Plans For The Summer Of 2013

I’m not sure what this picture has to do with the post, but who doesn’t love Rue?

Here’s what I’m looking forward to this summer! Some are goals and some are events.

• Writing. There are two big projects I want to work on – one is a story about aliens and the other is a retelling of “Cinderella”. (Or possibly “Sleeping Beauty”.) I’d like the retelling to be long enough for a novella since I’ve already written a short story about Cinderella, but I have no idea yet how long the alien story will be. I’ll just have to wait and see.
• College writing class. I’m doing Comp 101 over the summer! Whee! It’s only two days a week but for three or four hours each class, I think. I want to know what an Official Teacher Person thinks of my writing.
• Not doing the second session of Camp NaNoWriMo. Are you kidding? I’ll already be busy enough with college writing, my own writing, and 4-H Creative Writing.
• Rereading Harry Potter. There’s a few other series I plan to reread if I have time, but the main one is Harry Potter. I haven’t reread it in three or four years and I’m interested to see if my opinions of characters/events/the books themselves are different since I’m obsessed with other things now.
• The 4-H Genealogy project. Because this is me you’re talking about, I’m not just taking this project – there are ten others I’ve barely even started! (Oops.) Anyway, this is the main project I think about because I’m interested in seeing how it all comes together. I stupidly thought it would be fun and easy so I signed up, then discovered that it still looked like it would be fun, but it’s hard. I have to source everything.
• Lots of reading. Some C.S. Lewis, a little Stephen King, a gazillion thousand pages (give or take a few) of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, and several retellings of fairy tales as research for my story. (If you’ve read any good ones, tell me about them!)
• A 4-H trip to Washington, D.C. Through an essay contest, I won a week-long trip. I was super happy when I found out because they pick only two kids from every county. We’ll get to see Gettysburg, the Smithsonian Museums, various monuments, and more. I’ve been there on vacation before so I’m anxious to go back and take more photos. We’ll be there on the Fourth of July so I can’t wait to take pictures of the fireworks on the Mall!
• Looking at colleges. Gulp. I won’t actually be visiting any colleges but I have recently begun to look at schools with good writing programs. Specifically, I want one that offers both Creative Writing and Journalism as majors. I want to attend college for the former but I need a job that will actually pay for food and shelter so I want a degree in something more practical as well.
• Getting my driver’s license. I almost have enough hours of driving to get this and then I can start driving on my own!
• Normally I would list a movie I’m excited for, but there isn’t really one. Bummer.

What are you looking forward to this summer?

I Used To Hate School

From about third to sixth grade I hated school with a passion, but not as most kids do. I’m pretty sure most kids detest school at some point, due to anything from a teacher to a subject to having to get up early.

I hated school because I was convinced it was a terrible place. I don’t think I thought this because of bullying, but because of education. I thought school wouldn’t teach you anything. (Note: I use “school” here to mean a brick-and-mortar school, not education. I didn’t have anything an education; I just didn’t think you could get one in school.)

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately because it was very important to me at the time. It took me several years to get over this feeling and figure out why I even thought this in the first place.

The first reason is that my parents decided to homeschool my brother and I because we were bored. We would finish our assignments before anyone else, then sit and stare out the window because we had nothing else to do. I was frustrated by how easy everything was – my main memory from second grade is of my teacher telling me to read a book again because I couldn’t possibly have read it in less than five minutes. I quietly did what she asked but inside I was thinking, “It’s a picture book. It has less than thirty pages and not much of a plot. Of course I can read it in five minutes, you dork.”

This led to me thinking I was better than all the kids who went to school, because I was smarter. Never mind that plenty of other smart kids continued to attend school. In my weird little mind school had no redeeming features at all. Now I think what’s more important is that you do what works for you. Some kids have to homeschool because they’re bored. Some kids have to attend school because both of their parents need to work to make ends meet, so they don’t have time to teach. It doesn’t matter how you get an education.

But oddly, that’s not the most important reason I hated school. There’s another. After a while I realized that I didn’t hate school so much; it was the schoolchildren who bothered me. I quickly came to the conclusion that it wasn’t all the kids, just some. They were the ones who’d thought I was a freak when I still attended school. I’ve always been an oddball, the nerd who would blurt out that I’d rather read than watch TV, the girl who refused to swathe herself in pink. When I started to homeschool, I guess that was the straw that broke the camel’s back for those girls. (It was pretty much just girls because I’ve only ever had one good guy friend and I haven’t talked to him for eight years. I miss you, Trevor!) They didn’t like me so I disliked them right back.

Over time, I realized that it was OK to be “normal”. (Is there even such a thing, anyway?) I was made fun of for being a nerd so I thought non-nerds were stupid until I realized they were just different. And really, everyone is a nerd. Some forms of nerdiness are just more socially acceptable than others. Sure, Tolkien fans know all these obscure facts, but so do football fans. So I began to not care if people made comments about me.

I also learned that jerkiness isn’t limited to school buildings – I just needed to hang out with different people. One of my earliest homeschooling friends told me that because I wasn’t Christian, the devil was going to do horrible things to me. Until now I haven’t told anyone how much that freaked me out, not because I believed her but because I thought she was a nice, nonjudgmental person. At the same time, I became friends with a publicly-schooled girl who is now one of my closest friends. At first I hadn’t liked her because I thought that she thought that I was weird. Well, I’d say she’s my weirdest friend now.

It all seems so laughable now, doesn’t it? But at the time it was how I honestly felt. I’m glad I changed my mind because now I have amazing friends who attend all types of schools!

My Mother Is Infinitely Quotable

My mom is amazing in many ways. I’m not sure whether that means amazingly cool or amazingly weird, though. (They’re probably the same thing, anyway.) She is talented at everything from physics to singing like Kermit the Frog but today, I’m going to focus on things she says. I often say that I want a normal mother but actually, I don’t. It would be so boring without someone exclaiming odd things throughout the day.

Oh wait. I do that too.

I guess I know where I get that from.

“Chocolate is poisonous to elephants. Have you ever seen any elephants in South America where chocolate is grown? No, of course not – because the chocolate killed them!”

“You smell like toasted cheese!” (No one, including her, has any idea what this means. But it’s part of our family folklore by now.)

“I’m crafty. I make people.”

“I think Sam [Gamgee] looks like Chris Farley.”

“Adele is really a squirrel. Why do you think she doesn’t wear tight dresses? If she did, her fuzzy tail would show.”

“[Lord of the Rings] is like Monty Python – all the hobbit women look like men, probably because they’re played by men.”

“Adele has two types of songs: ‘I’m sad because you broke up with me’ and ‘I’m happy because I broke up with you’.”

“Watch out, it’s the zombie squirrels of the apocalypse!”

“[Screams like a goat]“

“A deaf chipmunk jumped on my shoe!”

“No, I won’t scream like a goat again.”

Love you, Mom!

Five Ideas That Will Change The World Forever With Their Awesomeness

Or, “Weird ideas nevillegirl gets when she’s bored”.

Firstly, there should be scratch-and-sniff cookbooks. Every recipe in a cookbook should be accompanied by a photo on which that awesome scratch-and-sniff stuff would be placed. If you thought a recipe looked good you could just scratch and sniff to determine if it really was yummy. This should be done with food magazines too. And while I’m at it, with any pictures on the outside of cereal boxes and whatnot.

Secondly, there should be shoes with adjustable heels. At the touch of a button, they’d switch from flats to high heels. These would be very convenient. At some point fashion designers might even figure out a way to turn them into running shoes, too.

Thirdly, we need to stop making film adaptations of books using human actors. Movies would be much better if Muppets played all the parts. I mean, think of a Muppet Hunger Games? (I’m pretty sure Effie Trinket was based on Miss Piggy.) Who wouldn’t want to watch puppets killing each other, with plastic eyes and bits of cloth flying every which way? Or what about Lord of the Rings with Muppets? I would pay a thousand gazillion dollars to see even just a few minutes of that. Miss Piggy would play all the female roles – you know, all three of them. Today I randomly burst out laughing and people were looking at me strangely. I couldn’t help it; I was thinking about Miss Piggy dressed as Galadriel, saying those oh-so-serious-and-dramatic lines in that oh-so-odd piggy voice.

Fourthly, old people shouldn’t have to hobble around with canes or wheel themselves around in wheelchairs. They should be given hoverboards, with chairs attached in case they want to sit down. I’m sure they would have a great time zipping around from place to place. Perhaps the speed should be limited to twenty miles per hour, though. You don’t want Grandpa going around knocking over people.

Fifthly, unicyles for built for two people . They could be called uniduocycles.

When I am Queen of the World, I will make all these ideas become reality.

I’m Not A Psycho, Just A Writer – Teens Can Write, Too! May 2013 Blog Chain

May’s prompt comes from Lily Jenness:

“What are some of the coolest/weirdest/funniest/most disturbing things you’ve researched for a story?”

Confession time here: I do not write many stories. Sometimes that makes me feel like less of a writer because everyone else is talking about the seven-hundred-page high fantasy book they just drafted, and I’m sitting awkwardly in the corner thinking, “ESSAYS! WHEE!” My fiction is almost entirely short stories so even then there isn’t a main topic I research, because my stories aren’t all about the same things or even in the same genre.

This past summer I did a number of Internet searches on the British Museum, which isn’t weird unless you know what I was going to do with the information. I looked at floor maps and online galleries, trying to decide the best location for an explosion. I was planning to have a villain bomb the Museum so I needed to know about important sites within it that a villain might want to destroy or little-visited exhibit halls he could use to sneak from place to place. I swear I’m not a psycho – I just have a vivid imagination. We writers may seem scary what with terms like “poison”, “car accidents”, and “what body parts will bleed a lot when stabbed” in our search histories but in reality we’re pathetic dorks who have only paperclips available to defend ourselves with.

The coolest things I’ve researched would probably have to be dinosaurs. This was for the same project as the British Museum stuff. My characters traveled back in time, so I used books and the Internet to determine the size and ferocity of various beasties. It was fun because dinosaurs are amazing to imagine – they’re huge! It’s scary enough to realize that some were the height of a grown man or weighed as much as a car, but then you find out that those were the small ones.

I also have fun doing Internet searches for censuses because some of my stories take place in the past. County censuses include names so I got a sense of which ones were popular at a given time. Actually, I’ve used this much more for what I refer to as my “old lady stories”. These are usually based on wacky stories my grandma tells me. The characters are elderly people who do anything from saving the day to being very confused about computers, and they’re usually funny. I set them in the present day so I find names that were popular around seventy or eighty years ago.

Lately I’ve been researching fairy tales, particularly “The Little Mermaid”, “Sleeping Beauty”, and “Cinderella”. I know I want to write a retelling of at least one of them if not more. Online, I’ve been looking at how the tales developed or how vastly different cultures each have a version of the same story. But research shouldn’t be limited to the computer so I’ve been reading retellings of fairy tales too, to decide where/when to set my story and who my main character should be.

What do you research? More importantly, would it scare other people?

Want to follow our blog chain? Here are the participating parties, day by day:

5^th – http://theloonyteenwriter.wordpress.com/

6^th – http://deborahrocheleau.wordpress.com/

7^th – http://bloodoverithaca.wordpress.com/

8^th – http://charleyrobson.blogspot.com/

9^th – http://musingsfromnevillesnavel.wordpress.com/

10^th – http://nonconformistwriter.blogspot.com/

11^th – http://dearsaul.wordpress.com/

12^th – http://missalexandrinabrant.wordpress.com/

13^th – http://insideliamsbrain.wordpress.com/

14^th – http://cinderscoria.blogspot.com/

15^th – http://emilyvaneaton.wordpress.com/

16^th – http://www.brookeharrison.com/

17^th – http://thespasticwriter.blogspot.com/

18^th – http://veewhoa.wordpress.com/

19^th – http://www.mandilynn.com/

20^th – http://theteenagewriter.wordpress.com/

21^st – http://avonsbabbles.wordpress.com/

22^nd – http://realityisimaginary.blogspot.com

23^rd – http://miriamjoywrites.wordpress.com/

24^th – http://anomalous93.blogspot.com/

25^th – http://thelittleenginethatcouldnt.wordpress.com/

26^th – http://ktlemonhead.wordpress.com/

27^th – http://dreamerheadquarters.wordpress.com/

28^th – http://paulinaczarnecki.wordpress.com/

29^th – http://www.lilyjenness.blogspot.com/

30th – http://teenscanwritetoo.wordpress.com/ (We’ll announce the topic for next month’s chain.)

The 2012-2013 School Year In Review

I don’t think it’s too early to do this post – we’ve always finished our homeschooling before the local public schools end their year. I have about two more weeks left of regular work and my second semester of college Spanish wraps up tomorrow after I take the final.

When my brother Quentin and I were younger one of our writing assignments towards the end of the year was to write about our favorite and least favorite parts of the school year, so I’m going to do that now.

The Good

1. Spanish 101 and 102 at college. Taking these classes gave me a lot of confidence. I now know that my Spanish skills are actually pretty good for my level. I learned so much vocabulary and feel like I’ve finally gotten the hang of conjugation. It’s also cool that other people there don’t think I’m only in high school. My 102 teacher found out just the other day that I’m only a sophomore and she was so impressed I thought she was going to fall out of her chair. 

2. Studying world religions. I’ll probably do a separate post of what I loved about this subject but I thought I should list it here anyway. I love learning about other cultures, including their religions. I’m an atheist but I think it’s fascinating how religion impacts the lives of others. Very frequently while reading/watching stuff for the course I’d go, “Oh, so that’s why they do/say that! That makes sense now!” Finally, I understand things like the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam or the Christian God-is-three-parts thing. 

3. Studying classical mythology as part of English. OK, so I’m not too fond of Ovid’s stuff. Also the lectures I watch as part of my coursework are a little weird because the teacher reads sexual symbolism into everything. But I get to read about Heracles! And Medea! And the Trojan War! And it all counts as school! My favorite part is probably the writing assignment – I have to write a short story using some of the characters/plots from my reading. I’m currently working on several because I keep changing my idea, but the final one will probably be about Heracles because he’s hilarious. He’s so strong and powerful but not very smart. 

The Bad

1. Physics. I like science but I prefer “squishier” science, as I call it – like biology. It’s easy for me to picture the parts of a cell or the insides of a frog but it’s much more difficult for me to imagine the forces acting on an object. I guess that’s because the forces themselves aren’t actually seen, just their effects. I am so happy that we have only one more chapter left!

2. Studying for the Academic Bowl. I enjoying participating in the actual Bowl but studying was a pain. The theme was “The Glory That Was Greece” and after a while all the names of places and people began to blur together in my head. (Why couldn’t they have had nice normal names like Bob and Joe? Far less confusing.) I don’t even want to write about this anymore. If only there were some way to know everything in the world without having to study it.

3. Civics. I like the subject itself, just not my textbook for it. Why can’t those horrid books be written like normal ones? I hate having to read the same sentence three times to understand what they’re saying. I could probably write better textbooks but they would probably be kind of funny and teachers would hate me because their students would be laughing too hard to take notes.

So my sophomore year is more or less finished. I can’t believe I’m already halfway through high school. I don’t know how I feel about that. My parents are starting to ask (read: pester) me more often about starting to look at colleges. Having attended college part-time, I’m not scared of it so on one hand I’m looking forward to seeing how I handle more classes when I attend full-time. I also just want to move out and see if I can live on my own without my mommy and daddy saving me from various things (read: myself).

But at the same time I’m slightly worried, not so much about college but about the thought that in three years I’ll independent. (Because of Indiana age cutoffs for school, I’ll be almost nineteen when I complete my senior year.) I mean, this is me you’re talking about. I’m the person who still loves picture books and often forgets which shoe is the left instead of the right.

And on that weird note, I’m going to end this post with a random song because I can’t think of a good way to wrap this up.

Homeschoolers In Fiction

The inspiration for this post comes from an article in the sadly now-defunct Secular Homeschooling Magazine. In it, Deborah Markus discusses the portrayal of homeschoolers in children’s and YA books. My post focuses on my specific experiences as a homeschooler trying and usually failing to find good books about others like me.

Quick, name a famous homeschooled character from any book at all!

You can’t, can you?

That’s not entirely surprising. We’re not in very many books.  Even when a book does feature homeschoolers (let alone portrays them well), it’s usually not well-known. (There is one big exception but I’m not sure most people realize the characters were homeschooled. Hint: It’s a series.) In all my wanderings about the library, I don’t think I’ve ever stumbled across a book with a homeschooled main character. I’ve always had to purposely look for them. It frustrates me. We’re not that weird. I know we only make up something like 3% of American schoolchildren but it’s not that uncommon to meet a homeschooled kid, so why shouldn’t it be that way in fiction?

What qualifies a character as homeschooled? Obviously if the book/author says they are, then they are. But what about books like Little House on the Prairie? Laura and her sisters didn’t attend school all the time; were they sometimes homeschooled? I would say no, at least not in the modern sense. Nowadays homeschooling is unusual but a few hundred years ago it was normal, so generally characters in historical fiction (or fantasy) don’t counts as homeschoolers.

Some of my homeschooled friends love Jerry Spinelli’s Stargirl books, but I don’t. I’m not a huge fan of Spinelli’s writing anyway but I gave them a try – and gagged the whole way through. The writing is like bad poetry and the main character is a pet-rat-owning, pioneer-dress-wearing, clueless-about-the-real-world freak. It’s funny; in real life all homeschoolers are often assumed to be ultra-religious but in fiction it’s presumed that we’re all hippies. If you found Luna Lovegood irritating then you will want to hurl Stargirl off a cliff. I don’t care if people wear pioneer dresses in public or don’t watch TV, but could authors please stop giving homeschooled characters all the quirks? Spread them out over all the characters!

There are two authors I want to pitch off a cliff: Christopher Paolini (but you already knew that) and Gordon Korman, the writer of Schooled. His main character is a boy who’s lived his whole life in a commune but eventually has to attend public school where (of course) he has no idea how the real world functions. He’s never handled money or eaten a pizza or seen a spitball. A few years ago my brother and I actually wrote to Korman to see if he had something against homeschoolers or was just stupid. It turns out it’s the latter, as his reply stated that he’d received similar letters from other homeschoolers and he had no idea why we were all so mad about the number of stereotypes in Schooled. I don’t even know why I still have a copy of that book. Maybe someday it’ll be so cold that I can burn it for warmth.

My favorite book about homeschoolers is Ida B… and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the World by Katherine Hannigan. Ida has to attend public school after her mother gets cancer and her family doesn’t have time to homeschool her in between doctor’s appointments and whatnot. Ida is smart and goofy; she reminds me of myself a little bit. I love that this book shows the good and bad sides of homeschooling and school. I can’t remember if Ida returns to homeschooling at the end but I think she might, which doesn’t usually happen.

Unfortunately, Ida is also nine years old. I like little kids, but where are the books about homeschoolers my own age? Plenty of families choose to continue homeschooling through high school. I want to see them in books – besides my own, that is! Most of my characters are homeschooled not because I’m trying to say grand things about homeschooling or even just have a little more diversity, but because it’s convenient. My characters are too busy traveling all over the world or assisting famous scientists in their research to be tied down to school schedules. I don’t feel bad about using homeschoolers because it’s easy since I know what it’s really like to be one. I’m sure books written by homeschoolers about homeschoolers exist, but I’ve never read any.

What homeschoolers have you found in fiction? What did you think about them?

P.S. Those famous homeschoolers are the Weasley kids from Harry Potter. Real live proof is here in this interview with J.K. Rowling. It’s also mentioned in Deathly Hallows that before Voldemort came to power a second time, wizarding families had the option of homeschooling their children instead of sending them to Hogwarts. To me, his banning homeschooling is even worse than the attempt to kill baby Harry! Just kidding.

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This isn’t related to homeschooling but on the occasion of Liam, Head Phil reaching six hundred followers on his blog, some other bloggers and I wrote a story for him. Go check it out. Now. It’s hilarious and I’m rather proud of my crazy little bit. (My section is fourth from the top, in pink.) It was amusing to see how crazy the other writers made “me”. Gee, thanks, guys.