Music Sets your Feelings Free

Music is a language of emotions. Music can say without words what it would take a thousand pages to describe.

National Novel Writing Month is a go!

NaNoWriMo has officially begun, and as I'm writing this post I am currently at 2,226 words. I'm not done writing for the day, but I'm already very pleased with this strong start. My general strategy is to always stay one or two days ahead if possible, and to start getting ahead early. I'm anticipating a lot of quality writing time tomorrow hopefully, so my goal is to reach 10k by tomorrow night if at all possible.

I'm especially excited because I've already learned a lot of good things about my protagonist, Ashlyn Atterberry, that never came up in pre-writing. For example, I now know that she is the daughter of a single dad who she is separated from by a large-scale cosmic war. Exactly how she lost her mother I don't know, but she admires her father a lot and aims to be like him and to eventually make a run on the border to reunite with him. At the beginning of the book, this is her motivation for everything she does. She travels to a terrible planet simply because it's close to the border, and takes up a dangerous job to fund her planned escape.

Whether or not she succeeds is up for speculation right now, even by me. I have the basic plot details in place, but I don't know for sure how this particular detail will turn out. What I do know is that this motivation will be tested when a friend begs her to give up her quest in order to protect both of them. I won't spoil the ending, but I know how that one turns out.

NaNoWriMo 2016: In Anticipation

Change The Galaxy: My 2016 National Novel Writing Month entry

National Novel Writing Month: it's a 30-day mental workout, and one of my favorite months. This year, I'm going to write another science fiction dystopia. Change the Galaxy is a novel about the struggle between doing what's right or acting pragmatically.

I've been dreaming of the setting for this novel for quite some time- I'm fascinated by gas giants and I love to imagine ways humans can settle these seemingly unconquerable beasts. Because a gas giant is a ball of gas, there is no land to build on. Every part of life on such a planet will be based on space stations, spaceships, and the most intensive life support systems ever conceived.

2016 marks my fourth NaNoWriMo attempt. I won NaNoWriMo in 2013, and haven't been able to hit 50k words since. I'm both optimistic and a little worried this year. I would love to celebrate a NaNoWriMo win my senior year of high school. I don't know how much time for writing I'll have in college, so this may be my last chance  to participate in NaNo.

In years past, my biggest roadblock to finishing NaNo has been running out of plot, or starting and then realizing the story isn't fun, isn't sustainable, or was just badly planned. In 2012, I tried to write an entire book about one person, isolated on a planet. I couldn't relate to him, and there was almost no story to write. This year, however I think I have a winning plot. There's lots of it, and it starts where things get interesting- not after it, like in 2012.

When I write characters I don't relate to, I get burned out easily. This year I'm not going to fight that fact, and I'm going to write a character as close to myself as I can. She's going to be nerdy and awkward, without a doubt. While I don't think that I could see myself as a hired gun, in the world of my novel it's not a hard role to dream up.

For the first month of this blog, I'm going to be almost exclusively posting NaNoWriMo updates. I'm more excited for this year than I think I ever have been, and I am going to post character profiles in the next few days to help with development. Until next time, thanks for reading!