I'm Going to Hogwarts...

via Union Square Station

college apps? who needs those when I can take Dark Arts and Charms and expand my room to twice the size it really is. All I want now is the Hogwarts letter :)

btws.
1) Who was disappointed when they turned 11 and didnt get the letter?
2) Anyone ever wonder...
    What their own wand would be?
    What House they'd end up in?
    What their Patronus would look like?
3) Who really wants to play Quidditch, right now?

Day 22

um I kind of suck at this whole NaNoblogging thing, particularly when I hardly have time to write, much less blog.
Anyway, I caught up almost 10000 words over today and yesterday. Sometimes I question my sanity.

Also, are there any NaNo people out there in East Brunswick? I feel horribly lonely. Knowing that just one other person who's as crazy as I am makes things a little bit better. Especially when I need to spew about my plot in ways that saner people probably wouldn't understand (ie: I feel horrible that I just impregnated my main character and completely ruined her life.)

Or maybe its just the Rihanna song that I'm listening to that is depressing me right now, but I needed a soundtrack to go with the dark pages I was writing. Maybe I should write about happy rainbows next time, just for a change of mood...

Then again, I have too many plot ideas swirling around in my head to think up of a new one. For one thing, I have to write the story of my great-great grandfather, and his whole part in the Wuchang Uprising/Xinhai Revolution of 1911 that overthrew the Qing Dynasty. I promised myself I'd try to finish that one by Oct. 10 of next year in time for the 100th anniversary of the Wuchang Uprising. Not sure if that's possible. Not sure what my mental state would be if I do make it... Interesting to undertake though.

7:44pm. IPLE time. ><

Ke$ha + Harry Potter?

I found this online! lololololol
(set to Tik Tok)

Wake up in the morning feelin like Lord Voldy
Grab my spellbook from out the drawer
I'm gonna hit Diagon Alley
Before I leave let my owl out, and make sure I pack
Cause when I leave for Hogwarts, I aint comin back

Im sayin' im the one the dark lord Knows Knows
Tryin on our new robes robes
Goblins keeping all our gold gold
Train-hoppin buying our favorite candies,
goin to the castle parties
Trying to get everyone sooooorrteddd...

[Chorus x2]
Don't pick Gryffindor
I dont wanna be a bore
Tonight, sort us right
Slytherin is Dynamite
Hufflepuff dont got the stuff
Ravenclaw is not enough, nooOoOoo OoooOoo

And got a care in the world but got plenty of butter beer
Aint got no problems with Dumbledore and Snapes Chillin right here
And now the girls are lining up, cause they hear we're death eaters
But we kick em to the curb if they're mudbloods like Miss Granger

I'm talkin bout everybodies got dark marks marks
we're trying to raise them up up
gonna bring the dark lord back back

Now now we going until the prophecies true true
or the Order shuts us down down
Order shuts us down down
Order shuts us...

[Chorus x2]

You are the one
You killed the spare
My dark marks hot yeah it burns me
With my wand up
Put your wand up
You got that spell yeah avada

You are the one
You killed the spare
My dark marks hot
Yeah it burns me
With my wand up
Put your wand up
Put your wand up up up up up up up

Now the party dont start till Voldemort wins

[Chorus x2]

The story that launched a thousand (millions?) viewers

Call me crazy, but in a short while I'm leaving to go watch the midnight showing of Harry Potter 7!!

There are just some things where you have to grasp the chance, because even if you try to make up for it, it doesn't feel the same (much like 1st time weddings :D)
This is one of them.

From a writer's standpoint, JK Rowling is my idol. She is amazing. The Harry Potter books are books that I grew up with (I was 8 years old when I read the first one, and was in 8th grade when I read the last one), largely because her stories are that captivating and appealing to so many people. Every reading brings out new ideas and themes and things I never picked up on before. Each book penetrates a certain maturity that you won't realize until you are at that level of maturity (ex: 4th graders can read HP5 and not really get anything out of the OWLS studying part--I know I didn't at the time. Read it again as a high schooler with APs to study for and all of a sudden.....)
That series was designed, whether she intended for it or not, to grow with her readers. We grow and mature as the characters do. After trying my own hand at novels, that is honestly a very difficult and amazing feat.
If anyone has influenced me to pursue a level of noveling/writing that was deeper than just words, it's JK Rowling.

school night? no biggie. I'll just see it as any other night that I stay up till 3am and then slug off to school at 7 the next morning. my work is finished anyway.

There is only one problem: I CANNOT FOR THE LOVE OF MY LIFE FIND MY GRYFFINDOR SCARF. that is a problem.
I shall hunt now.

"Just Kiss Already!" -- day 17

I just realized. My main characters, who are madly in love with each other, have not kissed.... or hugged.... or even held hands..... Nor will they ever. [O__________o] That's upsetting
Probably because I'm giving the girl away to a guy old enough to be her father, in the next 5 pages or so.
I'm upset enough about that to yell at myself for putting the poor girl through this. Or I'll go yell at her parents... At one point, I was typing and found myself yelling "Just kiss already!" at the computer screen. They didn't.
That's another quirk about writers: we talk to everything that can be talked to: real people, our characters (aka fake people?), inanimate objects, voices in our heads that pop out of nowhere, the paper, the darn pens that just have to run out of ink in the middle of a climax.... you get the picture.

Word Count update? Somehow, I managed to get myself behind. Again. Not my fault though: last night, I had to...
-study for Anatomy test (and memorize every last bone & joint in the human body; not even kidding)
-memorize To Be or Not To Be (via sporcle! and incessant muttering to myself)
-finish IPLE speech (I do believe our group set a record on how quickly we got it done)
-uh..... I ignored Stat studying.

  So basically this is where I'm at. 27,720 words, with 614 more to go if I want to be "all caught up." Fun stuff.

It's 9:14 and I still have English homework. How did this happen? Why does it feel like it's seven o'clock? Where has my brain disappeared to?

Here Comes the Bride (day 15)

I'M BEHIND BY 2867 WORDS!! (hence the sad panda)

ok. Now that I got that out of the way...

We talked about weddings in lunch today, with Jess (Yang) having quite a cynical take on the whole affair (she doesnt think weddings are as special as some people, like me, make them out to be). I think weddings are something to be cherished, at least the first time around. You only get your first wedding once, just like your first kiss, date, etc.... It's not as fun the second time around (I think).
But Jess did note something quite interesting about me while we were discussing this. I can't, for the love of my life, plan for next week or even for tomorrow, but I have my wedding planned out. I'm not usually the type to be dictatorial (I'll leave that to certain people in my AP IPLE class), but my wedding better go as I plan it. I'm also a dreamer (even though I never, ever remember any of my dreams unless they're the ones that scare me awake), which I don't if that's a good or bad thing.

But since this is supposed to be about NaNoWriMo... Our conversation, and Jess's views on marriage, reminded me of the fact that I am marrying off my main character... to a man who is over twice her age. To those of you who have read my writing/book, this is kind of strange for me. I can pick off characters one by one in SQuared, but I always try to make the love story aspect a decently happy ending (shush to those who know how SQuared ends). But I've never destroyed a love story so early on in the plot. For goodness sake, I'm only at 22000 words. That's barely a quarter of the way for my usual novels (even though I have a feeling this book might actually end around the 50k).
Now I have to go back to thinking about how I'm going to grind out the next 3000words. I wish my characters would just do something already. Maybe she's mad at me that I'm marrying her off to someone who's almost as old as her father.....

and then there's anatomy homework, Stat homework, IPLE speech for Wednesday, college apps. Whoever made the calendar year should have just given us that extra .25day (the one that acculumates into the leap year)

----------
It's 12:00am. I just submitted my words into NaNo for a count: 25016! :D    jeezums I wrote 3965words between the time I got home until 2seconds ago. And finished a majority of my homeowrk.... (minusing 2 art history pages. why are these study guides so long?)
anyways. sleep time.

Pumpkin Spice and Empty Pages (day 14)

So much for blogging about NaNo. I haven't even had time to write for NaNo, much less blog about it. Upsetting.
Anyway. I had been ahead by 2000 words or so until Friday came, and I wasted my day watching TV and doing not much else. Saturday, I tutored in the morning, and then went to Starbucks and into the fun world of IPLE -- Four Treatises of Awesome. **note on Starbucks: Pumpkin Spice is so good (thanks Sue!). It's so fluffy (there's no other way to describe it. It feels like you're drinking clouds from Autumn-land).

So now I'm here. I just finished-ish editing one of our versions, taking a break from Wednesday's paper by blogging/catching up on word count. I should be reaching 23k today and I'm only at 20k. Goddammit that's 3000 words that are not, for the love of my life, going to magically appear anytime soon today.

Writer's note: we make up words as needed.
Yesterday, I wrote "Deadendish" and "Actuatable" on Jess's paper. I wish we could use them in the real versions. Wouldn't that be impressive.

yay Starbucks!

30 Days of Insanity -- (Day 10)

It is the 10th of November. November is a very special month to me, and to many people out in the world. November is the month of National Novel Writing Month. To those of you who do not know what it is, it is basically where you [try to] write 50,000 (count the 0s kiddies) words of a novel in the 30 days of November. To prevent myself from going completely crazy over this third noveling project, I have decided to blog about my NaNoWriMo experience this year.

First, a little bit about Jess Fong, the writer.
I am an novelist. I've been happy to call myself a novelist every since July of 2008 when I put the "The End" on my first ever novel (Runaway). Before writing a book, I never gave much thought to the whole world of noveling. Afterwards, well...
So what do novelists do? We write like there's no tomorrow. We carry around notebooks and pens like lifelines. We think of plots and scenes everywhere we go (including shower and other bathroom activities). When we (or myself at least) are really intensely involved in a project, there is no life beyond its pages.

What do novelists eat? Ink and coffee. :D

Exactly how crazy are novelists? Crazy enough. I have stacks of notebooks sitting in my room because they are my handwritten manuscripts and simply cannot be recycled, even if it saves trees. I also refuse to throw out the ancient keyboard I'm currently typing on even though it's been around since before I was in fifth grade. Why? Runaway was written on this keyboard. So was SQuared. Finally, I crashed a computer trying to write a book. Granted, the computer was at least four years old when Runaway was done, but just a few weeks after I finished it, my computer completely died. According to my father, I killed some hardware in the CPU (technology-deficient here).

And this is where I bring us back to NaNoWriMo, the adrenaline boost in the year of many, many writers out there. If any of you are wondering why I have been scribbling nonstop in the last section of my 5-subject AP Stat notebook, NaNoWriMo is why. And so far, my progress (including the 4 day weekend where I was away in Baltimore, indicated here by the flatline) stands thus:
As of this moment, my word count stands at 17,356.

Anyway, this project will most likely be novel #3. I've been looking for it to happen since I finished SQuared back in February. Yes, I do belive I'm dangerously addicted to writing (as Ali so wonderfully put it this morning). Or I could just be, as Srishti said, "out of [my] freaking mind."

Either way... 50,000 words here I come!

Abnormality

Jess Yang (on google docs!): lol, is jess [fong] ok? -________________________- is not a normal expression

It's 1:42am according to my clock. How I love AP IPLE. And how I so dearly love daylight savings. Screwing with time is always fun.

Today, I not only got an extra hour of sleep in the morning (which was offset and rendered almost useless by aforementioned class), I also got more time to type 5000 words or so for my 3rd novel, made pasta, went out for dinner for several hours, and of course spent the last 2 hours or so editing 4 paragraphs.

Life is wonderful.

BTWs. My face is fine. :D

One number away

I am one number away from submitting my early decision app. Just one. Not an SAT score, or a grade, or a random thing like the number 4 (if you read the Runaway prologue you'd probably get this lol)...

I need my mom's credit card number to make the application fee payment.

Hitting that [SUBMIT] button (3 times!) was probably the scariest thing I've done all week.


Goodness gracious.

Good luck to one and all! :)