Alright, alright, so I missed a day or two. Don't judge me. Hahaha! Here's another snippet of encouragement to brighten your day.
"The Lord bless you abundantly... exceedingly abundantly! I pray that your life... your words... spoken, written and sung will bring glory to God. May your words be words of wisdom, insight, hope, and love that turn hearts to the Father."
-Grace
Friday, March 15, 2013
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Words of Encouragement #3
"God has given you many gifts and talents. As you pursue Him with all of your heart, those gifts and talents will develop to the fullness. Keep the Lord as your center and blessings will come your way. It has been a privilege watching you grow up and become a godly young woman. Live your life with passion and a pure heart for Jesus!
Love in Christ..."
-Grace
Love in Christ..."
-Grace
Monday, March 11, 2013
Words of Encouragement #2
Yes, I'm actually sticking with this. Someone shoot me off a comment if I forget tomorrow.
"Blessed by the Lord in abundance! That is you *insert name here*! May His Spirit reign in your life every moment of every day. May He take you into the Holiest Place showing you and revealing to you His plan! Seek His heart, seek His face, seek His way, seek His Word. You can NEVER have too much of him! I pray His guidance in your life and that His favor will be upon you."
-Grace
"Blessed by the Lord in abundance! That is you *insert name here*! May His Spirit reign in your life every moment of every day. May He take you into the Holiest Place showing you and revealing to you His plan! Seek His heart, seek His face, seek His way, seek His Word. You can NEVER have too much of him! I pray His guidance in your life and that His favor will be upon you."
-Grace
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Words of Encouragement #1
I've decided to start a little series on my blog here, nothing fancy, just words of encouragement. I have this notebook I got for my graduation party where people wrote little things, words of wisdom, things like that, and I wanted to share them with you (whoever "you" may be).
This one is probably the one that has stuck with me the most, and I hope it helps you, too.
"Dear Grace,
Thinking back on the time that has passed since my high school graduation, I want to offer this:
Don't wait until tomorrow!
Obey the Lord and then follow your dreams with relentless vigor and passion. Do not let obstacles deter you. Don't wait for the 'perfect timing' to occur. Make it happen with prayer and persistence. If you delay, time is lost. And you can't get it back. (At least this side of Heaven!)
Congratulations!"
-Grace
This one is probably the one that has stuck with me the most, and I hope it helps you, too.
"Dear Grace,
Thinking back on the time that has passed since my high school graduation, I want to offer this:
Don't wait until tomorrow!
Obey the Lord and then follow your dreams with relentless vigor and passion. Do not let obstacles deter you. Don't wait for the 'perfect timing' to occur. Make it happen with prayer and persistence. If you delay, time is lost. And you can't get it back. (At least this side of Heaven!)
Congratulations!"
-Grace
Saturday, March 2, 2013
Research
I have a whole new respect for historical fiction writers, especially those who prefer the 1930s. Geez! The other day I found myself looking up the history of ice cream, ice cream sundaes, hot fudge, milkshakes, cars, radios, meals, Little Red Riding Hood, all surmounting to my fifth story which I am desperate to come out in the next couple weeks. Otherwise I've been crunching my time to finish this story THIS WEEK for nothing. Did you know that DC Comics, Inc. wasn't founded until 1934 (four years after my timeline) and Marvel Worldwide, Inc. aka Marvel Comics didn't start until 1939 (you do the math)? And even then it wasn't "Marvel." It was something like Timely Publications or something, went through a name change or two, and it wasn't until, like, the 60s that it actually became Marvel Comics. None of this is crucial to my story, of course, but I did want maybe Ant-Man to be a role model for these kids, but no, Ant-Man didn't appear until 1962, I think. Even G.I. Joes didn't come into play until the 60s. Bottom line: I couldn't find any action figures for these kids to play with or look up to. All they had was reality and books. Granted, a healthy dose of reality is good for a kid to aspire to; I'm just saying it was a real wake-up call. These kids had to depend on their own imagination, something that I think was lost in the generations that followed. When I watch kids, they want to listen to music or watch t.v. or play on a cell phone. Yeah, it's not even a computer anymore. Smartphones are the new computers. The other day I forbid myself to go on Youtube for one whole day. I did it. Felt pretty good. It felt... refreshing. That's not to say I wasn't on my computer, because the whole point was to stay off Youtube so I could get some writing in. Which I did, I'm proud to say.
Crap. I forgot my point. It had something to do with researching ice cream. Oh yeah!
You know I don't think I had to be this careful when I wrote my last story, and that was written in a foreign country before 1920! Perhaps it was because I was so in-tune with the time, character, and country. How sad is that? I'm not even in-tune with my own home.
I really want to get this done. It's hard for me to concentrate on one thing for so long, or maybe my attention-span has shortened. I remember in high school I could spend hours upon hours just writing stories. I wanted to spend the whole day doing it, but I knew I might get tired of it, plus I had other school work to do. Writing was my escape. It got me out of my head for a few hours. Now that it's all I'm doing, I'M the one who needs a healthy dose of reality. Kathryn Miller Haines, author of the Rosie Winter books, said when she writes, it feels like this forbidden thing. She'll be at her day job and a flash of inspiration will hit her. She'll bring up a new window and start writing, even though she's technically on the clock. I guess I'm just hung up on getting this series done, but I'm trying to stay on the positive side. It's almost done (both the story and the series) and then I can move onto something else. In the meantime I'm becoming a master procrastinator.
Anyway, look for my next story, whose title I will think of eventually. In the meantime here's a link to "Tried and Treacherous." It's only $0.99 and a sure pleaser for Russian diehards, fiction-lovers, conspiracy theorists, and Disney addicts. Okay, 50/50 on the Disney thing, but still. Enjoy!
http://www.amazon.com/The-Woman-Scarlet-Treacherous-ebook/dp/B00BC7B9FK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1362272866&sr=8-1&keywords=tried+and+treacherous
Later!
-Grace
Crap. I forgot my point. It had something to do with researching ice cream. Oh yeah!
You know I don't think I had to be this careful when I wrote my last story, and that was written in a foreign country before 1920! Perhaps it was because I was so in-tune with the time, character, and country. How sad is that? I'm not even in-tune with my own home.
I really want to get this done. It's hard for me to concentrate on one thing for so long, or maybe my attention-span has shortened. I remember in high school I could spend hours upon hours just writing stories. I wanted to spend the whole day doing it, but I knew I might get tired of it, plus I had other school work to do. Writing was my escape. It got me out of my head for a few hours. Now that it's all I'm doing, I'M the one who needs a healthy dose of reality. Kathryn Miller Haines, author of the Rosie Winter books, said when she writes, it feels like this forbidden thing. She'll be at her day job and a flash of inspiration will hit her. She'll bring up a new window and start writing, even though she's technically on the clock. I guess I'm just hung up on getting this series done, but I'm trying to stay on the positive side. It's almost done (both the story and the series) and then I can move onto something else. In the meantime I'm becoming a master procrastinator.
Anyway, look for my next story, whose title I will think of eventually. In the meantime here's a link to "Tried and Treacherous." It's only $0.99 and a sure pleaser for Russian diehards, fiction-lovers, conspiracy theorists, and Disney addicts. Okay, 50/50 on the Disney thing, but still. Enjoy!
http://www.amazon.com/The-Woman-Scarlet-Treacherous-ebook/dp/B00BC7B9FK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1362272866&sr=8-1&keywords=tried+and+treacherous
Later!
-Grace
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Spiraling
I don't know what to talk about. Right now I feel like I'm just going through the motions. Where to start?
The story. Okay. Let's start with the story. Or more accurately, the backstory.
A few years ago, my best friend and I came up with the concept of a story. I won't tell you the name of it for copyright reasons. Let's just refer to it as Story E. So we came up with a list of characters for Story E, four sisters. That was my friend's idea. But the names were a collaborative thing. Initially the siblings would each control an element: fire, water, earth, and air. We came up with names and characteristics which branched from their respective element. Ivy was the oldest; Venus had blue hair, etc. I sometimes wonder what happened to that. The blue hair, I mean. No one has blue hair these days, not even in books. Wait, scratch that. In "Daughter of Smoke and Bone," I'm pretty sure the protagonist has blue hair. Natural blue hair. What I want to know is, why don't people, writers, go off on limbs like that? Make the impossible part of their ordinary world? I miss that kind of creativity. There's a story, a prequel, to a series I wrote a couple of years ago about princesses. And the style of the prequel was so different from how I write now I almost don't even recognize it. But I love it. It was formal yet humorous (if I do say so myself) and pleasantly impossible. I miss writing like that.
But here I am, going off on bunny trails, as a friend of mine would say.
What happened to Story E? Well... it's still in progress. I treasure this one probably above all the others. Why? Maybe because its origins extend not just from me, but also from my best friend. So I'm still writing it, and I like where it's going, even though I'm sort of working through it scene-by-scene, none of which are in any order whatsoever. But at least they're being written. Slowly. Agonizingly slowly. Grrr. How is it that the backstory, the history of the characters, is more exciting than the book itself? (Yes, this one is far too complicated to be some 30-some page beach read.) I love just thinking about the characters. My favorite thus far is a redhead; not the orangeish color people label as redhead, but an actual, deep red, like what Catelyn Tully from Game of Thrones has. Of course, George R.R. Martin describes it as auburn hair. Maybe that's my problem. Maybe I have to say it's auburn and not red. But I really like red. There's just something so rebellious and independent about writing someone with red hair. Gah, details. Literally can't write without them. At my writer's group last month, the alpha male of our group was saying how quests are overrated. If an agent picks up a proposal/query letter and sees the word "quest," they'll toss it aside without reading any further. Bummer, right? But I like quests. People like quests. They like the adventure and tromping through forests and swamps and near-death experiences. Quests are an opportunity for change. At least those are my observances.
Story E is basically about a quest. Question is: how do I make it not a quest after thinking of it as a quest for this long, though never actually recalling the word "quest" in my mind? I wonder if the characters will somehow separate. Not by chance or by battle, as with The Lord of the Rings. But what if it was totally natural? One of the characters does meet up with the others by chance, but their purpose is revenge. They have been wronged by the evil dictator and are now out for blood. But what if that person found they did not need their anger to drive them? What if they discovered their own contentment in, say, a village of people they could agree with, and couldn't find the fire that drove their need for vengeance anymore? Could that happen? Would it happen? And what of the others? Who is the lynch pin? What sub-journeys would they encounter on this quest that is beginning to dwindle? None of the characters really had a common purpose other than their destination. Can I really write something where the characters break apart like that? And to what end? To what purpose? All to avoid the use of the word "quest"?
You know what's nice about a blog? It's a great place to unload, to organize your thoughts, and then later, delete them.
I'm not sure who I'm talking to or if this has been a gigantic waste of your time... but if you read this... thanks.
-Grace
PS: I promise to limit the amount of sappy, emotional girl drama that make it on this page.
The story. Okay. Let's start with the story. Or more accurately, the backstory.
A few years ago, my best friend and I came up with the concept of a story. I won't tell you the name of it for copyright reasons. Let's just refer to it as Story E. So we came up with a list of characters for Story E, four sisters. That was my friend's idea. But the names were a collaborative thing. Initially the siblings would each control an element: fire, water, earth, and air. We came up with names and characteristics which branched from their respective element. Ivy was the oldest; Venus had blue hair, etc. I sometimes wonder what happened to that. The blue hair, I mean. No one has blue hair these days, not even in books. Wait, scratch that. In "Daughter of Smoke and Bone," I'm pretty sure the protagonist has blue hair. Natural blue hair. What I want to know is, why don't people, writers, go off on limbs like that? Make the impossible part of their ordinary world? I miss that kind of creativity. There's a story, a prequel, to a series I wrote a couple of years ago about princesses. And the style of the prequel was so different from how I write now I almost don't even recognize it. But I love it. It was formal yet humorous (if I do say so myself) and pleasantly impossible. I miss writing like that.
But here I am, going off on bunny trails, as a friend of mine would say.
What happened to Story E? Well... it's still in progress. I treasure this one probably above all the others. Why? Maybe because its origins extend not just from me, but also from my best friend. So I'm still writing it, and I like where it's going, even though I'm sort of working through it scene-by-scene, none of which are in any order whatsoever. But at least they're being written. Slowly. Agonizingly slowly. Grrr. How is it that the backstory, the history of the characters, is more exciting than the book itself? (Yes, this one is far too complicated to be some 30-some page beach read.) I love just thinking about the characters. My favorite thus far is a redhead; not the orangeish color people label as redhead, but an actual, deep red, like what Catelyn Tully from Game of Thrones has. Of course, George R.R. Martin describes it as auburn hair. Maybe that's my problem. Maybe I have to say it's auburn and not red. But I really like red. There's just something so rebellious and independent about writing someone with red hair. Gah, details. Literally can't write without them. At my writer's group last month, the alpha male of our group was saying how quests are overrated. If an agent picks up a proposal/query letter and sees the word "quest," they'll toss it aside without reading any further. Bummer, right? But I like quests. People like quests. They like the adventure and tromping through forests and swamps and near-death experiences. Quests are an opportunity for change. At least those are my observances.
Story E is basically about a quest. Question is: how do I make it not a quest after thinking of it as a quest for this long, though never actually recalling the word "quest" in my mind? I wonder if the characters will somehow separate. Not by chance or by battle, as with The Lord of the Rings. But what if it was totally natural? One of the characters does meet up with the others by chance, but their purpose is revenge. They have been wronged by the evil dictator and are now out for blood. But what if that person found they did not need their anger to drive them? What if they discovered their own contentment in, say, a village of people they could agree with, and couldn't find the fire that drove their need for vengeance anymore? Could that happen? Would it happen? And what of the others? Who is the lynch pin? What sub-journeys would they encounter on this quest that is beginning to dwindle? None of the characters really had a common purpose other than their destination. Can I really write something where the characters break apart like that? And to what end? To what purpose? All to avoid the use of the word "quest"?
You know what's nice about a blog? It's a great place to unload, to organize your thoughts, and then later, delete them.
I'm not sure who I'm talking to or if this has been a gigantic waste of your time... but if you read this... thanks.
-Grace
PS: I promise to limit the amount of sappy, emotional girl drama that make it on this page.
Thursday, February 7, 2013
"The Woman in Scarlet -Volume 4 -Tried and Treacherous"
Hello, hello, hello. Nice to be back.
Well, I can't tell you how good it feels to see my next story up on Amazon. The fourth installment, and one of the most important, "The Woman in Scarlet -Volume 4 -Tried and Treacherous".
I decided to take this story back to its Russian roots, so over Christmas break I was engulfing myself in the history, the culture, jotting down notes about meals and folklore and making a timeline and revising it. Exhausting? Forsooth! But it was worth it, I think. This honestly would have been a nice place to end the series, but I'm determined to sketch out the Woman in Scarlet's character a bit more, and I think you will see why after this episode.
A little background: In 1918, the majority of Russia was seized by the Red Army, the Bolsheviks, and former Tsar Nicholas was whisked off to Moscow for his trial, accompanied by his wife Alexandra and their third daughter Maria. While events unfold, the infamous Anastasia will soon learn why certain temptations have... treacherous results.
Don't worry. Nothing graphic and scary, but the twist is certainly not something you would expect.
I hope you do enjoy this story, and just remember: it isn't the end.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Woman-Scarlet-Treacherous-ebook/dp/B00BC7B9FK/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1360265994&sr=1-1&keywords=the+woman+in+scarlet+tried+and+treacherous
-Grace
Well, I can't tell you how good it feels to see my next story up on Amazon. The fourth installment, and one of the most important, "The Woman in Scarlet -Volume 4 -Tried and Treacherous".
I decided to take this story back to its Russian roots, so over Christmas break I was engulfing myself in the history, the culture, jotting down notes about meals and folklore and making a timeline and revising it. Exhausting? Forsooth! But it was worth it, I think. This honestly would have been a nice place to end the series, but I'm determined to sketch out the Woman in Scarlet's character a bit more, and I think you will see why after this episode.
A little background: In 1918, the majority of Russia was seized by the Red Army, the Bolsheviks, and former Tsar Nicholas was whisked off to Moscow for his trial, accompanied by his wife Alexandra and their third daughter Maria. While events unfold, the infamous Anastasia will soon learn why certain temptations have... treacherous results.
Don't worry. Nothing graphic and scary, but the twist is certainly not something you would expect.
I hope you do enjoy this story, and just remember: it isn't the end.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Woman-Scarlet-Treacherous-ebook/dp/B00BC7B9FK/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1360265994&sr=1-1&keywords=the+woman+in+scarlet+tried+and+treacherous
-Grace
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