Attempts at Fashion

I'm really bad at dressing up. In fact, any time I'm required to "dress nice", it turns into a fiasco. Being a girl means all of my "nice clothes" involve skirts or dresses -- neither of which I really like. I never really sit very ladylike, and that obviously does not mix well with skirts. That said, I've been working a little bit to improve my wardrobe so I'm not always wearing jeans and a graphic tee.

I wore this to go see Frozen on Nov 27! It was the only clean outfit I had;; It was really cute, but it was snowing when we walked out of the theater, and I wasn't prepared for the cold weather! D:

I wore this to our Thanksgiving dinner. It was kind of formal, and I ended up changing at least four times before we left the house. I'm really bad with finding things that match. I really like the skirt!

I'm hoping to go shopping for more winter-friendly outfits soon that look as cute as these. Wish me luck! 

(I experimented a lot with the HTML format of the post -- I'm really grateful for codecademy! And the sites Google gives me when I search how to put text and images side by side.)

Books I've read -- Oct. & Nov.

I'm just going to skip all of the books I've read between May and September. I don't remember enough of them to give more than vague descriptions.

Anyway, here's a read-more cut:

Artemis Fowl series

Instead of posting about the books I've read in the past four months (I don't remember enough of them to give good reviews), I'm going to write about the books I've read recently!

I first read the Artemis Fowl books back in elementary school. I first encountered it through my cousin, who was really into the series at the time. I don't think I read them in order though;; And neither did she. We had a copy of the first book up at our great-grandparents' house one time and I sat down and cracked the code that ran along the bottom of the book. It was fun! It was kind of hard but it was a good kind of challenge. (The messages along the bottom of the book weren't all that interesting, though.) Anyway, I checked out the first book today for the first time in years and I'm going to see if I can do it again :)

If you don't know, the Artemis Fowl series is about a boy genius (Artemis), his butler (aka Butler, I'm not kidding), and how they get wrapped up in all sorts of mythological stuff. The series starts out with Artemis kidnapping a fairy for a ransom. And he's 12. Amazing, right? It only gets better from there.

This whole "revival" of sorts for me was out of desperation. I needed a book to read from the library but I couldn't find one that interested me enough -- I've read through most of the books in our school library that fall into categories that interest me. I was running out of time to pick, so I went and grabbed Time Paradox because I knew I liked the series. I don't think I had read it before. It was a little confusing at first to jump into the series mid-way after so long, but luckily it wasn't that difficult to get caught up.

After Time Paradox, I read The Atlantis Complex and The Last Guardian. I have to say that they were super interesting as a continuation of a book series I'd read when I was younger. It was so cool to see how Artemis had developed over the course of the series, or even between what I remembered from the first few books and what I was reading.

The end of the series was also really surprising! It was kind of sad to think that there wouldn't be more books, but I'm also happy with how the ending was written. I think it was better than Allegiant, even though you could draw similarities between both of them.

I also had to go back and fix my headcanons for the series. I know that I found the comic book so against what I had pictured in my own head that I wouldn't read them. (I want to go back and read them now, but I'm not sure where to find them OTL) I always seem to forget that Holly is supposed to have really short hair, among other things.

On an unrelated note, I ended up solving those puzzle games Cracker Barrel has at every table because I had just finished The Last Guardian and wanted to prove I could be even half as smart as Artemis. It definitely took a few tries to get it, but I actually did win once!

TL;DR I really liked reading the Artemis Fowl series and I hope I'm going to enjoy it just as much while re-reading it.

NaNoWriMo 2013

National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNo) is a fun challenge: write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. The goal is to write about 1,667 words a day to reach 50k by the 30th.

This is my third year attempting it -- the previous two didn't go so well;; However, I used those to figure out what I did wrong and how I could fix it. As of the 17th, I had 42,186 words! It's definitely going much better. A lot of that is because I went ahead and planned my novel (Aperture) throughout September and October. "Pantsing" is actually pretty hard! I always lost motivation. It helps that I have computer access this year, too.

NaNo is super fun, especially when you have writing buddies! My school has a NaNo Club so we meet on Mondays at lunch (aka today) and talk about writing, or even whatever else we want to. It can be pretty hard once the new excitement wears off, but I think the bragging rights of completion is cool. I've been working super hard this November because of a challenge Marissa Meyer proposed -- you can win prizes if you write more than her. It's also a lot easier to write more than needed when you're working towards a goal.

Word counts so far! It's so fun to watch it go up :) 

I'm definitely working more on Aperture than I would have without the pressure of reaching word count (and beating Marissa Meyer), which is nice! I made sure not to write any scenes of the story before the month started so I wouldn't run out of scenes, but at this point I'm running a little low on ideas. And that can actually be a good thing -- while the scenes I'm writing are pretty bad, I'm learning more about the characters and they're growing even more than they have during the planning stages.

I've also been asked if I'm going to publish them, as a book or online. I was originally going to update my work every day on tumblr, but I didn't have internet access the first weekend of the month, and there was also concern that the official word count would raise a flag if it found a copy of it on the internet. I probably won't publish it as a book. That's a lot of stress and extra work I'd rather not go through. I'll go back and fix it up, and then post it by chapters / scenes onto tumblr. It's something I'm doing for fun, so I don't want to "taint" that with the effort of trying to make money off of it.

Anyway, I'll try to remember to post about the outcome of NaNo in December!