All was well.

EDITED: I remembered that I’d seen another movie.

Last book I finished reading: Are These My Basoomas I See Before Me? by Louise Rennison. It was okay, although Georgia, the main character, is so stupid that she’s unable to realize which guy she really likes…

Writing Progress

The Way Wars Are Won

Word count: 61 966

Excerpt:

Maeve never thought she’d miss the sensation of blushing—cheeks burning, like a fire beneath her skin, heart pounding, head dizzy. She closed her eyes. “But I miss being human.” William’s hand still touched her cheek, and his right arm was still wrapped about her waist. If she were human, her body would react in so many different ways to his touch. “You’re wrong about things feeling better. I felt more when I was human.”

Kenna’s Choice

Ideas for new, improved plot. Might add a POV. Will be awesome. Too lazy to start working on it though, because I’d have to go through every chapter and write a mini-summary for the Plotting Spreadsheet. Argh!

Word count is same. No excerpt.

Movies (as per usual, bold=better than the others)

Webs

Bienvenue Chez Les Ch’tis

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole

Vampire Bats

The Wind that Shakes the Barley

Day of the Dead

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 2: Wow… I laughed, I cried, I felt nauseous (because of the tension). Maybe on second viewing I’ll find plenty of things wrong with it, but, having seen it just once, I’m 98% happy with it. The 2% mainly stems from the epilogue. It was way too short to my liking. The Battle of Hogwarts was very epic.

Whip It

Satan’s School for Girls

The Usual Suspects: Amazingly, the twist wasn’t spoiled for me. (If you know me, this is quite an achievement–I’ll usually spoil it myself…)

Read Full Post »

Kayleigh fails at writing

I don’t know why but lately, well, look at the word count:

18th    Wednesday    245
19th    Thursday    1426
20th    Friday    277
21st    Saturday    0
22nd    Sunday    15
23rd    Monday    0
24th    Tuesday    0
25th    Wednesday   314

As for editing Kenna’s Choice… It started out fairly well, but I haven’t made any changes since… Sunday? I’m not actually sure. All I know is I’ve been wasting time on the internet these past few days, feeling tired and doing very little reading. The very little reading=a few pages of Lolita and the 91-page play “Our Country’s Good” for school.

Yeah. Maybe it’s the heat getting to me, and the lack of sleep. Or lack of leaving the house.

Sometime soon, we’re going to see Ondine, which I think will be good for me. Then maybe I should see my friends.

Words behind on goal for TWWAW: 2279

Depressing thing is that some writer write more than that in one day. I guess I could catch up if I had one or two fantastic writing days.

Zombies vs Unicorns giveaway

Jackson Pearce will give away an arc of Zombies vs Unicorns when she reaches 2500 followers on twitter. Even if you don’t want the arc, go follow her. She’s funny, nice and an amazing writer.

Read Full Post »

“Yeah, they’ll build monuments to you about this high that read ‘Rest in Peace’!”

Flatliners: There are some funny lines of dialogue, one of which is the title of this post, but that’s not why I’m in awe of the scriptwriter. The premise of the movie is 5 people who kill each other to find out what’s beyond death, then bring each other back. How do you transform THAT into an entire movie? But he managed.

For some reason, I can’t find anything else to say about this movie.

Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog: Now this I’ve got plenty to say, but that’s because it’s from Joss Whedon and I LOVE anything he creates.

So. Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is in 3 acts and in total is only 42, more or less. I wanted more the second it was over. And they might be doing a sequel!

It’s a musical/comedy about Dr Horrible, whose real name is Billy. He wants to join the Evil League of Evil who will be watching him to see what crime he commits. If it’s horrible enough, he can join the league.

As Billy, he’s pathetic and in love with Penny, who, naturally, doesn’t realize this. Standing in his way is Captain Hammer who ends up dating Penny.

Dr Horrible is played by Neil Patrick Harris from “How I Met Your Mother”.

Penny is played by Felicia Day—she played Vi in BTVS.

Captain Hammer is played by Nathan Fillion—he played Caleb in BTVS.

Favorite line: “The hammer is my penis.” —Captain Hammer

Writing: This is a pretty simple “revelation”, but I just found my solution to the lack of plot in my novels. To me, it’s all about the characters, so why not focus on creating realistic characters before starting my novel? Then I let the character interact and the plot will form itself. Does this make sense to anyone else but me?

Query Tracker: If you’re about to start querying—or going to next year like me—then you should definitely use Query Tracker to find agents. Know what else is your friend during the querying process?

Spreadsheets: So here are the different column headers in my “Agents to query” spreadsheet:

• Agency
• Agent’s Name
• Who they represent
• Address, e-mail, Twitter, website [this works better as one column for me—I use NeoOffice]
• Genres they represent
• Notes [such as “include first chapter in body of e-mail” or “only send query” or “any requested material is sent by mail” and the agent’s response time if they mention it on their website]
• Date of Query
• Date of Partial Request
• Date of Full Request
• Offer of Representation
• Date of Rejection

My long list of goals

• Reach 55 035 words in TWWAW by the 31st of August 2010
• Edit chapters 1 through 9 of Kenna’s Choice by the 2nd of September 2010
• Reach 68535 words in TWWAW by the 30th of September 2010
• Reach 75 285 words in TWWAW by the 15th of October 2010
• Edit chapters 10 through 17 + prologue of Kenna’s Choice by 31st of December 2010
• Second round of editing Kenna’s Choice done by 31st of March 2011 (by then I’ll 17!)
• Write query letter for Kenna’s Choice by the 30th of April 2011
• Third round of editing Kenna’s Choice done by 30th of June 2011
• Start querying Kenna’s Choice the 15th of July 2011 (enough time to make sure my query and my manuscript are perfect)

Read Full Post »

“Spike follows the smell of Willow and we follow the fairly ripe smell of Spike.”

The Wolfman 2010: Meh. I started watching it a week or two ago and couldn’t get into it. I thought it was because I was tired. Now that I finally finished watching it, I know it wasn’t. So why couldn’t I get into it? It’s not a good movie. The make-up/special effects are really well done, but overall it’s nothing special. I don’t recommend it.

Wrong Turn: I’d already seen it years ago, but I had forgotten a lot about it, the major thing being it’s actually a good horror movie. The characters aren’t too stupid and eventually they realize what they have to do to survive. I recommend it.

Wrong Turn 2: Dead End: Because it’s a sequel, it’s obviously worse than the first and way gorier. But it’s still not too bad.

Writing

Playing with Darts

Wednesday I wrote a measly 245 words, but that’s because I was drained from the previous day’s writing. But yesterday I caught up and wrote…

1426 words!

Deadline: 15th of October

In other news, I have found the perfect title for “Playing with Darts”. Ready?

The Way Wars Are Won

It’s from a line in season 7 of Buffy. Good thing I did that marathon, huh?

Kenna’s Choice

I’ve given myself until June to get Kenna’s Choice in shape to start querying. Yes, that means I’m going to try and get it published. It’s weird—I had no intention of getting it published. I thought that my first novel-length story wouldn’t be good enough, but my critique partner said some very good things about it, and I have a list of things to delete (subplot of Kenna’s aunt) and things to expand (Kenna’s sister’s storyline).

Word count for Draft 2:

Goals

• Have edited chapters 1–9 by the end of August.
• Have 55 035 words for TWWAW

Read Full Post »

“You better do something quick, ’cause I’m sick of drawing dead bodies!”

Warning: I’m feeling lazy, so I won’t be writing much.

Movies

• Push: Meh.

• The Life Before Her Eyes: Not what I expected. Kind of disappointed.
• Red Dragon: Very good.

Writing

Still looking for a title for my novel. Have narrowed it down a bit.

Busy editing chapter 2 of Kenna’s Choice.

Writing chapter 16 of Playing with Darts, which stands at 1857 words.

Wrote 680 words yesterday.

Almost reached 40% of my goal.

Will now go and write 250 words.

Books

• Lolita: Have read more of it. Might finish it this weekend.
• A Clockwork Orange: Need to finish it. Ditto The Sweet Far Thing and The Forest of Hands and Teeth.

Read Full Post »