Written Long Ago

In my heart... I'm a writer.  I don't do it as often as I should but I am trying to exercise that bone.  I have a journal that I am writing a page in everyday.  I used to run a blog on LiveJournal called All_Unwritten dedicated to daily writing prompts.  If I get stuck, I am going to use that.  I just looked it up and damn my first one was pretty good.

Prompt: 
In the beginning

My writing:
In the beginning it was all a world of stones. The cascading mountains descended into pebbles. All was quiet, here in this world of harsh corners and the never ending waterfalls into the dark rock. Stones threaded through a needle in your eye. It was all in the beginning.

That's some good imagery.  I really like that.

Here's another one:

Prompt:

My Writing:
It was cold outside. It was always cold outside now. The world was in a whitewash of sleet that tugged at the leaves and massed at the edges of the window pane. It was cold and silent, like the world had forgotten to breathe, forgotten it was alive. His own breath fogged against the glass. Against glass that had ceased to be glass but surrendered itself over to a world that lacked warmth. It had given up and let itself slip into the ice that he felt crawling at the back of his neck. He mourned her, releasing the choking misery into the damp world. A world that was hungry for it, seeping his sadness deep into itself and icing it over. It was cold; it was always cold.


Seriously, I need to get back into this.  I am going to stop looking through these and reading what I've written.  I want to reuse the prompts and see what I come up with this time.  Should be a fun exercise.

Laziness

Another weekend gone and yet again I got nothing accomplished.  I need to break free of this lazy cycle I'm in and actually get crap done.  I have so much to do and it piled up and piles up.  Then the pile is so huge there's no way I could get it all done in a reasonable time so I just don't do it.  Vicious cycle.  And it stresses me out so yet again, I do nothing.  I really could just kick myself.

It's hard to work so many hours and still have time in the day to be sane and get everything done that needs to be done.  I've been choosing to stay sane and get nothing done but that doesn't really help either.  Dunno what to do about it either.  I might have to take a day this week and just get everything I need to do done.  That will take some serious ass kicking.  I need someone to kick my ass full time.

Sigh.

Well in other news...  I have no other news really.  Work.  Sleep.  Work.  You know my life.

My little brother is headed back to his end of the country for his last semester of college.  Enjoy it while you can bro.  The real world is gearing up to kick you in the teeth when you graduate.  Or that just could be Monday morning talking.  I'm proud of you!  Another English Lit degree in the family.

Finally think I came up with a name for my main character in my novel.  Keller.  Which of course I stole from somewhere else but if you don't want to end up with a name like Salkagoindlasd, you have to steal names.  I am on the fence about it in that it may be too unique, which you will see why that might be a conflict as I work further into the plot of my book.  Eh.  For now I think it will have to do.  I just love it too much to move off of it for awhile.

I'm editing and writing a bit up soon so I may post that later.  For now this will just have to conclude my thoughts for the morning.  I wish I could have more coffee but I haven't yet finished my water.  At least that's one rule I'm sticking with.  I'm lazy but hey at least I'm drinking water!  Progress!

NaNoWriMo

Because I don't have anything else to do, I've decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month.  Basically your goal is to write 50,000 words in November.  The idea is to just free write and get your juices flowing and not edit yourself.  Once you write, you don't go back in touch it.  Which for writers is one of the hardest exercises you can put before them.

I've decided to participate because:
One- One of my best friends is doing it and I figure we can cheer each other on.
Two- I am a writer in my soul and I want to bring that more into my life.
Three- I seem to have this deep seated need to be incredibly busy.

I did it once in college and ended up with something that was pretty out there.  Granted I was battling pretty hard depression and insomnia at the time.  I'd like to make this a yearly thing.  It really is a great exercise.  I have lots of ideas of stories rattling around in my head and I need to get them on paper.  What better way?  I'm going into this with pretty much no preparation, just a will to write.  I think that's the most important thing anyway.  We'll see where the words take me.

Word count: 0

Wish me luck!

Guru in training

I have been informed by my dear friend Whitney that I suck at blogging.  No that's not what she said but the general meaning was there, haha.  I do admit this is true.  Beyond posting a new blog post and then sharing it on my Facebook, I'm not a big blogging guru.  Apparently there is much to learn.  So now, if you look at my lovely blog (which by the way I am proud that I figured out how to customize it at least a little) there are some changes you can take advantage of.  Above ↑ you will see a little bar below my lovely picture heading with "Email" in it.  If you submit your email address there you will receive my blog posts to your email.  Over to the right → you will see this little like three line design followed by "posts" and "comments".  If you click those, my blog will be added to your collection of blogs or other things you are following, if you are techy like that.  WAY down at the bottom ↓ you can share my blog on Facebook or Twitter.

So hopefully that helps get my blog out there a little more.  Not that there is anything of great importance on here as I am mostly writing it for myself and I'm not sure how many people read it.  But if you do read it you can now choose different ways to be notified of my various posts.  That being said I do promise to post more often.  When I get busy and stressed I only tend to want to do bitchy posts.  Then I feel like I'm just complaining and I don't really need to cement it in words.  But this is supposed to be a reflection of my life and sometimes in life I get bitchy and complain.  I guess anyone reading this will just have to handle that.  I do want to try to have more of a presence.

In my heart I am a dog trainer but I am also a writer.  I do write quite frequently but mostly keep it to myself.  I've been writing since I learned how to read and write, which came later in life than most people.  I have a pretty good case of dyslexia.  Dyslexia means I have a hard time reading or doing other activities such as math because decipher I symbols differently.  Basically I learn differently than everyone else.  So when I was in elementary school the teachers didn't know how to teach me and I wasn't learning anything.  They told my mom that I was just stupid.  Luckily my mom knew something else was going on and took me to get all this testing done and soon found out I was dyslexic.  After a couple of years of tutoring I was reading at a college level and able to work around being dyslexic.  I still struggle with some things, like my spelling or with math, but dyslexia didn't stop me from a love of reading and writing.  Heck I have a degree in English Literature with a focus on Creative Writing.

So coming back from that tangent, I love writing.  I have been writing since I knew how and have several pieces of poetry published.  In high school I took three times as many English and writing courses than was needed.  I also kept a blog that I recently reopened and looked at.  I was really open and honest in that blog.  Though before you ask, no I will not be sharing the link with you.  I downloaded the whole thing and plan on going back through it and rereading it.  In knowing who you are, I think it is important to remember who you were.  Doesn't mean you have to keep being that person but you should at least acknowledge life experiences.  So, though I may not want to share all my teenage angst with you, I probably will pull bits out here and there.

In the spirit of blogging and writing more I will make the effort to at least post something everyday.  I get caught up in these silly rules like "I can't post more than one post a day" and "If I'm going to bother posting it has to be something of substance".  Bah.  I don't think the blogging world has such rules, which is one of the reasons I so enjoy it.  So I will move the Blogger App on my phone to the front and do more blogging in general.  Yes, there is an app for that.

I really want to start writing about dogs/dog training and all that good stuff that I am passionate about so maybe in the next couple of weeks I will be starting a second blog to do that.  Whitney will have to help me set that one up so that it is SUPER cool and advertised.  Oh yeah.

Rambling post but there you have it.  Should probably find time to do some work between all the blogging I am going to do.

APDT Blog Possibility

So the APDT (Association of Pet Dog Trainers), of which I am a member, are launching a new blog.  The blog is going "aimed specifically at dog trainers and behavior consultants or those who want to follow this career path".  It is supposed to cover "topics of interest to the professional community."  That is kind of broad for me to pin down exactly what to write but I'm VERY interested.  I am a writer at heart and I miss doing it as much as I did when I was in school.  This would really be the perfect mesh of both halves of my life, dogs and writing/literature.  It would be an incredible experience.  Plus it would get my name out there, which is super important.

So I am thinking I should apply.  But that makes me nervous.  I have to apply with possible topics and provide writing samples.  Now writing samples I have.  When I was in college in Boulder I wrote freelance for the Colorado Daily newspaper.  I wrote articles featuring independent businesses.  I had a lot of fun with them and I don't think they were terrible.  I can use those as writing samples.

But are they good enough?  Which is best?

Here they are:


Articles

Okay I know that's kind of awkward but that's the easiest way to do it.

So which one/s are good?  Can I use any of them?

Also, what topics should I choose?

Just one more thing to tackle.  I feel like the list is getting bigger and bigger.  Never ending list I need to get done to get my feet under myself for training.