Newearth Castle
Friday, April 25, 2003
Grr. I made some lovely banners for the other blog I'm part of, and I uploaded them to the web last night, but the quality--changed from the original format to .jpg made them look all--not good!! Sure, I suppose they look alright now, but they looked *really* nice before, in my opinion.
If you're interested to see them, head over to the Inklings. And read our stuff, while you're there!
Thursday, April 24, 2003
Okay, so I'm transitioning form my old blog. I didn't much care for the name of it. I guess I'll cut & paste the entry I had there.
Sunday, April 06, 2003
Well, I suppose I should start posting here.
This is my blog. I'm here to talk about whatever's on my mind.
First off, let me recommend my other blog (it's not mine, I'm a coadministrator of it, with two other people, and there are other members). It's called The Inklings. Here's the address: http://theinklings.blogspot.com . We're a writing group, just getting started.
It's a lot of fun. I like to write very much. I always thought of writing as fun, and loved thinking up stories in my head, but I never thought I was any better at it than the next person. Besides, I never finished stories I started for fun.
But, when I was fourteen, I decided to try my hand at clay-animation. I thought it would be better if I had a little story to enact with the figures, so I wrote down this story that I had been working on in my head. It seemed pretty short in my head, but the script got longer and longer, and it took me months to write. When I finally finished it, it was almost sixty scenes long. But I had finished it. And I thought it was a pretty good story.
There's something incredibly fulfilling about finishing a story. It's like "wow, there you go", you just made a stack of gold coins, and now here's a treasure chest to keep them in. I have to admit, I still haven't done a lot of story-finishing, other than fanfic, but I'm working on it. I think it's easier for me to write out a little sketch of what I want to happen in the story, so I have a direction to go in, no matter how lost I get writing the thing. But even with a scribbled road map, things happen in these stories that I couldn't have anticipated. Characters that I never mentioned in the mapping, that I invented in the writing to be just passing devices to advance the plot, turn into major presences. Scenarios and observations made at the beginning find an opportunity to come back. Little opportunities for wordplay present themselves. I love it.
There are times, though, when I feel like I've lost it. I sometimes feel like I've lost the ability to write well. As it is, I think my writing has gotten stiffer and more formal and self-important than I'd like, than it used to be. The only thing is, while I generally have no problem finding the problem, there's always a much harder time finding a solution. Sometimes I just stop writing, because it's giving me a headache, and I feel like I'm not making something nice. But I know I have to come back to it, and I always do. It's my writing, and I can't abandon it. Coming across one of my half-finished stories in a notebook or on the computer, to me, is like coming across a flower dying of thirst. I know what I have to do to fix it, but for some reason, I can't always bring myself to turn on the hose, so to speak.
That's the beauty of fanfic. I write lots of fanfic, and while I may go weeks at a time without touching my original stuff, I write a little each week. I have to, if I want to put up new chapters for people to read and comment on. I sometimes feel like it's silly for me to devote so much time to fanfic, but I know that without it, I might not write at all, anymore.
Quillfull Inker 6:00 PM
Alright, just thought I'd cart that over here. This is an awesome layout!
