Holy Wow, that car is cool

First things first: I have to admit that I finally gave in and started watching the TV show Knight Rider. Not the older version, I would probably gone insane watching that one. No, I started watching the 2008 Knight Rider, and believe me, I was hooked, instantly. The movie, which I own, was okay. A little cheesy, but okay. The TV show, much better. I have always loved movies/shows with racing/really fast cars; Speed Racer, etc. So after I watched about half of the show, I got a really great idea for an urban-ish fantasy series I could write.

It would be about a woman (duh) who is a great mechanic and loves cars. One day she gets struck by lightning and (par What Women Want) she starts to hear cars talking. She then goes on grand adventures with different kinds of cars, rescuing people, stopping bank robbers, etc. I ran the story idea by my mom, and she liked it. (which surprised me)

So of course, for this kind of story I would have to get pretty intimate knowledge about the best cars, car terminology, and how to fix cars. So I hurried like a good little writer over to the local library and found some books that might help. (might, since I didn't find an all encompassing car book detailing how to become an automobile genius) I got a book about Pony cars, a term I hadn't heard of before, muscle cars through the ages, and a ladies guide to taking care of your car.

Being myself, I read through the muscle car book first, drooling over the pictures of the really amazing looking cars like they were male models. I couldn't decide what car I liked the best, so I decided to do a little more research online. This led me to the Dodge Challenger.

I was originally looking at the Ford Shelby Mustant GT500, which is an amazing car, and was looking up pictures when I came across a picture that compared the Shelby to the Dodge Challenger. Next to the Challenger, the Shelby doesn't look nearly as cool. So I began to look up pictures of the Challenger. This led me to finding out what the specifications of the car could be, so I headed over to the Dodge website to build my own from scratch.

This led me to the Challenger SRT8 (Street and Racing Technology, in case you were wondering), which automatically comes with a 6.1 liter V8 SRT HEMI engine. For those of you who haven't been studying cars all day, that means this is a really fast, powerful car. It can pull 325 horsepower, which, while not as amazing as the Dodge Viper (600hp, and $91,000), is really good for a muscle car. As a comparison, average coups and sedans get about 110-150hp. See?

Now, the Charger SRT8 actually has the same engine. The selling point for me was the Challenger can come in purple.

Now you see how very non-girly and girly I can be, at the same time.

Sorry about the ramble... I tend to be long winded.

They have come back to haunt me.

As someone who loves her dreams and hates waking up in the middle of them, I have had some trouble with the last two nights' collection of dreams. Don't get me wrong, I loved them all. It's just, every single one of them reminded me how very alone I am, as well as how scared I am of being in a relationship. My subconscious has it in for me, I swear.

Talking about another plan

My life has taken on some structure; For once I have a concrete schooling goal that is possible to complete, as well as an after the fact goal. Like my novel, mentioned in the post below, it has taken a long time to get to this point.

As someone who is college age and who could be almost done with her third year, I'm not the most dedicated person. I have a problem with procrastination (got it from my dad), and I'm always changing my mind about exactly what I want to be doing. I've planned everything from ASL interpretation to crime scene investigation and police work. But when I actually get to the part where I have to start working on it, then I have either chickened out or decided that I wanted to be doing something different.

This year it's going to be a little different for several reasons. My family is moving to Iowa without me, and I still don't have a way of supporting myself when they're gone, and I'm tired of being stuck in a rut of earning very little money and having no money. So after careful thinking and discussing with my mom, I've decided to take some advice that my dad gave me last year.

This may be completely against my personality, but I'm going to become a Certified Nurses Assistant (hereby called CNA.) It's hard for me to admit that I'm going to become something I'm not entirely one hundred percent enamored with, but it's going to happen. I have started saving for the class, which I will probably take in either April or May depending, and I've already started planning where I might be able to get a job.

I'm hoping to be able to get a job at the children's hospital in the city, because I would rather work with children than with old people. Then, once I have a steady job that pays pretty good, I plan to buy a car. Preferably a Ford Focus because that's my second choice; my first choice is too expensive.

So my financial life has been planned for almost the entire year, which is a first.

If that was all a little bit scattered and random, I'm sorry; I'm tired and have the residue of a headache sitting in my brain.

In other news I love the movie The Lake House; it's now on my top ten list.

Thus I am ready to spearhead the global take-over

It has taken me a long time to get to this point. I've thought I've been here several times before, but each time it wasn't right and stalled out. This time I am positive that I'm going to get it right, and there are several long reasons why. Let me start from the beginning so that this all makes sense:

I have a single novel that I actually reached the words THE END. I wrote it during NaNoWriMo in 2008, and despite how completely boring most of it was because of how much filler I put in it, it was a great story and all of the people who I let read it raved about it. They all said that it had great potential, and one particular friend has been great at helping me get to that potential. After November was over, I started working on the second draft, and decided that somethings needed to change. So it began to evolve from what it was, very slowly morphing to what it is today. However there were quite a lot of large bumps in the road along the way.

Since the first time I wrote it, I haven't been able to bring it back up to 50k. After the initial paring down, the most I got it to was 24k. At first I didn't understand why this was happening, then I realized that it was because I didn't have enough plot to actually fill that much space. So around version three, I started adding new plot stuff; dreams, more bad guys, a longer conflict with Chandra instead of Artemis (they are the same person, just different personalities, in case you were wondering), etc. Nothing worked.

Another thing was the guys in my writing group kept accusing telling me that it was like Twilight, which was NOT my goal in any way. So I finally just set it aside and didn't touch it for a few months.

About a week ago, I decided that I really needed to work on it some, because my best friend has a printing waiting for me to finish it. (her own painted cover included, it was the best birthday present I have ever received) So I pulled it out, thumbed through my notes, read through several of the different drafts, and talked it out with my mom. It's always fun doing that, because while she doesn't like what I write, it's good to bounce ideas off her (and they always come back better than I threw them.)

After a few days I came to a decision: Huntress was taking on a whole new direction. After carefully examining it from every possible direction, I came to the conclusion that it would be better for Chandra, the main character to be older; It would make it easier for me to write it since I hate writing about high school students, and it would solve a lot of time constraint problems. So Chandra had a small encounter in high school, but the big one didn't come until she was halfway through college.

And since she was older, many other things had to be changed as well. Friends had to be cut out or changed, setting had to be rearranged, and finally I had to come up with things for her family.

But I still didn't have an exact plot in mind; I knew the very VERY basic of what I wanted to happen, I knew that it had to last longer than any of my other plots, and I knew that it had to be amazing.

So today, while mom was at work and the boys were at school or asleep, I sat down at mom's computer (mine's in Iowa) and just started typing the plot. I wrote up a little of what I had already written, including a prologue and some of chapter one, then just continued on from there.

The plot was similar to the first drafts, but at the same time very different. There were less important characters to keep track of (though I did completely forget about one while I was plotting...) and there was a lot more action and danger. I finally got around to inserting a new scene that I have wanted to get in there for a while now (it never fit until now), and I got to use two characters as supporting characters instead of background, like they were before.

Somethings still happened, like her mom dying a fiery death, and somethings that happened in the first drafts but not the more recent ones came back, like certain people getting injured, and some completely new things happened, like Artemis not really coming back all the way, just as a voice in Chandra's head.

All in all, when I was finished writing the plot, I felt a sense of elation; I was actually going to be able to get this done.

And so here I go, on my way to a complete global take-over, stealing the world right out from under Twilight's vampire riddled, annoying feet.

Wish me luck.

Numa Numa

I assume everyone has heard of the Numa Numa song by Ozone? If you haven't, go to youtube and type in 'numu numa'. It's the music video one. If you have, you know what it's an energetic, interesting song in Russian (or Ukraine I think.)

I mention this song because it's my family's favorite song. My mom in particular. Every time she hears it, she immediately starts to dance, which starts the whole family dancing and leaves everyone out of breath and in a good mood. It's a great spirit-lifter, and I love it when my mom is in a good mood. 'Cause when she's not, then no one else can be in a good mood.

It is incredibly hard to come up with a unique magic system

Every so often I'll read, either on my favorite authors websites or in writing books, about creating a unique magic system. I never really thought about it that much, because I was more in to writing modern fantasy or science fiction, or really light high fantasy, with very little mention of magic. It's only been recently, after reading Branden Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy (have yet to read the third), Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth, and Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time that I really started to get interested in writing epic fantasy with a larger focus on magic.

This brought with it the problem that every kind of magic I could think of either wouldn't work under close scrutiny, or had already been used in one form or another. So, a few months ago I created a new word doc and just began making a list of different kinds of magic I could develop. I've worked on it on and off, and did some developing on one based on light.

Two Sundays ago at church, I got the idea of a kind of magic based on song. It took me a while to come up with how it actually worked, and after that everything took off. I loved it, and really wanted to work on it.

That's when I needed a story to go along with it. I tried to come up with one, but I kept finding that it was too similar to Mistborn. So I gave up and set the magic aside.

Now, for the past couple of weeks, the only things I could get written were stories based on my dreams. My normal creativity has been somewhat lacking, so I've been relying on my subconsciousness. It's worked, I've written anywhere from 2k to almost 5k steadily every day, and I can definitely tell that my writing is getting better.

However, Saturday I woke up and couldn't remember any of my dreams. I remembered having them, and remembered that they were cool, but I just couldn't call them to mind. So, when I sat at the computer, determined to write something, I started typing, not really sure what I was creating.

As I continued writing, it became clear (as clear as the sub-zero air in the story) that this was the story for the magic system.

It fit perfectly. Every reason and law I had come up for the magic meshed so perfectly with the frozen landscape I had written, I was amazed that I hadn't thought of it before. So, while it took longer than I have ever prepared for anything, I found the story that fit, and even the characters to go along with it, and am so excited to continue writing it.

Alright

So I finally got a job. Hallelujah!

It's a nanny job in my neighborhood, and is only part time, but it's a job! Whee!