words, which is perfect (in the loosest sense of the word) for me. A Maiden's Touch has 20,000. Add the youth goal and it'll be a whole novel.

Eventually. I have very low hopes of sticking to the thousand-words-a-day thing. Ha.

~Charli Rae |Job 39:19-25|

Ramblings - Feel Free to Ignore

This week was/is my mom's spring break. We explored Downtown Disney on Monday, but other than that, we haven't really celebrated her week-of-no-school. Why not? Because, crazy lady that she is, she's spending it studying. No homework, no tests. Just studying.

I admire my mother so much. If I were her, what precious little amount of brains I have would have leaked out my ears by now.

Anyway, I'm sure this comes across as a shock... *cough*intensesarcasm*cough*... but I just can't commit to a book. As soon as the thought, "Y'know, I think I'll try to get 12:10 done this year," crosses my mind, I get a flood of ideas for Riding Orion and its fellow series...es (eek! what a word! how do you say that?!). So how does one react to that? By working on them both, of course. Skatterbrained-ness has to come in handy for something.

But I thought you all might be interested (or not, but please pretend) in 12:10, because... *brrrrrrrrrrbumbadum*

It's a comic book!!

Yeah, we'll see how that turns out. I've only really glanced over comic books (though I'm a huge fan of superheroes) and I have no idea how to write one (well, how could I, when I don't even read them?). But I think that's what makes it so much fun. Not to mention it's about 11/12-year-olds, so I get to mess around with the humor a lot more. And my dad (amazing person that he is) not only loves comic books but used to work for Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc. My parents are my heroes.

That said, let's talk about sewing. Or rather, I'll talk about sewing and let you close your browser whenever you get bored (which, if you're smart, was about four paragraphs ago). My medieval dress has gone nowhere. The forlorn pieces are lying in a crate in my desk (that's right, not under - in), waiting hopelessly for me to put them together. But I just... have no excuse. I'm a lazy bum.

But I am going to sew a gauntlet. Not two, just one. For the left arm. Why? 'Cause Ben has a bunch of archery stuff and, while having fun and shooting people (with carefully foam-wrapped arrows), I obliviously scraped the bowstring against my forearm whenever I fired. It left a really big bruise.

Well. I'm exhausted. If you read this far, comment and tell me -- I will stick by you for the rest of my life. Well, until you admit I'm incredibly annoying, at least.

So what do you think? Any comic-book-writing advice? Or suggestions for the gauntlet? Or a way to overcome my laziness and sew that dress?

~Charli Rae |Job 39:19-25|

From the back of my journal

“I’ll have to wake up”

as told by an insomniac

I hate sleeping. Maybe because I don’t do it often. Sitting up in bed, forced to listen to my sister’s deep breathing, I hate myself for not doing the same. I lie on my back and stare at the clock’s projection on my ceiling. Minutes move slower at night. I know it.

The black air turns milky with lazy sunlight. The darkness is giving me a few precious moments to fall asleep. That’s when my strength melts, my resolve fades away. I stop praying for my friends and family, for the world’s broken condition, and start begging. Most often, silent tears twist my face. Sometimes I’m granted the two hours of silence left. Others I lie awake until someone gets out of bed.

One might think that if I get to sleep, it’s better. I believe it’s worse. If I fall asleep, I always wake up with a feeling of dread. I fumble to the bathroom, switch on the light, and expect my reflection to distort into a horrid monster. But it’s only me looking back.

If darkness remains, I turn out the light and return to my bedroom. Something follows me. It’ll grab me if I don’t get into bed and under the covers quick enough. Who knows what it plans to do then?

It must have been some bad nightmare to warp my imagination in such a way, but for the life of me I can’t remember what it was about. All I know is, if I go back to sleep, it’ll haunt me again. Lying awake is torture, but sleeping is worse. Because then I’ll have to wake up.

My Writing Inspiration

Montana Gold tea. The writing program Scrivener. Unfinished sewing projects. Inspirational books. A zebra-shaped pen. Horsey bookmarks. Beat sheets that make formatting a story so much easier. And sugar. :)

~Charli Rae |Job 39:19-25|

Book Update!

Remember Pepper Grey? The book that I told you all I was going to focus on? The one I had a perfectly planned-out story chart for? Yeah. This is what that looks like now.

Big. And empty.

I decided it wasn't going in the direction I wanted it to, so I tore it all off, dumped it in a pile, and never rewrote my ideas. Instead, I started fiddling around on a blank Word document and ended up posting that random clip about a random girl named Liadyn. She wormed her way into my head, shoved Peace and Ethan out my ear, and whispered her life story until it was all I could think about.

Now I'm obsessed with her story, a Maiden's Touch. Sorry, Pepper Grey.

I might post an excerpt of it sometime soon. Sorry for this short, facebook-not-blog-worthy, post.

~Charli Rae |Job 39:19-25|

Usually I'm counting down the days 'till Christmas from 364, but, somehow, Christmas managed to sneak up on me this year. After singing carols and drinking hot cocoa with my friend on an 80+ degree night, it finally hit me around eleven thirty last night... "Omigosh, Katie! TOMORROW'S CHRISTMAS EVE!"

And that 'tomorrow' is today. It's Christmas Eve. We've been cooking all day, it seems, and in a few hours we'll head off to church for the Christmas Eve Service. Then we'll come back, watch Polar Express while normal people watch It's a Wonderful Life, then we'll open a gift or two and go to bed.

In our old house, where we lived for six-years-and-four-months, I hated sleeping on the night before Christmas. Not when my presents were taunting me just around the door! But now I like it. It might just be that I'm older. It could also very well be that, in this house, we have a fireplace, and from my bed I can see the fire. But it's probably just that I'm an insomniac and, for some reason, it's been easier the past few years to sleep on Christmas Eve. (Though last night I slept pretty good, too...)

Anyway, to end this babbling post (actually, only three paragraphs, now that I look), would you like to read a story that Alyx came up with and I wrote down years ago? If so, feel free to keep reading. If not, go ahead and ex-out of your browser - it is pretty goofy.

*Ahem*

Hello, my name is Sandy Livingston. My family and I moved to Orlando, Florida into a small neighborhood called Lake Bosse. While I was exploring the house, I tripped over a loose floorboard. A hidden staircase fell from the ceiling. I, being adventurous, climbed up slowly. There was nothing in the attic but a couple of boxes and some sort of machine in the corner. I walked over to the machine and saw a blue crystal. I picked up the crystal, realizing that it was a time machine.

“Where would you like to go?” the time machine asked.

After thinking for a moment, I answered, “The birth of Christ.”

“When you wish to come back, hold the crystal in your right hand and say ‘Take me home’.”

There was a bright flash of light and by the time I could see again, I was in the dessert. On my left there were two pal trees, and on my right was a small pool. In the distance I could see black specks. As they drew nearer, I made out a couple camels, and on them, three kings. Or they looked like kings.

They stopped in from on me. One of them said, “Who are you?”

“I’m… Sandy Livingston.”

“Where are you going?”

“Um… Bethlehem?”

“We are heading that way also. Would you like to join us?”

“Sure.”

I mounted a camel. After riding for about an hour, it had grown really dark, and the star we were following stopped above a barn.

“We are here,” the first king announced.

 We walked in and the kings gave gold, frankincense, and myrrh to a baby in a feed box.

“Um… I don’t have a gift,” I whispered to the first king. The king touched the bandana that was tied around my neck.

“This will be your gift,” he said.

I untied it and laid it across Jesus. I looked up and Mary smiled at me. I hitched a ride with the kings back to the spot I came from and watched them disappear into the distance. Then I took out the blue crystal and whispered, “Take me home.”

Another bright flash and I was back in the attic. Not a second had passed. I returned the crystal just in time to hear my mom call, “Sandy, time for dinner!”

“Coming, Mom!”

I smiled as I climbed down the stairs, pulling out a piece of straw I had taken from the barn.

~Charli Rae 

|Job 39:19-25|

*Sigh*...

{What she knows her blog to be:}

Unimaginative. Irregular. Dull. Stand-offish.


{What she wishes her blog could be:}

Inspirational. Original. Creative. Easy to relate to.


{Problems going from 'is' to 'will be':}

She's lazy. She's unadventurous. She rarely tries new things. She's hesitant to share things for fear that they will be scorned.

{Boy, does she have a lot to work on...}

~Charli Rae 

|Job 39:19-25|

Pepper Grey

So it isn't the 'new idea' I pitched it to be two posts ago, but I have been  'dreaming it up'. I had part of the story before; now I have most of the first act. (For those of you who don't have English majors for fathers, all stories have three acts.) I was going to try and get as much of those three acts as planned out as possible. Here's how that went...

{I actually do have more than that, but I'm too lazy to update the video.}

Anyway, I'm getting itchy. Now that I'm not writing RO - or anything else, for that matter - I'm going Cr@zY! I have to write something! And that something is Pepper Grey. Even though I'm not as prepared as I want to be. Even though there's a huge blank spot between the catalyst and the break-into-two (you saw that, didn't you?). 

The problem is... (oh, yes, there's another problem)... I have no idea how to start it.

That first sticky note wasn't the first scene. It's the list of things I need to include in the first couple scenes. Now, normally it's not a problem for me to start a story (it's finishing that I obviously struggle with). A good action sequence, clever dialogue, a crazy dream; all good starters, but none fit. This story is a type that I have never written before. The action isn't sword-fist-bow-POW! kind of action. The dialogue belongs to an every-day family in modern day Wyoming. And all crazy dreams that the main character could have simply don't further the story.

Any ideas?

~Charli Rae

|Job 39:19-25|

Ramblings

So, what's been happening? Thanks for asking. I haven't posted for a while because... *bumbadadum*...

I've been camping. With my youth group. Well, not for as long as I haven't been posting. But I was feeling lazy. Now I'm extremely sore and bored and am finally willing to get on my blog and participate. Anyway, it was supposed to rain the night before last - hence, many families stayed home - but the only rain came while most people were still sleeping and briefly sprinkled after breakfast. Which, for some, was rather a disappointment, as it was supposed to bring cooler weather. Or maybe it was cooler than normal and we couldn't tell because we ran around too much. Back to the context, I didn't get many pictures of people, but there was this particularly friendly peacock who posed for me. I believe he was relieved to get away from the flock of peahens chasing him around. Poor boy....

To change the subject, I would like to say that *ahem* I'm going to take a *cough* break from Riding Orion. The poor thing has been drowned in so many scattered ideas that it can hardly breathe. In fact, I'm wondering if it stopped breathing. And, though it sounds horrible, I don't think I'm even going to try to resuscitate it for a long while. Instead, again, I have dreamed up a new story.

I was considering entering NaNoWriMo (National November Writing Month, for those of you who do not write), but remembered that lack of structure was the reason I failed to write RO in nearly a year, let alone the three months it was supposed to be done in. A story is only as good as its plot, just as a house is only as stable as its foundation. The LORD didn't create the space between the sky and the ocean before He decided what to put between it. Of course, to be fair, He is perfect, and He had all eternity beforehand to plan out His story.

Anyway, back to the point. I am determined *cough* to finish this story, and to have a pretty good idea of where it's going before I start the first sentence (more on that later).

Ellie, I will need plenty of support for this.

And Bethanie, if you're reading this... please don't be upset with me. The book I'm planning out *coughcoughcough* isn't Pages of Myondelf.

~Charli Rae

|Job 39:19-25|

5 Reasons to Stay Far Away from Writers

We're scary. Plain and simple. But some of you might need to know why we're scary.

1. We're extremely controlling. You may have heard some writer rant on about how "my characters tell me how to write - they just want their story out there." No. They are our characters, we control their lives. We get confused when it doesn't work on you.

2. We love conflict. Without conflict, there are no good books. Evil glares, random screaming, dramatic storming out of the room (that's a hint for you to stop talking so the scene can end, by the way)... yeah, we do all that.

3. We're really convincing. It's our job to make stuff up and make you believe it. We get rather upset when you don't.

4. We think the worst. You know, that conflict thing again. You're going to the Rocky Mountains? Somebody's gonna fall....

5. We go through weird phases. Sometimes we're snuggled up in a chair with a notebook and snap at anybody who tries to take our attention away from our stories. Other times we want to talk your ears off about our new ideas. 

I'm sure there's more, but that's all I can think of right now.