The New Year & Being You

It's 11:48 pm, December 31st. Let's talk about 2016.

The Perfect Life & Success

The other day, I took my little brother Jack to the park. Well, it was more like a playground with surrounding patches of grass. Unlike most days, there were a lot of kids there. They were mostly at or a few years around my brother's age. This got me thinking. What exactly is success? It's not an object, that's for sure. It's an idea. It's a goal, or is it? At what point in your life do you say: "I have succeeded." Succeeded at what? Life in general?

Global Compassion | P4A

Good Morning, Good Afternoon, Good Evening, and/or Good Night! We're about 9 hours away from Project For Awesome, and I'm so excited! I just finished uploading my video to YouTube, so if any of you want to watch it...it's below the page break.

Project For Awesome Aproacheth!

It's that time of year again! Time for the nerds to take over YouTube! If you have no idea what I'm talking about, or if you do, please read the following post!

YWP?

This year, I recorded my noveling adventures on both the adult NaNoWriMo site and NaNoWriMo's site for students, Young Writers Program. This was because I decided on doing NaNoWriMo a few months before signing up for YWP. YWP came in when I went to school and discovered that some of my classmates were doing it too, so I thought, 'Why the heck not?"

Over the past month, every lunch time, I take my lunch into the library (per the librarian's approval of course) and write. I did this with a couple of friends, and have found it to be quite delightful. (Ugh. I can't believe I said that.) The point is it was fun. There was a group of people there that could answer my questions if I had them, and they were real world answers. Not google answers.

There is a certain bliss to writing on your own though, and that was part of the appeal of NaNoWriMo to me. In language arts, we always have to write such a short amount of words and then have our peers check over it. NaNoWriMo was kind of the way for me to let loose and just write and not care about editing. Believe me, I didn't care about editing. My draft is horrible. I really need to finish and then revise it.

My message to teachers: YWP is an amazing program that I think every language arts/humanities teacher should do with his or her class. By choosing your own goal, you don't have to commit to the 50k that seems impossible (even though it isn't.). But a word of caution to teachers who do this, don't force your kids to edit and revise. Your students are trying to write a novel, and editing a first draft of a novel is like knitting with cooked spaghetti. A little bit gross and basically futile. (That was not my quote. If I could, I would say who said it, but that information is buried deep in the twitter madness of the NaNoWriMo twitter account.)

Would anybody be interested in an excerpt from my novel? I'm nowhere near finished, but I feel like I need somebody to tell me what they think.

Cheers, DFTBA, and Good Night.
Anna Grace