Don't Even Bother Reading This

Yay! No track practice today! woot woot. :) Sorry. i feel like being lazy today. Will be back with more.

Time to Slow Down

Ok, my marathon of writing is finally over! (That's a lie. I'm always on a marathon of writing.) But nonetheless, I am temporarily taking a pit stop. I finished three essays for a journalism workshop in DC last week (and discovered how important the First Amendment is). I finished writing an article for Current Events magazine from Weekly Reader and was only 4 words above the "limit". Hahaha but it's all good. Time to have some fun. Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day everyone!

More hours in the day!

I need more hours in the day. Doesn't everybody? Just more time to work, more time to relax, more time to sleep. An extra four hours would be great.

I'm working on an application for a journalism workshop in DC. Hopefully, I'll get in because  I really want to do this. For some reason though, writing about something I'm passionate about is a lot harder than writing about something I'm not. Example: I had to write an essay to get into the top high school in the nation. That school is really into math and science and I'm not, but I was able to write an amazing essay about why I wanted to go there. And I got in! But I didn't go in the end because I seriously didn't want to be there. Now I really want to go to this journalism workshop, but I can't find powerful enough words to say it in!! Does that ever happen to you?

Anyways, the Columbia College Chicago Young Writer's Contest ends on Friday. If you want to enter it, get writing. The info is in the "One Down..." post.

Today, we got our PSAT scores back. I've been waiting for those forever, and for once I got a relatively good score on the writing section. I don't know what it is about me and standardized tests, but on the writing sections, I never get as high of a score as I want to. The PSAT score wasn't bad, not bad at all.

Alrightee, must go back to studying for two tests tomorrow. C ya!

New Contest

Erma Bombeck Writing Competition. Deadline: Jan 31. Submit: Personal essays of 450 words or fewer. Can be entered in the humor or human interest category. Prizes: $100. Free admission to a writing workshop. Publication on website and in local newspaper. http://www.wclibrary.info/erma/index.asp.

Ideas: The Finished, The In-Progress, and The MIA

Finished: Ok, so my overly ambitious plans to enter all these contests is not gonna happen. I'm just happy I finally finished my Scholastic Art and Writing Award forms signed and put it in an envelope. That's going in the mail tomorrow. Yay! I kissed it for good luck.

In Progress: I also saw the almost finished draft of the school news magazine that my article is getting published in. It looks so awesome. Man, I love that feeling. Bylines. Columns. A big and bold headline. It's amazing.

So today, I just recently thought of two really good places to find ideas.

The MIA
1. Yahoo answers. Have you ever looked at those? Some of them are really vague. Some are universal. Some have the craziest situations with insane answers to match. Wow. Good writing material.

2. Darn. I forgot the second one. Ugh. I hate when that happens. It was today. Hmmmm. Maybe I'll think of it.

3. Well, I have some more anyways. fmylife.com. I'm sure you've probably already been here, but it's the best for finding situations to put your character in. After all, being embarrassed shows a lot about your personality.

4. Carolyn Hax columns. Ok, ok, any advice column would do, but I particularly like hers. Characters need problems after all. And Carolyn Hax is ready to tell you what you didn't want to hear.

Weekend is almost here everybody! :)

The Wonderful World of Rewriting

It was a rough morning trying to get up for school this morning. Then my bus was late, and it was freezing! But even after an intense indoor track workout, all ended well. I finally finished editing my Scholastic Art and Writing Awards entry! This is probably the fifth time I've tackled rewriting it (I'm very particular about making everything sound just right), but I'm finally happy about it and can't wait to send it off. Or it could just be because I'm tired of seeing it. Anyways, two more contests I'll have to find time for before Friday. Hopefully.

If you happen to rewriting something, I always...

-Read it out loud. Many times. Even after you change just one word. You can catch a lot of grammar mistakes that way. Plus it improves sentence fluency.

-Refer to Elements of Style. It's like the writing bible. Seriously, you have to live by it.

-Put it away for a couple days and come back to it. You will finally figure out a way to fix the passage that always sounded a bit awkward.

Later gators!

New Year's!

Happy New Year's everyone! Hope you all didn't stay up too late last night. I was watching the ball drop on tv and I don't know if that's gonna be on my to do list anymore. It looks like so much fun and all, but they had been standing there for ages and it looked so cold and how do they go to the bathroom?? Hahaha.

So anyways, my new year's resolutions are...

1) Write consistently. Do not make excuses.
2) Keep room clean.
3) Get a faster mile time. (I run cross country and indoor track)
4) Land double lutz consistently. (I compete in figure skating, too)
5) Eat healthier. Not that I am trying to lose weight or anything. Just maybe I don't need all those deserts.

If anybody was wondering, I never did finish an entry for the Seventeen Fiction Contest. Everything I wrote didn't seem to fit. I considered sending something I had written a long time ago, but that was like not even trying, and I wasn't about to make the judges read another mediocre story. Not all was lost, though. I ended up writing something that I think I will enter in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards (after a little rewriting, of course). It was like when you're looking for a specific word in a word search, but you end up finding a different word instead. Hahaha I love when that happens!

Best wishes for the New Year!