Writing Gooder

Alright, so I’m going a bit crazy. We all know this. I have a goal: write a novel in one month. But wait, don’t we do this in November? Yeah, yeah, we do… But here’s the idea: You get the last month of school to write it (which in its self is a terrible idea since you are freaking out over finals and grades but…more stress, more fun, right?) and then a whole summer to edit it and write a second draft. I had planned this for Secrets but no, didn’t work out. So I’m doing it with my newer novel.

Who else wants to participate in NaNoWriMo in May? We could have word wars and word count competitions and all that stuff. I think I’m missing November…

I took some basic photos of how the model has started out.

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Was amazing this weekend.  Played lacrosse yesterday–poorly, since we don’t know how.  I’m burnt.

 Who else had great weather?!

I’m working on the layout of Squills now, and it’s going to be absolutely huge.  Fifteen pages possibly; maybe more.  I’m also adding some sections into it: Humor, Heard in the Forums, Poetry, and Op-Ed.

It’s going to be awesome.  But the copy editors are going to be angry with me because I probably won’t have the layout done until Wednesday… (the issue is due out this coming Saturday).

When I first came to YWS, the storybook forum wasn’t very well used or organized.  So, I began promoting it by writing storybooks and advertising extensively.

Today, the Storybook forums see plenty of activity every day and enjoy a loyal following of YWS members.  This would not be possible but for the members that stepped up to write in the threads therein.

If you go to home page of YWS, you will find three help buttons marked by a “?”.  There is also one more help button that you can find on the forum index pages for the random member block.

I’m going to be adding these in any places where I think it will help new users (or even older users).  There’s a lot of stuff on YWS that I’m sure you don’t know unless you’ve been there for a year or more.  For instance, I doubt many know that you need at least 100 posts to show up in the random member block.

If you know of any places that need a help button, just let me know!

We watched a movie today in my Govt. Class (block scheduling gives you two hours in each class, and my teacher is too lazy to grade work, so we watch videos) and it was about North Korea and Kim Jung Il’s rule there. It is a documentary from National Geographic, I forget what it is called? “Inside North Korea” perhaps? It’s very recent—he taped it last night.

Anyway, I knew a little about how bad off North Korea is but… it is insane. I feel lucky to be where I am, and I really wish I knew some way to help the others. We hadn’t finished the video, but my teacher said they have concentration camps for people who don’t “follow the rules”. These people worship Kim Jung Il to the extreme. They are his “great leader” when Kim’s dad died, the previous leader, the people were crying, “Why are you leaving without us?” one person was shouting (They showed film). It was just…so strange.

Opens your eyes, I have to say. (I probably misspelled a thing or two in this post…)

The YWS Blog now has a brand new look.  Should be much easier now to read posts, and also see where one ends and the other begins.

Last year my girlfriend bought me a model of HMS Victory to build, because she knows I love painting miniatures, but I had no job and thus no money to spend. However, because of many things (lack of time, laziness, procrastination — okay, just the last one really) it’s lay pretty dormant since then. I did paint one of the decks and half-painted that deck’s cannons, but other than that, it’s been left. I then realised I needed some black spray paint (to undercoat — for the uninitiated, painting colours straight onto plastic doesn’t work very well, so you use a darker undercoat to allow the newer layers to coat better) so I went out and bought some, and right now, the two sides of the ship and the upper deck are drying.

Now, mainly to encourage me, I thought I’d blog my ship-building efforts. I can provide pictures for anyone interested. Details as well, if anybody wants them (scale or whatnot).

This introductory post is just to know whether anyone would like to watch my progress, and laugh at my poor efforts at trying to paint a realistic wood effect onto a plastic ship with average painting skills, a severe lack of brown paint variety, and a miniscule model. This will probably end in disaster. Anyone wanna watch me sink?

I’ve been reading The Economist for a decade now, and so I’ve become very used to the British spelling of certain words.  That’d be fine, but I’ve gotten so used to the British spelling that I think words like “defense” and “favor” are spelled wrong.

Anyone else have this problem?