i wish you a tolerable thursday. that's all any of us can hope for.

Today's post title comes care of April Winchell.

So I've been trying to figure out what it is one of my MCs does to impress another character enough that they let the MC travel around with them. The MC has to somehow obtain an object the other character has tried and failed to get, I just haven't decided how he manages it. But then I had the thought: maybe he steals it. Which resulted in two totally separate reactions: "HOLY CRAP. WHAT? HE WOULD NEVER STEAL ANYTHING." and "Oh, well, considering something this other character tells him earlier he might not consider it to be stealing so it could make sense that he would take it. And that would impress the other character."

Apparently, half my brain is my mother and the other half is Mercutio [specifically from the 1996 film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet].

There wont be a post next week because I'll be in New York [yay!] for my sister's graduation. I'm crazy excited because I haven't been home in two years and I have an epic surprise present for my sister - along with the finished armadillo stuffed animal I told you was in the works a while ago:

Isn't he cute?

The stress of packing always has a way of getting to me though. I can get so anxious about it that I want to start a month before the trip but that doesn't make any sense. I just get paranoid that I'll forget to bring everything I'll need [based on a history of forgetting important items]. Making lists seems to help though. There's something so satisfying about lists, being able to check off items and see how much has been taken care of. Inevitably, I will forget something. The hope is just that I'll be able to remember all the major things.

Sorry, bit of a random post today. Here's a picture of last night's sky to make it worth your while. Hot pink exists in nature, go figure!

back to basics

Hey guys! Sorry about missing last week but, as my husband says: it's a fool that speaks when he has nothing to say.

It's been a bit of a rough week with some weird bits thrown in [getting a random sample of Similac in the mail that I definitely didn't order and buying a 36 count box of tampons only to discover that it was 20 units short. what?] but things are looking up. Tim and I are going to a Collective Soul concert tonight and I'm super pumped. He's been wanting to get me to one of these since before we were married so it should be pretty awesome as long as we don't get rained on!

In other news, I've been writing more this past week, largely because I realized that I needed a change in medium. For those of you that have been reading for a while, you may remember that I'm not a huge fan of writing on a computer. I've tried a lot of things [MS Office, Ommwriter, and Google Docs among other things] and while some worked out better than others, I'm just never completely comfortable with doing at least my preliminary, first-draft writing on a word program.

Part of the reason is probably that I'm super easily distracted and if I'm on a computer chances are I will interrupt myself sooner rather than later to check facebook, email, or some other brain-killing thing. Also, computers are cumbersome to me. When I write I move around almost as much as I do when I read and computers typically aren't conducive to contortion.

So this last week I pulled out one of our blank notebooks left over from school and got back to my basic, which is writing by hand. There's a reason I picked the quote at the top of this blog. When I first started writing, it was in notebooks. Writing has always been a very tactile thing to me, as with reading, there's just something magical about paper and ink that computers can't replace for me. Of course, I'll still be using computers as part of my editing and formatting process since handwritten manuscripts seem to be frowned upon. But picking up a pen again seems to be helping me break through other blocks I was experiencing and while making progress can bring its own kind of stress, it feels good too.