What's Up Wednesday

Kind of belated What's Up Wednesday... oh well. Anyway, here we go!

What I'm Reading

I just finished reading The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson. To be honest, not exactly sure where the title comes from, but the book was really good. The setting was made up of jungle and desert, which is quite a bit different than the Europe-in-the-dark-ages setting of most fantasy books. I also loved the main character Elisa. She is such a strong character, but she also was vulnerable at times. She was definitely relatable.

Now I'm reading an MG that was recommended to me back when I worked in an elementary library, Summer of the Gypsy Moths. I'm only the first chapter, so we'll see how it goes.

What I'm Writing

At the moment, nothing. I'm writing critiques for a CP, but that's about it. Every time I think about starting in on figuring out edits for my book, I'm kind of overwhelmed with figuring everything out. Especially the beginning, which I have never liked and still don't. How do I set up the world so it makes sense, but also introduce conflict soon enough so that readers are hooked? It is complicated, I tell you. (Although I'm sure you don't need ME to tell you that).

What Else I've Been Up To

I just got a job, so that's cool, but so far I've only had one shift and don't have anymore until next week so my days have been pretty laid back. Um... yesterday my mom, sister and I sat down like we do every week to watch the next episode of The Amazing Race Canada. I have to say I really enjoy The Amazing Race when I do watch it, but especially this time since everyone is Canadian and they're travelling in Canada. :) I love my country.

What Inspires Me Right Now

There's this web series called Video Game High School, and it's a really cool web series but besides that they also put a ton of behind the scenes content up on the creators' website, rocketjump.com. A bunch of that content has been the writers talking about, well, writing.

In this one podcast they did (which you can find here), the writers reflect on writing season 1 of VGHS. Everything that one of the writers says around 33 minutes is really inspiring to me and motivational. They talk a lot about the writing they did for the show, but a lot of the stuff they say applies to writing in general. I don't know, I found it helpful and inspiring. (And if you want to, check out VGHS! It's pretty fun).

What's Up WORLD

I have been absent from the blog since... well, it's been a few months (oops). But a lot has happened since April so I thought I would update you. Actually I just saw a few "What's Up Wednesday" posts so I thought I'd do it in that sort of style, although it isn't Wednesday anymore.

WHAT'S UP WITH MY LIFE

100 Islands, Philippines. Yup, I went there. And...got sunburnt.

I'm home! If you didn't know, I spent this past year in the Philippines, doing a lot of cool stuff. But mostly doing stuff like working at an international school in the elementary library and being the main playground supervisor which means sweating BUCKETS everyday because the temperature rarely goes below 30 degrees Celsius. (Seriously, the one week of the year when it gets down to 26 C people start wearing toques!!) If you're interested I could talk a bit more about my experience there, but for now I'll stick with reading and writing unless you really really want to know. :) So, yeah I'm back in Canada and gearing up for starting university in the fall!

WHAT I'M READING

I just finished FINNIKIN OF THE ROCK by Melina Marchetta and WHYYY did I not read it earlier?? I actually tried to read it a while ago because I absolutely ADORE Melina Marchetta, but I didn't feel like reading fantasy. Finally I sat down and buckled up to read it and I'm soo glad I did because Melina Marchetta did NOT disappoint. FINNIKIN is fantasy, but it has so much truth and beautiful story in it and AWESOME characters, which is my favourite thing about MM and the main reason I love her work. Give me a good character and I'm in love. PLEASE go read it because I want everyone to know how awesome Melina Marchetta is!!

WHAT I'M WRITING

Since I didn't have school work to worry about this year (a very weird thing for me...), I spent quite a bit of my free time writing. So only a couple of days ago I managed to finish my third draft of a book I've been working on for quite a while! Actually, pretty much exactly a year ago I said briefly that I'd finished my second draft. So... it takes me a year to write a draft. But anyway, I'm super pleased with this draft and I feel like I'm more on the right track now than I was with my disgusting first draft and messy second draft. I've now sent it out to a few readers but actually if you're interested I'm on the lookout for more critique partners. :) Here's a terrible one-sentence synopsis... 17-year-old Percy Collins used to be invisible, part of the world of invisible people called Unseens, until he was injected with the legendary antidote to invisibility and for the first time in history, it worked on him, thus making him a very valuable person in the Unseen world. (Trouble ensues). Yeah, I've got to work on that. But anyway, if  you want to read it email me at kazuntai101[at]gmail[dot]com. You can also contact me through twitter, @AlyssaSherlock!

MY GOALS

I feel slightly lost now that I've finished my draft, because my goal for so long has been to finish it! I think I'll take a break from any writing projects for a while, and then maybe try to work on writing a good summary. Which is kind of daunting, to say the least, but also necessary because right now when people ask me what my book is about I say "uh... people... who are... invisible..." (And I'm only trying to annoy them a little bit).

WHAT INSPIRES ME RIGHT NOW

Melina Marchetta! Reading Finnikin of the Rock inspired me to work on my book and finish it. It reminded me a lot of my book, just because my favourite part of the book I wrote is the relationships and the growth of my characters throughout. :)

I am also looking for some new music to listen to, so if you have any suggestions please let me know! I'm also wondering what your favourite YouTube artists/musicians are (because then I can just listen to all their songs on YouTube... haha).

Anyway, I've been away for a while. How are you? What are you up to? Have you posted lately on your blog? (I need to catch up on my blog reading...) Let me know!

The Formula for Inspiration

A few days ago we were coming home from somewhere, driving along this road that runs right next to a large valley. Most of what I could see on this drive were trees, but I got a five-second glimpse of the roofs of a village of squatter homes. I only saw about fifty makeshift roofs, but I know that the squatter area there fills that valley. (Squatters are really, really poor Filipinos who make their homes anywhere they can, with anything they can because they can't afford to do anything else).

After that five-second glimpse of that squatter area, my thoughts wandered. I thought about what it might be like to live like that, and how I can never ever fully comprehend it, and other things as well. I don't know why, but for some reason that overwhelming urge to create something meaningful overcame me at that moment.

That afternoon after I got home, I sat down and wrote for about two hours. Somehow, for some indeterminable reason, that glimpse of those squatter homes inspired me to write.

I feel like I talk a lot about inspiration, but I think I do that because it's always different. There is no formula for inspiration, and I think it's sometimes easy to forget that. I know that I've definitely read posts about how to get inspiration, or people have inspiration-themed prompts. "Music inspiration for you", "want inspiration? go for a walk outside", etcetera.

But really, inspiration comes, at least for me, in the most unexpected moments, through the most unexpected circumstances and glimpses of images. I don't have a formula for what inspires me, and I never will, no matter how much I might analyze the things that have inspired me and motivated me to write in the past.

What random things have inspired you?

Stories That Create The Desire to Write

As you may have noticed on the sidebar of my blog, I have now committed to start posting every Monday. I wanted to do this so I won't procrastinate on writing blog posts, and also maybe it'll force me to write blog posts that I normally wouldn't write, stuff that turns out to be blatherings squeezed out on short notice. I also wanted to have a goal this year of talking more about my personal writing, which is something I normally shy away from on the blog most of the time. I thought that probably if I was scrambling for things to post about, it'd be more likely I'd fall back on talking about my writing (because that's basically what people do on writing blogs).

The other day I saw Les Miserables for the first time. It was amazing, and I'm fairly certain I was on the verge of tears for almost the entire movie. I love things like that, whether it be books or movies or any form of art, that evoke such emotion from you, and make such an impact on your emotions or your mind. I love how much story, no matter what form it's presented in, can affect a person.

When I feel affected by a story (like Les Mis), it inspires to affect other people with the stories I have to tell. @CostelloShields summed it up perfectly on twitter:

"I want to write things that matter. I want to write things that people will love."

That's exactly what I want to do with my writing, and brilliant stories like Les Mis, or The Fault in Our Stars, or Okay for Now, or Life of Pi, or even the Lizzie Bennet Diaries make me want to do create stories that matter even more. I want to write something that will affect others in the way all these other stories have affected me.

I love it when I come home from a movie or when I finish reading a book, and the first thing I want to do is write.

What kinds of things create a desire to write in you?

How People Think

This afternoon, as I was getting my haircut a chair over from me a woman was getting her hair dyed and cut. And, as happens so often, she was talking (to her hairdresser; not to me) and I was listening. (Listening! Not eavesdropping *ahem*, well.) I listened to her talk about various things like buying a house, or going out for dinner tonight and just by listening to a few random snippets of conversation I learned quite about this woman. For one, that she does or has lived in a condo in Toronto and is now looking for a house in Winnipeg. I also learned that she is a widow, and has kids that are grown and have kids of their own.

I was thinking about this -the interesting things you can learn about a stranger just by listening, and people's stories - when all of a sudden....

Flashback!

To... last night, me, my brother, my sister, my mom and my dad all standing (or lying down or sitting) around my parent's room and chatting at 10:30 PM about various things. Well, at first my mother and father were arguing, basically about who was right or who was wrong and it was all very amusing. Then it became even more amusing when my dad started reminiscing about the days when they were first married and they (my mom and dad) were working out their relationship, and how to deal with things, and Dad said that it helped him extremely to think of their relationship in terms of graphs.

Just by that, you can probably get a fairly decent picture of my dad in all his glorious nerdiness (today he and my cousin spent the day testing their cameras through various nerdy setups). Then he went on to say how he often thinks of things in terms of math, or science, and it helps him understand things.

This, I thought, was a very interesting concept: That different people think in terms of different things, favouring their interests.

I also wondered: what do I think in terms of?

And, in a lot of instances, I think in terms of... stories. :) Yup. Or really, what if questions that turn into stories. For example, once when I took the recycling out to the curb on a cold day in winter I noted that cold air really clears your head.

All of a sudden my brain was saying: what if someone really loved that feeling of being clear-headed? And they knew they could get it from the cold? And they were slightly crazy? And so they loved that feeling so much that they froze themselves to death....

My family thought I was, um, crazy.

What do you think in terms of? Math? Science? Stories?