This blog post is just beautiful – read it.
Tag Archives: description
Time for a light-hearted post!
I’m going to ease myself back into blogging with a couple of light-hearted posts. To be honest, I’m not feeling an awful lot better, which isn’t a good thing when I’m on the last day of my antibiotics, but I guess it’s going to take a while. So, for my first light-hearted blog, I’m going to basically just post pictures of things I really really like. Sounds a bit simplistic – that’s exactly what it is, and that’s why I like it so much. I’ve been posting all these “Moom’s Views”, which I will continue with eventually, I have a draft of a post about Samantha Brick floating around somewhere that needs finishing and posting, and it’s all well and good but it gets a bit upsetting and miserable after a while, because it seems like there’s not very much about the world to celebrate these days. So, I’m going to celebrate some of the things that I like about life. Obviously top of the list is my boyfriend, my family and my dog, but I’m not going to post pictures of them – I want to protect their privacy and not force them to have their pictures broadcast all over the internet by me!
1. VW Campervans
If you’ve seen my Tumblr, you’ll have realized by now how much I love VW campervans. I don’t know what it is – maybe it’s the distinctly hippie air they all carry, which I do love, or just how amazing and rounded they look and how much they make me think of holidays and fun, and I love them! Personally my ideal one would be sunshine yellow like in the first picture, or sunset colour ❤
2. Disney
I love Disney, more than any other film genre (I think it’s possible to call Disney its own genre by now, because there’s nothing else that really applies to it. Animation could refer to anything and cartoons don’t quite cover it, so I’m gonna say that Disney is a genre of its own). There’s so many things about it – there’s always a happy ending and I love the fairytale ones. My particular favourite is “Tangled”, the Disney re-telling of Rapunzel, because of the amount of just plain beautiful scenes in it.
3. Gaming
I wouldn’t call myself a mad gamer, as in it’s not my whole life, but I am partial to the odd go on the PS3 every now and again – particularly Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Now, I wouldn’t say I’m a violent person, but I love that game – mainly because you can get rocket launchers and blow things up, but also because I’m fairly good at it considering I don’t think I’ve ever been good at shooting games before. I’m not going to post any pictures of this because I think everyone knows what MW2 is, and if you don’t, try playing the game – it really is quite fun. Downside is, I’m one of those annoying girl-gamers, who puts her clantag as “Girl” so that all the guy n00bz playing know that they’re getting decimated by a girl. I’m not just a mindless killer, however – I do also like playing games like The Sims (the third is my favourite) and Spyro 🙂
4. Haribo
Yep, I love Haribo. Not going to lie, I prefer Haribo to chocolate. Yes, I am a disappointment to the entire female side of the species, but what can I say? Chocolate gets sickly, I’ve never known Haribo to. And the variety! With chocolate, you’ve got three types – milk, dark and white. Yeah, you can have your fillings or whatever, but with Haribo, there’s just so many different types! In just one bag you can have foamy eggs, little hearts, cola bottles, gummy bears, rings – *sigh* it’s amazing! And then you’ve got Tangfastics, Super Mix, all the seasonal variants, mini packs – it’s just wonderful. And it’s happy! It really is a happy world of Haribo ❤
5. Llamas & Alpacas
Yes, I think we’ve all ascertained by now that I like llamas. Perhaps not to the extent of my little April Fool’s Day escapade (not enough to dedicate my whole blog to, and certainly not more than life itself), but I do really like llamas. I’m not averse to their fluffier cousins, the alpacas, either – in fact, I might even be inclined to say that I prefer alpacas to llamas. But really, how can anyone dislike the fluffy long-necked goat things? I mean, just the description of them is amazing! And their faces! Look at their cute widdw faces!
Aaaand that concludes my light-hearted post. Normal miserable service will resume shortly. Thank you for your patience.
Naming Characters
It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about how I do something – I think the last one may have been writing about first kisses ages ago? – so, I shall do a new one today, about how I come up with the names for my characters.
Usually, in all the books I’ve attempted to write before, I’ve picked ones that have specific meanings, or are literary names – for example, in a previous one, the heroine was called Hero Bronte Murphy (before I developed a deep-seated hatred for whichever Bronte sister wrote Wuthering Heights [I really should figure this out before I sit the Wuthering Heights exam in June]) – Hero because of the character from “Much Ado About Nothing” (again, before we started studying it in English) and Bronte because of the literary connotations (my justification for this is because it’s set fairly far in the future and deals with humans away from Earth, the parents would want to keep the memory of classic literature alive).
Then, when it came to this one, naming characters came very naturally. There was no looking online or searching for fancy meanings – all the names just occurred to me when I was writing about the characters. The two main characters are called Lilly and Adam – Lilly because I was reading Harry Potter at the time, and Adam because it seems to sound nice with Lilly and is a fairly modern man’s name, which is what I was looking for. There is a Welsh Celtic warrior called Daeron Pentraeth – Daeron was just a celtic-sounding one, and I wanted it to begin with a D because of the person his character is very loosely based on. Pentraeth is Welsh for head of the beach, and to be honest there’s no real meaning behind it, he isn’t the head of a beach or anything, I just wanted a Welsh surname and that’s the first one that occurred to me. Another character is a young girl, Imogen Love – again, just because I like the name “Imogen”, and Love is a cool surname which completely contrasts with her family life.
There isn’t actually anyone with an out-there name, I don’t think – my characters this time have names like Charles, Ella, David, Bryce, Aaron, Joe, Harry etc compared to when it used to be ridiculous names I couldn’t even pronounce, because I set so much store by the meaning of it. Obviously I try not to pick names with stupid meanings that make the name ridiculous, but for many of them, I haven’t actually looked at what their names mean – obviously Lilly is after a flower, and I think Adam is Biblical, but Daeron is completely made up and I haven’t the foggiest about the rest of them, and the meanings had no influence on what I chose.
I hope that’s a sign that my writing skills are improving and maturing, because I want to focus on making a more natural, believable story than one where I’ve picked names I’m really pleased with, but possibly to the detriment of the story itself!
However, if you do want to pick names with a meaning, a website I’ve found to be absolutely invaluable is behindthename – http://www.behindthename.com – because you can search for names by meaning or words in the description, and you can also search by language and origin. I don’t want it to come across that I’m saying picking names with a meaning is wrong all the time, but the way I did it was very wrong – even if the name didn’t suit the character at all, I’d pick it because I liked the meaning, which made the stories quite bad to write because I didn’t like writing about the characters.
… proving a point!
Just to prove that what I said about writing – as in, when you most want to write, something comes up and you have to stop, but when you’ve got loaaaads of free time, you don’t want to write anymore – I’ve been struggling for words all morning, trying desperately to write whilst I had loaaaaads of time to spare because I only have one lesson on a Thursday and it’s in the afternoon – and the words wouldn’t start flowing until I had about half an hour left until I had to catch the bus to college, so I had to stop writing even though my head was like “WOO LOTS OF PLOT POINTS AND NICE LITTLE DESCRIPTION BITS TO PUT IN YAAAAAAAY!”. Now I’ve got home, my head’s like “Blurgh. I forgot”.
My Story…
No, this isn’t another blabbering session about myself and my past. Well, it does concern me, but it’s not ABOUT me – it’s about the story I’m writing, the one I’ll probably mention quite a lot. I don’t want to give too much away because of plagiarism – I’ve met a few plagiarists in my time and they have no morals or a sense of individuality, they just crave attention and praise that they’re not talented enough to get for themselves.
I might post a few chapter when it’s all done, dusted and edited (the first book that is, I’m not going to make you wait until I’ve finished the whole trilogy), but I’m really not sure if it’s any good – I’ve been reading it back and it all seems a bit samey, so I’m toying with the idea of starting again. The only problem is, I got that idea from a dream, and I haven’t had any dreams that could be made into anything but a horror story/hallucination recently, so looks like I’m stuck trying to improve it and add in a few more exciting characters/bits of character development before I go any further. To be honest, I should probably have started planning BEFORE I started writing, rather than the other way around – but there we go. I doubt it’ll ever get published, but I’m still wary of posting too much detail about it, in case it gets stolen.
Basically, it’s a fantasy. And it concerns the afterlife. And the concept that our soul lives on when our body ceases to function. And that’s all I’m going to tell you 😉
I like writing fantasy. I can get away with a lot when I’m writing fantasy because if people say “That would never happen”, I can reply, “Maybe not in our world – but in my story’s world, it most certainly does!”. I don’t set much store by reality in my stories, because it bogs you down – you get so focused on looking at the possibility/probability of this or that happening, and you end up getting confused and then bored of having to do all this research – trust me, I’ve been there! I much prefer to write about a fantasy world, where I can make up the rules and then all I have to do is make sure I’m following my rules – if that makes sense.
I tend to jump between stories – I’ll write loads of one (my NaNoWriMo 2011 effort being an example, I got to around 60,000 words during NaNo, got tendonitis, got bored and stopped writing it), then I’ll get bored, start writing another, wish I hadn’t stopped writing the first one but by that point I’ve gotten so into the second one that it’s hard to get used to writing in the world of the first one again! It’s even harder considering my NaNo was more of a science-fiction, this one is more in the realms of fantasy really.
I’m quite excited for where the story is going in the second book, but in the third… not so much, which is a shame because I want to be excited. I’m quite tempted to just go for a completely different angle in the third one – introduce a whole new villain or something. Or even, potentially, turn one of the good characters from the first two into a villain. I’m just kind of typing as I’m thinking here so that I don’t lose the idea, so this might happen… but it might not.
Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief foray into what I’m actually writing, so that when you read my rants about word counts/characters not doing what I want them to/the fact that I REALLY SUCK at descriptions, you’ll understand.
the life of a moomin 