Today

Today was relatively uneventful.  I’ve been sick with some sort of upper respiratory thing since last Saturday.  I was better yesterday, but this morning, I woke up with another sore throat.  Hopefully it’s just having one last hurrah before it finally leaves my body once and for all!  Or at least until next time… 

On a more writing-related note, I’m going to meet with the woman who edited my manuscript on Monday.  I’m very excited to hear her thoughts and critiques.  Slightly less excited about editing again since it always takes a lot longer than I think it will, but I am looking forward to taking the final steps to improving my book and hopefully getting it ready to send out to agents and publishers (that is, if they ask to see it).  I guess that means my next step, after editing, will be writing a really outstanding query letter.  

Easier said than done.  

In the mean time, here are some scandalous confessions.  

1.  I don’t like reading, writing, or watching action scenes.  I think they’re so boring.  

2.  The only classic old movie that I really enjoy is White Christmas.

3.  I despise Hagrid from Harry Potter.  I resent him for living while all of my favorite characters ended up dead or earless.  

4.  I’ve never seen the original Star Wars trilogy because Yoda scares me.

5.  My favorite movie in the world is Titanic and I still bawl my eyes out every time I watch it.

6.  Ironically, I’ve never watched Titanic all the way through.  I always skip the beginning because sunken ships also scare me.  

7.  Whenever I start a new story, I create a specific playlist on iTunes that I think would be the soundtrack to the movie.  When I actually start to write that story, everything plays out like a movie in my head, and I write what I see.  

8.  I don’t understand anyone who thinks that Katniss should have ended up with Gale.  

9.  I tried reading A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L’Engle in elementary school but I stopped because I got jealous of Vicky’s ability to communicate with dolphins.  I finally read it at the beginning of 2010 after watching the Disney Channel Original Movie on YouTube.  It is now one of my very favorite books.  

For the life of me, I can’t think of a Number 10, so I think I’ll just get back to writing my new manuscript and leave it at that!  

Until next time! 🙂

Cool!

I have followers!  I guess that means I really need to try to be interesting.  I definitely plan to follow back just as soon as I figure out how to do that.  I’m not very tech-savvy, you see.

In the mean time, here are a few interesting/vanity facts about me and reading and writing.

1. I began writing for fun at the age of three after my preschool teacher read my class Shortcut by Donald Crews.  Granted, all I really did was rewrite books and Disney movies that I already knew and loved, so really, it was was just the preschool version of fanfiction, but hey, it was a start.

2. I actually began writing fanfiction the summer that the fifth Harry Potter book came out, right before I started tenth grade.  I was so obsessed with Harry and the Weasleys and Sirius that I stayed up all night reading and ended up fainting the next day due to heat and lack of sleep.  I wanted to go on reading, but my mom made me take a nap.  Rude.  Anyway, after I finally finished (totally devastated, I might add), I realized that I couldn’t just wait around for the next book.  I needed more Harry.  So I decided to start writing my own.

3.  I continued writing for fun until my junior year of college.  That was the year my body decided it was going to get sick every time I was really looking forward to doing something, like having a spring break.  I spent the entire break on the “sick couch,” achey and congested and just plain miserable.  I was angry too.  I wanted to have fun over spring break!  Not being able to breathe through my nose was not fun.  But instead of moping around and feeling sorry for myself (which I do quite a lot when I’m sick), I decided to retrieve the stack of Nicholas Sparks novels that I’d purchased a few days earlier (I’m a huge sucker for romance and beach towns).  Halfway through one of them, True Believer, there is a paragraph about tiny shampoo bottles in the guest room of a house near Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.  I loved it because in that instant, I felt like I was there, in that room, getting ready for a night of romance.  Then I thought to myself, “Hey, I bet I could do that too.”  And that’s when I decided that one day, I was going to be an author.

That was really long.  I’ll try to keep it short from now on.

4. My writing idol is Meg Cabot.  I love her.  I love her books.  I love her style.  I love her sense of humor.  And I really love that she Tweets about her cats as much as I do (I have two cats; one is a nineteen-year-old Blue Tortie who still thinks she’s a baby and the other is a three-legged, former stray, black cat with a menthol habit and who will not chase bugs despite the fact that she used to hunt squirrels in our backyard).

5.  Whenever I am feeling stressed, I reread The Hunger Games trilogy.  I’m pretty sure I would not have made it through grad school without Katniss and Peeta.

6.  I am a huge, nerdy fangirl at heart.

7.  My guiltiest guilty pleasure (aside from Nicholas Sparks novels) is the Twilight franchise.  I definitely saw the last movie at midnight.  No judging.

8.  I love television as much as I love to read.  Criminal Minds, House MD, Big Bang Theory, Sherlock, and Ghost Adventures are a few of my favorites.

9.  I am a fourth-generation Episcopalian and I love it (not really anything to do with writing, but relevant I suppose).

10.  My other great passions, aside from writing, are traveling, photography, and basically anything that has to do with the ocean.  One of my lifelong dreams has been to photograph orcas in the wild.  Another is to help out at a marine mammal rescue/rehabilitation facility.

Now that I have bored you all to tears about me, what do you like?  How did you get into writing?  What are your stories?

Introduction

Hi!  I’m Jackie.  I’m 25 years old, I love nature, photography, and Texas, I have a Master’s degree, and I’m an aspiring novelist.  I’ve written two novels, a screenplay, a children’s book, and have at least seven other ideas in mind and/or in progress.  

Though to be totally honest, the screenplay really sucked.  So did the first novel.  

I like my second novel a lot though.  And that’s why I’ve started this blog.  

As a young aspiring author, I need all the help and advice I can get as I embark on the journey that will hopefully lead to publication.  As of right now, the novel is in the final stages of being edited by an incredibly intelligent women, a dear friend of the family, and someone whom I hold in the highest respect.  After she’s given me her feedback, I plan to start seeking out a literary agent to help guide and assist me on my quest.

Okay, this is starting to sound like a bad Lord of the Rings fanfiction.  

In all seriousness though, this whole process is a lot more complicated than I expected iit would be.  I always thought that finishing the book was the hard part and the rest would all sort of just fall into place. Not the case.  Writing is the easy part.  Writing is the fun part.  That’s why I want to be a writer.  I love it.