Today's Post Has Been Postponed...

...today got eaten by homework. I will put up the post tomorrow, and it will be awesome. *crosses fingers*

Also, I'm thinking that I should just change my posting day to Thursday anyways, because I've got this evening class on Wednesdays now and it's really been cramping my style here. Yes. I have decided. From now on, I'll be posting on Thursdays and it will be wonderful. *crosses fingers*

Anyways. See you all tomorrow!

I just finished a term paper

Like, ten minutes ago.

And I've been working on it this whole past week.

Needless to say, there isn't going to be any post today, but there will be one tomorrow. Here's a sneak peek of what I'm thinking of doing:

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:

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.

I Am So Sorry About Me

Dear You,

I've spent so much of this blog talking to me.

Now, don't get me wrong, I think me is great, but me isn't the only thing in the universe.

And I really need to stop talking just to me so much.

When I first created this blog, I did it because I wanted to have my own place on the internet to talk about what I wanted to talk about. Now, that's great and all, and it really is important for me to write what I want to write (rather than what I think you want me to write), but that by itself is empty, meaningless.

"If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate." 1 Corinthians 13:1-3 (Message)

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:

Did Thea Write Another Guest Post?!?

I'm positing the existence of creatures that come from paradise today. You can read my ramblings at the blog of Liana Brooks, sock enthusiast and author of Even Villains Fall in Love.

Enjoy! And be sure to check out her (in)famous flowchart while you're there. I would say more, but it's really much more entertaining if I don't. :)

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.

In Which Thea Rips up a Quiz for the Greater Good

Hello, everyone! Here are the draw results, with a dash of randomness thrown in. :)



Lewinna, if you're seeing this before you get on Twitter, I've DM'd you the pertinent information about your new ebook. If you're seeing this after you've gotten on Twitter, well... this is awkward.

Guest Post is Live!

For those that haven't yet checked it out, my guest post on Sue Santore's blog is online! And it's about monsters. :)

Read it here!

I Have a Confession to Make...

I'm sorry to say that I haven't been taking blogging as seriously as I should have. When I started, I thought that the only things that were really necessary were writing as regularly as possible, making the blog look pretty, and writing about things that I thought were cool. While all these are wonderful things that really do help make a blog work, there was just one thing that I was missing:

Purpose.

To be completely honest, I've felt claustrophobic every time I entertained the notion of deciding what this blog was actually about. It frightened me, because I thought that, if I decided on something, I make things too narrow, and I would cut out most of the things that I'm passionate about and that I could talk about for hours on end simply because I think they're just so darn fantastic. All my interests felt mutually exclusive, like choosing one would be denying everything else, and that terrifies the heck out of me.

Let me tell you something I've never told anyone else. Being told I must decide what to do with my life gives me so much fear that I want to high-tail it to the farthest of far corners of the earth, so that the person who mentioned it can never, ever find me. Laugh if you want, but picking a career is the stuff of nightmares. I'm afraid of just thinking about it.

Right now, my entire body is shaking, my heart is trying to beat its way out of my chest, and my fight-or-flight response has kicked into high gear. You could tell me I'm going to die tomorrow, and I wouldn't be as utterly frightened as I am right now.

A Forthcoming Guest Blog Post and an Award!

Sometime in either December or January, a guest post by me will appear on http://suesantore.com/! I don't know the date yet, so keep watching this space for more information:

[The date: January 6th! :D]

Until then, I'd encourage you to click on that link and check out Sue's website. She's got lots of solid writing advice, and there's a guest post every Friday!

Next bit of news!

About a month ago, Angela McGill gave me the Versatile Blogger Award!

What Are These Series You Speak of?

Before I officially kick off any of the series I mentioned in the last post, I thought I'd make a list of all the series I have going (or will have going in the near future), along with an explanation of what they're about. This post will be updated as new series get added and old ones are completed, and will always be listed first in the Series links in the right-hand column on this page, for easy reference. Without further ado, the series:

Exciting New Things!!!

First off, some housekeeping (mostly for my own sanity): for some odd and inexplicable reason, I cannot publish any changes to the other half of my website because my website software cannot login to the ftp server. This is upsetting because I've not only fixed an embarrassing typo, but I've also made a few things look much prettier. I will, however, have to figure out what's going on and fix it before I can change anything over there. Which means that all updates shall come through here.

Excellent.

We are all very excited. *rolls eyes*

I shall now provide antidote through the proclamation of my plans to self-publish. Yes, yes you did hear me correctly. I am going to self-publish, starting with the project I've been working on in secret for the past two months: a series of short story anthologies called Expected Aberrations! (cue applause) Each anthology will be one, complete journey through five or more stories of entirely different genres. Let your imagination expand. Discover new mysteries, unearth familiar secrets, shudder at the intimately terrifying, and explore all the shininess that unknown worlds have to offer. And get warm fuzzies for helping a writer continue to do what she loves. /plug :)