What Amateur Linguists Do For Fun

So, today I was totally going to write something serious and important or something, but then I got very distracted by playing around with a font I made yesterday. You see, yourfonts.com had a thing going on yesterday whereby you could make a font from your handwriting for free if you had the coupon code... and I had the coupon code.

The unfortunate thing is that I didn't have any time to immediately play with said font, because homework was eating my life (thankfully, I can say without sarcasm that it was the funnest homework I've ever done, because I got to try deciphering Chinese characters and figuring out which English words several Japanese loan words came from based on what they sound like. This may not sound like your cup of tea, but it is totally mine \o/), which meant that I didn't have time to play with it until today.

In Which Thea is Not Exactly a Feminist

My younger brother and sister (and probably my parents) get a little tired of me pointing out the overwhelming number of male main characters in movies, and the lack of a realistic sample of female main characters in books.

I know my sister didn't like it when, after we watched the trailers just before the Hobbit, I pointed out that not one of them portrayed a movie with a female main character. This wasn't a comment on the apparent quality or creativity of the movies (because we were both pleasantly surprised with the apparent originality of Oblivion, and can't wait to see it). This wasn't to say that those movies were somehow evil for all having male leads. All I was saying was that every single one had a male lead.

You know what you say with the main character of your story? You show through who they are, the things they do, the values they hold, the change(s) they undergo, and the consequences at the end of it all what makes a person important, what makes them worth thinking about. And, whatever you say, if you say it often enough, without any notable challenge or alternative, people tend to believe it.

2012: The Year the World Didn't End

I've seen several people reflecting on their blogs about what went well/not so well the past year, and I rather liked that idea. It seems a more productive thing to take a moment to see where you've been and then organically growing from there than it is to just decide where to go next. Context allows us to see more clearly what's needed, and can give us ideas for how those needs can be met. At the very least, context is great for picking up new vocabulary. :)

What went well this year?
1) My writing. I finally proved to myself that I can finish things, not only by finishing the first drafts of several short stories (via Written Arpeggios), but also by self-publishing my anthology. On top of that, I completed the first draft of a novel for the first time ever this summer. How much I enjoyed doing all these things has only confirmed to me that I love writing. :D

In Which Thea Memes

Looks like I've been tagged for a meme. Well, that makes it sound far more serendipitous than it really was.

Mike Duran, a writer who I greatly respect, and whose blog I read regularly, got tagged with this meme. I loved the idea behind it and really wanted to be tagged by someone at some point.

A few days later, D Jordan Redhawk, a friend from an online writing community called Forward Motion, said on Facebook that she'd been tagged for this meme and asked if anyone wanted to be tagged by her (thank you very much for doing that! :D). I said yes.

Which is a very short story to say that, once you know what you want, and if you pay attention, you have the ability to take advantage of the opportunities that come your way. :)

I take it back: The whole thing really was wonderfully serendipitous, which is pretty cool.

Why Make a Book Series Like a TV Show?

Due to an unfortunate spasm of boredom that severely sprained the dignity of several cortices of my brain yesterday, I won't be continuing the series about Adam and Eve. To be entirely honest, I'm not sure why I started it. Ah well. My apologies.

Different Dialects

When a director makes a movie based off of a book, there are always changes made to the story. This is because of one or more of several reasons:

1) Movies and books are fundamentally different formats, and so have to be done in different ways.
2) Two hours isn't enough time to do everything in the book.
3) Whoever was in charge of the movie clearly only read a description of the book and then used the other reasons as excuses for their shoddy work (I'm looking at YOU, makers of Ella Enchanted. *glares*).

No Posts Until December 5th- Fun Stuff in the Mean Time

It's that time of year again. No, not Thanksgiving (I'm Canadian, we already had ours :P :) ). Finals. More accurately, the time before finals when everything is due and I realize that I've been behind on my readings. Again.

There are other things along with that, like the fact that I have an oral exam I need to practise for and a room that is in desperate need of being cleaned, all resulting in a severe lack of time and energy in all areas, which causes my work to be of poorer quality. I don't want to be posting things that are crappy. Therefore, I'm going to wait until things die down before I start back up again.

But, since I won't be posting for two weeks, and I didn't want to leave it at that, I thought I'd give you some interesting material from around the web which you can enjoy at your leisure:

One Night, I Dreamed I Was a Beast

Fear: An unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat. (definition from Google)

This post is brought to you by the theme song 
for book 4 of my fantasy series.

One night, I dreamed I was a beast.

This Is Something Interesting to Read

Since there has been so much amazingness happening this week, I realized that I couldn't do my usual and talk about just one thing. As a result, I present to you five cool things to fill your day with awesome. Five! :D

I was going to call this "Internet Grab Bag", but that wasn't working for me, so I asked my sister for help. The exchange went like this:

Me: What's a good title for this? You know, something that says 'this is something interesting to read'.

Her: If you call it 'This Is Something Interesting to Read', I will love you forever.

What can I say? I'm a sucker for love.

Out Now: Dreaming of Her and Other Stories! :D

If Rumpelstiltskin Were 100 Times More Snarky

Or: I Totally Forgot How Random the Ending Is

(Announcements: I wanted to let you know that there won't be a post next week -August 15- because I'm taking a week off from the computer in order to go to camp. Yay for camp! Now, the show is about to begin. Please turn off all cellphones and other distracting devices, and put away your cameras, as photography is strictly prohibited. Thank you, and enjoy the show. :) )

Act 1: The Miller Meets the King

Scene i: The Miller is Also an Idiot

Making Abstract Philosophy Practical

As you may know, I'm working on revising an anthology.

As you may not know, I originally wrote some of these pieces eight years ago (aka, when I was just barely a teenager). I'm discovering that I've changed a lot since I wrote them, and it's weird to find another person speaking through my words.

Which means I have a problem. Well, more like a choice:

In my first year of university, I took a philosophy class called "Knowledge and Reality" which is a shorter way of saying:

My Adventures with Camp NaNoWriMo 2012

Gotta say, winning feels good :)

Last month marked my second time participating in Camp NaNoWriMo, otherwise known as the summer version of that thing where people try to write 50,000 words of a novel in one month.

(Writers in general are slightly bonkers, but even we admit that coming up with this takes a special kind of crazy).

My friend says that it takes about a week until a person's brain can disengage from their NaNo story and start thinking about normal(ish) things. I agree. My novel basically took over my brain while I was writing it and the unfolding plot was the primary cause of all but one of the emotional upsets I had the whole month.

Coming Soon: "Dreaming of Her and Other Stories"

By the end of this summer, I plan to release my first-ever anthology called Dreaming of Her and Other Stories. If you've been reading this blog for a while, and you remember my announcement about the anthology called Expected Aberrations, well, this is that. Just all grown up and way cooler. :)

Everything has been written; all I have to do is revise, make a cover, put everything together and put it up on Amazon and Barnes & Noble (and possibly other places that I haven't looked into quite yet).

Concept art for the cover

Since every good 'coming soon' announcement includes some hype, here's some hype:

Announcing: Apreggios for Writers

Sometime around last Christmas I discovered a really fantastic blog by this badass named Justine Musk. Perhaps you've heard of her.

I absolutely loved what she had to say in her posts and more or less devoured everything I could in three hours (and I read fast, so that was about 90% of her posts). While in the midst of this veritable feast for my mind and imagination, I came across one of her posts on deliberate practise, which linked to a post on Study Hacks on the same subject, and I was like: "Hey! This deliberate practise thing sounds exactly like what I've been needing to give me a boost in my writing skills" -not that I think that I'm a terrible writer or anything, I just love it when I find a practical way to get even better at something that I adore doing.

I got to thinking about this idea, and it really excited me. So, I started a little blog where I'd introduce and exercise, and then I'd do it on a regular basis until I've learned what I can from that exercise for that time, at which point I'd start a new exercise. Since it was really just for me, I didn't tell anyone on the internet about it, and only told some of my friends and family, people who might be interested in writing-related activities.

Then the Hero Did Something Amazingly Epic

Once upon a time, there was a writer who was smack-dab in the middle of writing what she felt was her best story yet when everything ran straight into a wall. She smacked her computer a couple of times, succeeded in breaking her favourite pen when it accidentally hit the wall a little too hard on the backswing, spilled black ink on the carpet, made a huge, ugly blotch in her attempt to scrub out the ink, bashed her knuckles against the desk leg in the process, got rug burn on her elbow while she fell over from the shock of bashing her knuckles, lay on her back, looked up without really seeing anything and burst into tears. Her eye liner had just reached her ears when, lo, an angel appeared before her, bright as the sun and pretty gorgeous besides. The writer sat up, tears forgotten, and tried to wipe the streaks of eye liner from her temples.

“FEAR NOT FOR I BRING A WORD FROM THE LORD!” the angel cried. “HE HAS SEEN THY SUFFERING AND HAS COMMANDED ME TO TELL THEE HOW TO END IT!” He paused, arms held out and face to the sky, waiting for a gasp or other, similar sounds of astonishment.

The Story Equivalent of Dropping Mentos into a Bottle of Coke.

*Warning* For those of you that are concerned by this, there is an instance of language later in the post. If that kind of thing really, really bugs you, then don’t read this post because the instance of language is kind of important for understanding the rest of it. I have considered cutting it, but what I’m trying to say would suffer greatly from its omission. Thanks for understanding.


Right now, as well as (still) looking for a summer job, I’m taking a writing course. I signed up for it basically as soon as finals were over, which earned me an incredulous look from my mother, but I don’t mind. Why? Aside from the fact that I absolutely love learning things at all times and will actually go and research topics that interest me if I’ve gone too long without learning something new, I knew I needed something to help me out with my writing. Not that it’s unspeakable horrible (unless I have really, really nice friends who are also much better at acting than they let on), but that it hasn’t really been flying. It’s more like slogging through thigh-high mud while wearing shorts and flippers that are at least two sizes too big. No, not mud. Slime. Nasty, green slime like the stuff that floats on the top of a lake or pond that has way too much algae in it. That slime. But now I’m fixating.

While I getting ready to work on one of my lessons, I started thinking about Main Character and that I needed to know more about her because she was really lacking in the motivation department. Remember, in my first post, how she was being snarky with me and wouldn’t cooperate? While that was, um, lovely, she didn’t have enough motivation to keep up with it even as I slapped together a very sloppy version of what she was demanding. Then my thoughts wandered to the assignment for a previous lesson where I made what is basically a map of all the things that are the most important to me, and I wondered if I just needed to look at it and see what applied to her. Then I thought about the map itself.

‘Monsters,’ I said to myself. ‘Monsters are everywhere...’

Drama, Drama Everywhere! Part the Final

Remember when I talked about everything going wrong before Ex-Villain left? It was like the stars were out of alignment or something. You know how, in quite a few fantasy stories, Macbeth included, when the wrong king is on the throne, nature seems to unravel? Well. Allow me to remind you of the enormity of the situation:

“Mystery Character started doing nastiness never intended in Author’s conception of the story. Villain’s father came disturbingly close to being raised from the dead. Masses of people began keeling over for no apparent reason. Magical storms inexplicably gained status as near-sentient beings. As things kept progressing, it felt like a balloon of wackiness was rapidly expanding from the climax of the story.”

(You see what I did there? Flashback to another post? With the quotations and the copy-pasting and the... okay, stopping now.)

When Ex-Villain left the story, along with the rest of the results of his fantastic organizational skills, all of these things returned to normal. Almost all of them. For some incomprehensible reason, people continued to drop like flies. At first, it seemed reasonable, so I let it go. They were exhausted and overworked. They had just come back from a gruelling experience. They had poor immune systems. A really bad headache.

Then about ten of them fell over simultaneously, and I knew this had to stop. I immediately turned around (figuratively speaking, of course) and faced the story, only to be met by the most adorable Bambi eyes I have ever not seen in my life. The conversation went as follows:

A Brief Interlude to the Drama

Main Secondary Character (MSC) would have wanted me to make up for the merciless teasing I subjected him to in the last blog post. The only problem is that he’s too busy eating a quesadilla to even notice that I’m writing this (if ever one day he becomes lactose intolerant, I’m sure he’ll drop down dead within the week). This means, of course, that I will have to shoulder the responsibility and explain why he is the way he is, and why he’s one of my favourite characters.

In my last blog post, I more or less mocked him for his inability to pay attention to all the important things around him. This was for good reason, but it speaks to a part of his character that I greatly admire.

MSC is all about honour, and he focuses on what is honourable, the temptations to go against his code of honour, how to grow as a person and still keep to what is honourable... you get the picture. He also has a great ability to focus on what he considers to be important. Add these two together and you get a really decent guy with tunnel vision. Vital things tend to fly by his radar simply because they do not fall under the list of things he thinks about. It is his greatest weakness. And his greatest strength.

Drama, Drama Everywhere! Part 2

Once upon a time there was this lovely Villain. He was all planned out by Author to be wonderfully vile, have a semi-complicated past, inspire disgust and fascination, tempt not only Main Character but also Major Secondary Character (MSC), have wants and needs, and yet still be able to be relatable in his motivations. Things were progressing so beautifully.

One day, while Main Character was being belligerent to Author, Villain began to think he deserved another story. His (im)perfection existed at a level far beyond the ability of this puny story to portray his true greatness. Villain toyed with this idea, waiting until Author and Main Character had finished their shouting match to bring his proposal forward. Author didn’t really want to deal with Villain right then, being much more concerned with staring off into space whilst attempting to save the story from death by black hole.

Now, Villain was intelligent. As soon as he realized that his conversation with Author would go nowhere (about three words in), he went to confer with other characters. Unfortunately for him, Main Character had sequestered herself in some private place for some private gloating over her power over Author, and the rest of the characters either had lives to attend to or were incurably unobservant when off-duty (*ahem* MSC *ahem*). That is, except for Mystery Character. Mystery Character agreed that Villain should find a new story and, rather enthusiastically, the two of them began to concoct a delicate and subtle plan to convince Author of their position. As soon as they finished their designing, they began to implement it.

Drama, Drama Everywhere! Part 1

As far as it’s going, my current WIP has had the most drama of any of my stories to date. One would expect that this is a bad sign, but many would find it very encouraging, if a little exhausting. Let me explain:

My first sign that something was up, something different, occurred while I was happily working on my outline. I had plotted out a rather lovely and twisted course for the story to follow, and I was figuring out a little more about Main Character’s head space. We were going along merrily, reviewing a scene and her emotional reaction with it, and how she has this big secret that she can’t tell, and how an incident has just brought it to the forefront of her thinking (this secret is vital to the plot and must not be revealed until a certain moment in order to facilitate the proper feeling of the world falling apart). During this scene review, I start to write down how Main Character feels as if she wants to spill this secret to the world, but she doesn’t...