I loved this post, and even I’m not 23 like the writer, but far away 🙂 I connected with many of her perspectives… I recommend to read this!
Author: Carla Doria
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Hang in there November, NaNoWriMo is coming!
NaNoWriMo???? I must be crazy. For those of you that don´t know about this, you can take a look here.
But basically is the National Novel Writing Month, and any writer can register in this event. You just need to have the courage to do it and all the energy of the world. In order to win (many people can win), you need to write 50 000 words in all the month, so that would mean 1666,66 words per day, and yes I´m taking into account, weekends, which for me is the challenge.
nanowrimo.org Image source: nanowrimo.org
I don´t feel it too bad to write that amount of words per day. I usually write between 1000 and 1500 per day, but I must confess that I don´t write all days of the week. I may write perhaps 4 days and no more. Usually, I will spend 2 days per week with my inner Editor on (which sooner is going to let me insane, I´ll tell you about this in another post); and Sundays, I don´t write, the lazy worm invades me completely. There are so many things going on Sunday, from doing laundry, cooking for the family, etc, to just spending lazy comforting time with my loved ones. Whenever my mom says on Sundays, let´s watch a movie, believe me I never think of rejecting it, it´s golden time to be able to spend time with her; and well writing gets mostly postponed on Sundays.
But if I don’t write Sundays in NaNoWriMo, I will have to write almost 2000 words per day, and that is a lot. I usually get burned at 1500 and sometimes 1000 is my best of the day.
sarahcradit.wordpress Image source: sarahcradit.wordpress
So maybe I should consider, waking up early on Sundays, the only day I get to oversleep? Hell yeah! I will do it! because is NaNoWriMo and not LazyWormMo, and I need to take this challenge and put my 100% in doing it!
It´s going to be a hell of challenge, but I can imagine the satisfaction at the end of the month, when you know you have written 50 000 words… overwhelming!!!
So getting ready for the craziest months of the year!!! Hang in there November, you´re going to be my month!!!
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When you wished your dog could talk…
Two days ago, we took our beloved girl, Dana, a golden retriever, to the vet for surgery. She had developed a tumor in her chest and we were told that it needed to be removed before it grew too much and went inside her body to attack other organs. My girl behaved heavenly all the time, as always, but I was disheartened when I saw her scar, it was huge, and could only tell how much pain she was on after the surgery. Besides, the anesthesia did a number on her, when we brought her home, more than 8 hours passed before she could actually sit down, but couldn´t walk yet. I was concerned that she couldn´t walk and wanted to pee but couldn´t. It was the first time where I felt impotent, and couldn´t avoid to look into her eyes and beg that I wish she could talk, so I knew exactly if she wanted to pee, if she was in too much pain, etc. Fortunately, she managed to get on her feet and pee. She was still walking dizzily.
I really hated myself for putting her through so much pain and promised her that I would never do that again. This is her second surgery, she had another tumor extracted before, but this time it was too hard on her. According to the vet it´s because of her age, she´s nine, but I feel these problems are just taking a huge take on her. Through her eyes, I felt as if she was trying to tell me: Why are you doing this to me again? And I really couldn´t help but to feel miserable.
People´s eyes are supposed to be their windows to their souls (I don´t remember who said this, sorry), but this also happens on animals, and so intensively on dogs. Her eyes were so full of feelings, pain, and still so much love, I wonder if humans are able to ever express those eyes. And when we exchange looks with my girl, I can´t help but to feel terrified of losing her…
This post may seem a little bit different from others, but I just felt I needed to write it.
And you, how do you feel regarding your beloved pets?
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Writing helps me to be sane…
This is a continuation from my last post (Once I forgot the typewriter, I forgot how to live) and final part (I promise):
From those writing experiences and my relationship with my typewriter in my child years. I sadly left the writing world, and forgot about my dreams. Many years later, I started to pay attention to other things in life, and stopped writing until I was probably out of college, or even after I had finished some postgraduate studies.
I studied a career that was never meant for me, so when I read about a short-story local contest in the newspaper, I heard a voice calling me again… I didn´t win anything, but being more mature this time, I acknowledged that writing was truly a passion for me.
For many years, I had several jobs in a career that I never liked, and a life situation where I was always unhappy. Finally, I decided that I had to find what I really wanted to do in my life and shout it to the world, and I did.
Now, I´m a writer, even if I don´t write that well yet, or even when I have so much to learn, I consider myself a writer, because writing helps me to be sane, it helps me communicate with the world, and it helps me discover a life where I feel everything is possible.
Image source: archolatheatre.com
I have started writing this year, and I chose to do it in English (because all the books I read are in English and writers tend to write according to what they read) and I feel absolute and totally happy and satisfied with my life, because for the first time I´m acknowledging who I am, what I want to do for the rest of my life, and I´m totally confident that I´m working hard on it.
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Once I forgot the typewriter I forgot how to live…
(This is a continuation of the previous post: How to make your kid an avid reader/writer)
I still remember when I was little, no computer yet in my house (I got my first computer when I started University) but we used to have a typewriter (well, we still do, it´s there forgotten somewhere in a dark place of my house). I had read in the newspaper about a writing contest, sponsored by the government in my city, and I thought it was a hell of opportunity for me. I was no more than eight years old, and decided to enter this contest for ‘novel writers’. I´m convinced that it was just for adults but I didn´t pay attention to it. I just wrote with my typewriter a wonderful story (that shamefully I never kept a copy) of a fantasy world. Since typewriters didn´t allow you to make mistakes, my presentation was extremely awful. Being a kid, I wasn´t conscious yet about having to redo a whole page whenever I had a mistake on the typewriter, I would just use an eraser and type over the mistake.
Image source: site.xavier.edu When I was done, I begged my Aunt Nancy, who used to live near the post office, to put the papers in an envelope and submit it to the P.O. box of the contest. Of course, I never won or anything and the writing must had been really embarrassing, but I was just eight years old! Nevertheless, having such a wonderful imagination (that I still have fortunately), the story in itself must had been a lot of fun.
At that age, I felt there was no limit for me and no barriers to achieve whatever I wanted. What a shame, I was never encouraged to follow these dreams. I wrote short stories for my mom and some members of my family before I was 10. I have a couple of them stored in a box, and of course the writing is terrible but the stories, the creativity, the characters were great. But what I remember the most is that I always felt fulfilled whenever I wrote those stories.That sense of fulfilment shouldn´t be forgotten, we should live our lives with the intention of feeling always like that.
However, I did forget it… and it was shameful because it led me to years and years of an unsatisfied and unhappy life….
P.S. will continue…
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How to make your kid an avid reader/writer
I never post advice for parents, but I thought this title was actually the objective of this post.
“This is your vacation homework.” my mom would say. When I was a kid, my mother used to prepare vacation homework for me. I was the only kid in the family and didn´t have many friends, so on school vacation, I actually got bored watching TV. Since I was an obedient kid, I would think of my mom´s “vacation homework” as something I had comply with or I would be facing some severe scolding. Most of this homework was reading, and that is the best gift that my mom ever gave me.
Image source: www.elizabethstreet.com
I was born, grew up, and still live in Bolivia, a country where if you say you´re a writer, people would look at you with disbelief and even pity. Writers don´t make any decent earnings here, and of course it´s never a good career choice. So as a normal young girl, with very good grades, I went for what I thought was an excellent career choice for me and for everybody else in my family: “Industrial Engineering”. Just the name sounded good, hard, complicated, and something that everybody else could be proud of, with lots of job´s opportunities, good salaries, and all the things that people advised you when you graduate from high school.
I´ve never received the advice “do you what you love to do, what you´re passionate about” and I wish I had.
story will continue…
P.S. I came up to the conclusion, that in our current lives where we get tons of emails, blog posts, and so on… the shorter the better, so I decided to write short posts from now on…but I will try to make them to sound as complete as possible on their own…
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Oh men! we´d better achieve our dreams or….
Image source: blog.princetontutorial.com
Oh men, If I thought I would had a weekend like the previous one, years ago, I would have laughed really hard. I´ve always envisioned myself writing a novel in the late years of my life. I would say “SOMEDAY I will write a book, when I´m retired, and have time, and blah blah…”, but then one day I just decided to say that is BS! I will accomplish this dream “RIGHT NOW RIGHT HERE”, not in the near future, or someday when I´m in a retirement house, but NOW, when I have a day job and almost no time. I made the right decision…
For the past months, I´ve been trying to write my first novel. I started writing short stories first but when I got what I thought an interesting idea for a novel, I decided to give it a go. I decided I was going to put ‘writing´ as number one in my priorities list. No more “extra activities” that would drive me away from it. I would write everyday, if possible, until I actually made a habit of it.
Then, to not bore you anymore with the process to achieve this goal, I started to research about the process of writing books, how to build up characters, plots, etc. So much material about it, you wouldn´t believe me.
Image source: www.arcolatheatre.com
Finally, I decided to enroll myself in the Writer´s Digest bootcamp: Agent One-on-One: First ten pages, which basically focused in the first ten pages of a novel. We got a video tutorial from Ms. Paula Munier of Talcott Notch Literary Agency, who was brilliant, the cleverest person I´ve ever listened to. She gave excellent advice of what Agents were looking for and what she expected to find in the first pages of a novel. She also talked about all clichés, and all the times she got to reject queries from writers. I was “Oh my, I´ve never going to make it!” I did some research about her clients, looked in the web for their books, and believe me , those were quality material, beautiful books, written so amazingly that I was “I don’t stand a chance, English is not even my native language! I´ve never going to be at that level” But I was already registered in the course, with 200 $us invested, which here in my country is a LOT of money.
Image source: www.trinitylgbt.com
So to shorten things, Paula Munier was assigned as the agent who would review my pages (out of five agents in the bootcamp). I was thrilled, maybe she was the toughest one, but the one I´ve imagined myself working with. I sent my pages, expecting to receive a critique that would say “this is not good, you really have to improve, you should consider changing careers, or are you sure you want to be a writer?” I was already mentally preparing myself for that, telling me that I would try not to take it so bad, that I would improve, that this was just a course, and that I was there to learn and to improve.
What I got was: “Nice work, Easy and Fun to read, Engaging premise, Likable hero, Colorful cast of characters, Unique great style” and I was … My god I was stunned.
Of course she also described the parts where I could improve, like improving the flow of the scenes, avoiding overwriting, American grammar and punctuation (the British influence of course), and some issues with my second scene. But nonetheless, I was thrilled.
Image source: www.kariwolfe.com
And true, there is still a lot to improve, but it is all about the HARD WORK, and nothing else. If you want to write, you have to do it all the time. You have to read millions of books, if you want to improve your craft. It´s hard work and nothing else. Revision after revision and craziness along the way of course! I usually find myself about to go nuts when I get into one of those hard “revision” sessions, like I would dream with characters and get traumatized with grammar rules. But it is worth it.
In the end, we don´t get a second life, we only have this one, we´d better make the best of it. That means we only have NOW and THIS LIFE to make our dreams come true. We’d better devote ourselves and work our asses off to achieve our dreams, or else when are we going to do it? There is no other way around.
Believe in your dreams and just work the hell out of yourself to make them come true!
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Being the real ‘you’ and not the invented one…
I´ve never been more devoted to being myself. Unfortunately, this has brought me lot of disadvantages and one of them is to be a loner.
Few years ago, I was a complete different image from what I am now. Surrounded by friends, always with social activities, going to clubs, etc. Now I´m not a fifth of what I used to be in those years. I had my years of fun, getting drunk, and the regular things people do when they are young. But now, I don´t do that anymore, and I´m still young! But I don´t do it for one simple reason: it wasn´t me, it´s not me, and will never be me.
Image source: www.glavo.net
But how do I know that I am better now than I was before?
Because…
Because if you had asked me before in those years, if I was totally happy with the way I was living my life, if I was doing what I always wanted to do, If I could feel that I could already die without regrets, mmm… the answer would had been a mess, it would had depended on the day I was, If it was a good day I would say, geez…I don´t know, if it was a bad day I would have started crying for sure.
If you ask me that now, good or bad day, I would say yes: I´m happy and I´m living the life I always wanted to live. Period.
The reason – I have accepted who I am: the bookworm, the girl who loves classical music and dislikes most trendy music, the nerd, the geek, the writer.
Image source: www.lightsburning.com
I´ve been wondering why so many friends have grown so distant from me. My best friends are still there but it is not the same anymore, and it won´t ever be, because I´m not what I used to be. I´ve become too boring for them.
However, there is always this “however” in my posts. I don´t regret anything because for the first time I’m being myself and nothing else, not what others want me to be, not what family wants me to be, not what I think I should be in order to mingle with others. That´s the challenge, and I´m on my way to achieving it, how many people can say that?
No matter, how people around us think, what our society waits from us, how do we think we should be, the only ever existent challenge is to be ourselves and nothing more. And if the so called friends don’t like the truly me, then maybe it is time for letting them go and let other people come in, but without ever thinking in changing again.
And you, how truly are you? Have you invented and ´ideal you´ or are you just being the way you are meant to be, the REAL you?
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