Tag: writing

Weekly Roundup! Wait, Cat Videos!?

Posted on by in NaNoWriMo

Greetings! Normally I do my Friday weekly roundup today, but NaNoWriMo has taken over! I guess I wasn’t vaccinated for it. 😉

Image is from Wikipedia Commons

In all seriousness, NaNo is tough after a long day at work. Writing at least 1,667 words a day is a lot harder than it sounds. I can’t ask myself “what did I get myself into!?” because I knew full well!  I am in the process of warming my mind up for it, else I’d just sit here and stare blankly because I’m tired, and it’s cold outside. I want nothing more than to curl in bed with a book.

With that being said, I may change my weekly round up to one of my days off (just for November). At any rate, enjoy these random videos:

The video of the week goes to:

NaNoWriMo

Posted on by in NaNoWriMo

That’s right, ladies and gents, I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year! I have an idea, my mind is obsessed with it, and it just so happens to be November, so why not?

Graphic is from NaNoWriMo’s website, nanowrimo.org. 

For those of you who don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, it is one of those witty November traditions (like No-Shave-November) that is quickly becoming a Thing. The goal is to write 50,000 words during the month of November. You “win” NaNo by completing the task.

Let me fill you in on a fun little secret: The Year is Now started out as a NaNoWriMo project. I “won” NaNo in 2012 with it and revised the living daylights out of it until it became the book that it is today. I remember being obsessed with the same fervor that I have today!

I decided to have as much fun with this year’s project as possible. The holiday insanity is just around the corner, so I might as well enjoy every single day before Black Thursday Black Friday. I made a mock up cover with the current working title of the project. And yes, it’s fantasy. I’m skipping the kiddie pool and diving into the deep end!

The cover is surprisingly effective. Every time I log into NaNo’s website, it’s there to inspire me to move forward. If you are doing NaNo, I highly recommend creating a mock up cover. It doesn’t have to be the next best thing to sliced bread, just something to make you smile.

Are you doing NaNo this year? Feel free to add me as a Writing Buddy. I will add you back. I am RlyehDreams. I’ve been tweeting about my progress on twitter, @MishiWan

Excerpt Time: Richard Edition

Posted on by in Fiction

I laughed my heart out yesterday. It was glitter, glitter everywhere in my mind. I was writing in a cafe and needed a quick, temporary name for a miserable, middle aged character. I don’t want to know what my fellow coffee drinkers thought of the crazy woman laughing and snickering into her tiny keyboard…

Since everyone I’ve told about this wants me to keep the character’s name as it is, I decided to post an excerpt.

The following excerpt is (c) M.L. Crabb 2014

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Richard Butkiss!

“We’ll get you help,” Kenneth stated, emerging from the shelter with a large knife strapped to his brown belt. His ruck sack was hanging from his left shoulder, and he was slipping his right arm into the remaining strap. “Where is Butkiss? It doesn’t take this long to take a dump.”

                 
“We are in…in…” My cousin started muttering something about his books. I didn’t care if he was some hot-shot New York Times bestselling author; he was being ridiculous. Had he suffered some sort of mental meltdown during the crash?
The woods rattled with a sudden fury of noise. Butkiss came barreling through, nearly tripping over a branch that had fallen the night before. He kicked it with his tiny foot and started cussing. I hated him. I hated his awkward fitting khaki pants. I hated his red face–it was never pale. Never. There was always something he was irate about. I hated his beady eyes and his bowling pin of a body. His head was far too small.
I sighed. Was I being too harsh on the man? Maybe he was just miserable and couldn’t help it.
“WHO LEFT THIS BRANCH HERE?”
“Yes, please wake King Avundil. Please,” my cousin whined. I let my face fall into the palm of my left hand. He had truly lost it. Richard Butkiss’s chest heaved, and he clenched his sweaty fists. For a moment, I thought the man might keel over and have a heart attack. 
“My…my…” his tone was stilted and stiff, and his cheeks grew redder. “My canteen had spiders on it.” His dark eyes flickered to my cousin, growing wide, as if asking some sort of unspoken question. “I think I know who did it,” his voice dropped into an eerie bass. His eyes sifted to me. I snorted. We are in the woods. What does he expect!?
Kenneth shot me a sidelong glance and cleared his throat. “Get your things,” he barked. “We are heading out.” That was all it took to shut that red faced monster up. Why my cousin kept that oaf as company, I would never know.

Post A Day Roundup!

Posted on by in Babylon 5

Day 30, and this means my Post A Day challenge has finally come to an end. I did a lot better than I thought I would: 25 out of 30 posts! I’ve posted my thoughts, feelings, and rodeo roundup of the challenge.

It was certainly a challenge to post every day. I work a full time job, and when I get home, I’m not always wide eyed, bushy tailed, and full of creativity. There’s also the fact that I have other things I need to get done–that is not to say that I don’t like blogging! I do. I enjoy it!

Tripping Over Hurdles
The initial hurdle for me was to find things to write about. If you go back to the beginning of the month, you’ll see that I was using writing/blogging prompts. As the days went on, and the more I posted, I found that it was easier to come up with things on my own.

The second hurdle was actually posting every day.  When the creativity wasn’t there, I  had to fight the lazy urges within. On those days, I tended to post a lot of pictures and, in one case, videos. As I stated above, I missed five days. There is a strong correlation to exhaustion and not writing (at least for me). My blog and my characters do not want to meet an exhausted me. Trust me on this. *wink*

I felt terribly guilty for the days I missed…you can also trust me on that! 

Tick, Tick, Tock!
One of the things I noticed was that I neglected a few of my other nightly rituals in order to make sure I stuck to my guns about posting. My nightly rituals include drawing, creating photo manipulations in photoshop, and other stuff that I’m too lazy to think of and write on the spot like this. 😛 The two that were most effected were the two I just mentioned.

Want to see some of my photomanips? Here you go! They are all Babylon 5 related (naturally):

The Cliche “What Did I Learn?” Part
I love blogging, but I don’t want to do it every day (if I had a little bonsai tree that was a never ending source of blooming money so that I didn’t have to work, it would be different!).

I want to blog more often than I used to. My initial plan is to do it at least two or three times a week; that way I am posting a lot, but not to the point where I feel overworked and that my posts lack substance. …Not only that, but I missed doing my photomanips and random sketches.

Jumping the Fence

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Day 22 of my Post-A-Day challenge. With all this news of people jumping the White House fence (let us not forget about the toddler who got through in August…*lol*), I wrote a silly blurb of a poem.

 Jumping the Fence

“I’d like to jump the fence,”
thoughts plea.
“You can’t jump the fence,”
wit decrees.
Only mad men jump the fence.
You see. 

….Well, mad men and toddlers to be precise. I don’t care how old that story is, I still find it hilarious. I do admit, that the thought of running across the lawn and lounging on the porch is rather tempting! Who hasn’t thought about it?

* Disclaimer *
I would never jump the fence.