Well, this has been a very unproductive week writing-wise -- the only day I wrote anything on was on Monday (I always seem to be able to write on Mondays). So I was hesitant to write about this week as I did about the other weeks, since nothing much has happened.

Granted, I have been tired this week, really tired. That sounds like a cop-out, and maybe it is. But usually when I'm tired I don't write very well, though there are exceptions. Even the bit I wrote on Monday en route to my day trip to Disneyland (which was written on my phone via Word Mobile, since I'd forgotten to stick a pen in my bag) was written on like 6 hours of sleep (since I'd had to get up at 4:30 to catch the 7am northbound train, so I'd have as many hours at Disneyland as possible before I needed to leave) and I think it was pretty good.

I'm thinking I won't try to make it up today (as I was thinking of doing) and hope to do better next week. And I probably need to think of a better method for this practice. *sigh* Writing with any sort of discipline is hard sometimes! No wonder so many famous writers became alcoholics.

I am hoping to get some writing for my websites done soon too...though maybe I shouldn't jinx it. (I have a bad tendency of jinxing myself, like saying I'm going to go to bed early and then not doing so after all).

My family's going on vacation in the mountains starting a week from tomorrow, so hopefully I'll be more productive then! Being in nature always has a good effect on me. (Insert typical anime "Ahh, kimochi!!" moment here). And I once came up with a story while hiking (on a Hiking Club hike in 8th grade with my friend Dawn Mansur, where we came up with a story about two girls getting locked in a library after hours and getting kidnapped, which later became a novel I no longer have a copy of; I think of it often when we have to end our CWCW summer meetings at 20 till 6 when the "library is closing in 20 minutes" warning plays).

Well, I start work in 10 minutes so I should stop here. I pray my productivity picks up!

(finished at ~11:50 am)

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(Note: I actually started writing this a few days ago, but was having problems publishing it from my LiveJournal app on my iPod. I got it to work by logging out of my account on my app and logging back in).

I finally finished typing up my potential markets/contests/conferences and workshops of interest from both of my Writer's Market books - the 2010 edition of the secular publication Novel and Short Story Writer's Market (published annually by the people behind Writer's Digest magazine) and the 2009 edition of the Christian Writer's Market Guide (the Christian equivalent to Writer's Market) - into a Microsoft OneNote notebook, a project I started in March but didn't finish till now. (OneNote is an amazing program available in some versions of Microsoft Office, including the Teacher and Student Edition. It's great for organizing stuff. And now I have it on my phone too since I just got a Windows smartphone, which includes Microsoft Office Mobile. And no, I'm not getting paid to say that). Now, I realize these books are both outdated now, but hopefully they'll give me somewhere to start. After all, someone on The Anomaly suggested, after I asked for advice about what to do for summer writing practice (while I'm on break from Darkly Bound), that I practice writing by writing stuff to meet guidelines for contests and stuff. This research will help with that.

So far I've had trouble getting my practice started, but now that I finished this project, I should be able to focus on that more easily. I even found great writing prompts at the Writer's Digest website that I can use as warmups. (Writer's Digest even thanked me when I tweeted about how great the prompts are!).

Now, thoughts...

The secular book first, since I just finished that one.

Mostly I looked at places interested in sci-fi and fantasy, but I'm not counting out other genres either, especially since I'm still figuring out what I'm like as a writer. I wouldn't be against doing mystery or historical fiction as well, since I enjoy reading those genres too. In fact, my planned TimeSavers series is essentially YA historical fiction with elements of sci-fi (time travel), fantasy (the 4th dimension world), and either mystery or adventure (I intended them to be mysteries like the Boxcar Children series, one of my childhood favorites, but they might work better as adventure stories à la Frank Peretti's Cooper Kids Adventures series. Not sure yet).

For fantasy, a lot of places (magazines especially) want either "space fantasy" or "sword and sorcery." I'm not sure what "space fantasy" is; it's probably some sci-fi/fantasy hybrid, like "science fantasy" (science fiction with fantasy elements; this is the category Darkly Bound falls into. The CYA Files, my planned novel in the same universe, might too - or that one might be urban fantasy due to the half-werewolf and werecat antagonists, since urban fantasy generally features fantastical creatures in a non-fantasy setting). "Sword and sorcery" is the typical "hero on a personal quest" story, featuring swords and magic. It isn't about "saving the world" quests (that's epic or high fantasy, think Tolkien for that) but rather about personal quests. Some RPGs and fantasy movies are like this. Inuyasha, an anime I'm watching right now, might fit this also - each character in the party has a personal reason to take down the antagonist, and the other main quest (reassembling all the shards of the sacred Shikon Jewel) is more about personal ambition rather than saving the world. The Hobbit, the "prelude" to the more famous Lord of the Rings trilogy, would count as well (it's more about Bilbo helping the dwarfs get treasure) as would parts of other LOTR-related works of Tolkien's like The Silmarillion (the "Quenta Silmarillion" particularly), Unfinished Tales and Lost Tales.

There were also a lot of places wanting "dark fantasy," but that's probably because, as the book says, that term is often used as a euphemism for the horror genre.

With sci-fi they were much less specific, usually just indicating "hard/technological" or "soft/sociological" (most often both together) which are the two super-broad categories that have been used for sci-fi for a long time. Basically, hard sci-fi is sci-fi that is based on real science. The "old guard" (love that phrase!) magazines like Analog and Asimov's primarily print this type of sci-fi. Sci-fi TV shows and movies that are based on real science, like the TV show Fringe (which is based on a real branch of science called "fringe science"), also count. "Soft/sociological" sci-fi, on the other hand, isn't based on real science, or at least is primarily based on the "social sciences" (history, psychology, sociology, etc) rather than the "natural sciences" (biology, astronomy, chemistry, etc), hence the "sociological" tag. Soft sci-fi is what I primarily write, because I'm no science whiz (I didn't ace it but I didn't flunk it either; I just did ok). I did just write a more hard sci-fi story though for my 3rd Writing Project for LTWR 475, with a more realistic technological setup, space colonies, and reasonable genetics. So I could do it if I wanted.

As for the Christian Writer's Market Guide, it's been so long since I finished that one that I've forgotten it. I guess I can say that there were a surprising amount of Christian markets taking sci-fi and fantasy, genres which aren't as prevalent in Christian fiction yet as they are in secular fiction.

So, with that done, I've got myself set to find places to send my work. I just need to look them up and eliminate ones that won't work for me (either right now or at all). But I think I'll hold off on that for a bit.

So, on to writing practice! For my main works, I'll probably work on the otaku senshi story I mentioned, maybe on other website writing too. And I'm going to try to practice short stories, flash fiction, and poetry. And maybe find a brainstorm-on-paper method I can work with.

Agh, so much to do! Please keep me in your prayers!

P.S. 6/23/11 Writing practice going good so far! Yay!

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Well today was my Writing to be Heard presentation. Overall, I think it went pretty well, and the comments I got back from classmates were pretty positive. There are things I would do differently if I could do it again, like maybe use PowerPoint instead of Prezi (a presentation site a girl in my class introduced me to, which is free for educational use), because I actually know how to use PowerPoint, whereas this was the first time I'd used Prezi. Also, I would manage my time better. Someone wrote that I should've used the extra time for questions instead of elaborating on the site. I think so too. Basically, I wasn't timing myself (I meant to & brought up my iPod for that, but then forgot) and then had all this extra time, and I felt like I had to improv, and I'm bad at improv. Oh well, now I know.

It's interesting expanding something you write into something visual - as was the point of this project. I expanded some blog posts I wrote from the perspective of Princess Ayeka of Jurai (from the anime Tenchi Muyo!) into a full-on website. It didn't look as nice as I would've liked though. If I hadn't had a ton of other stuff going on, I could have. I know that.

Another girl in my class (Kat from Sigma Tau Delta, actually) presented on autism before me. She talked in her chapbook about the "restricted interest" thing that is a primary symptom of Asperger Syndrome, though she didn't define it as such (I recognized it though). I think that may be why not everyone totally got my presentation. That's another thing I should've explained.

I haven't had a chance to talk about my Writing Process class a lot on here, or about the Writing Projects I had to do for it. I said I would, and I've just been too busy. But I have time now so I will.

For my class in "The Writing Process" (a 400-level "theory and pedagogy" elective), we were assigned three Writing Projects, along with in-class writing and some reading. The projects had to each be different types of writing. They couldn't be all creative, and at least one was supposed to "stretch" us as a writer.

My first project was my "stretch" project (figured I might as well get it out of the way). I chose reviews because I've been having trouble writing reviews for one of my non-writing sites. Plus, writing reviews can help you get your name out there as a writer (John Green of Vlogbrothers fame wrote book reviews before becoming a novelist). I wasn't sure what kind of reviews I was going to do at first, but eventually I settled on film reviews, because I like films a lot. I did three reviews, each a couple pages long or so. The films were Bandslam (a great movie featuring Aly Michalka, who I like, as well as Lisa Kudrow, a.k.a. Phoebe from Friends), the classic French film La Belle et La Bête, and The Last Airbender. I read lots of examples, which helped. I was kinda glad when it was over though. I'm also glad I didn't adapt that project actually, because several people did similar things for their Writing to be Heard presentations.

The project I did adapt was my second project, an attempt to revive an old fansite for Ayeka I had about 10 years ago by doing the site's updates blog from Ayeka's POV. Initially, I didn't know which plot continuity to blog in, and wrote posts for all of them at first. This confused people, so I went with just one -- the Tenchi Muyo OVA, since that had the most story potential. I also read several character blogs (blogs written from a fictional character's POV) and three books on blogging. All in all, a lot of work.

Project 3 was my fiction project. I proposed a fantasy or sci-fi short story for this (I couldn't decide on a genre at that point). Draft 1 was hard cause I got intense writer's block trying to think of a sci-fi story idea last minute. I finally wrote a Walden story about the fairies and how they got to the isle they now live on. But my workshop partners didn't get it. (I don't think people "get" my writing a majority of the time). So I went back to sci-fi. I ended up having an idea about a convenience store on a space station -- something like the truck stop in Pearsonville, California, that we always stopped at on the way to my grandparents' house in Lone Pine (near Bishop) -- getting robbed. After all, who hasn't watched the news reports about convenience stores being robbed in the middle of the night? A few weeks & tons of notes later, that idea blossomed into a story about genetics, parallel worlds, and what would happen if we'd had alien contact since the time of Ancient Egypt. Pretty crazy. I have two of the drafts up on my Scribd, where I put them so people on The Anomaly could critique them; I'll have to change them to excerpts soon though (to avoid having them being seen as "published" on the Internet in the future). My teacher wrote that she hopes she sees it in video form someday, like on the Syfy Channel or something. That would be cool. :)

What next? I'm going to write some of the fan senshi story I've been planning out & use it for my Final Project for my Flash 1 class. I also wrote a bit for the LTWR Graduation Chapbook, which is being given out at the Graduation Party next week. (I missed the Oh Cat deadline though...but I'm still going to the Oh Cat release party cause it'll be my last as a CSUSM student).

Well my battery's running out on my iPod. Better go.

Finished at around 2:50pm, edited around 11:50pm

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Ok so I keep saying that I'll talk about the projects I'm doing or have had to do for my Writing Process class, but I haven't yet. So here goes.

Basically this class, Literature and Writing Studies 475, is called "The Writing Process." It's one of the classes you can take for the Theory and Pedagogy category of the Writing Emphasis for the Lit & Writing major. (The core courses are the same for both emphases; it's just the elective pools that are different). I was interested in it from early on, but I got really into it when my friend James, the president of the CWCW, workshopped some work he had written for that class.

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