Oh Nuts

Whenever possible I try to include a knit item in with the Christmas present that I give to the sibling that I have for that year. Two years ago I made a scarf for my sister to take with her to school, and last year I gave my other sister a pair of hand warmers that I made. This year my sister's friend T from school joined us for Christmas and was included in the sibling secret Santa and I picked her name. Since T is still in college I wanted to make sure that the presents that I gave her were light and easily transportable. So I decided to make her a hat using pretty yarn that I had found on sale at Jo-ann Fabrics earlier in the year. After finishing the hat, and including a pom-pom on top since my mom and sisters said it finished off the hat, I used the rest of the yarn to make a coordinating ear-warmer/headband. The pattern that I used for the hat is called "Horizontal Rib Hat" and I found it in a knitting book called 'Sock Yarn One-Skein Wonders.' For the

A couple of months ago three of my siblings re-painted and re-arranged their rooms. Since I have my own room now, the only changes that I have made so far have been to get rid of the bunk bed that was there and replaced it with two single beds, one is for guests or if my sister comes home to visit. I also moved a tall shelf-thing from where it had been at the end of the bunk beds to the corner next to my bed and moving a canvas picture from in between the windows to a different wall. During all of the re-painting and re-arranging of rooms, I had the idea to get a stencil and paint it in between the windows in my room. It took me a while to figure out what type of stencil I wanted to get and what size. The stencil that I ended up with is a set of 3 small-ish size stencils with an owl and flowers on them. After I had bought the stencils they sat in my room because I didn't know if I wanted to paint them all white and then go over them with another color so that they didn't ble

While it took me twenty-eight days to do it, but I won NaNoWriMo this year. But the writing of my novel is far from over because there is still quite a bit that I would like to add to it. Now that NaNo is finished I need to find the motivation to finish it and not let it sit and collect dust on my USB drive. During the month of November there was one day during the beginning and then two days this past week where I didn't reach the daily word goal of 1,667 words. But I managed to make it up by writing anywhere between 1,000 and 3,000 words each day to keep moving forward. Since all writing platforms (eg Google Docs, Microsoft Word, etc.) all have slight variations on what they consider words, like hyphenated words and that sort of thing. According to Word, numbers, when they are written out like 1234, are counted as words, which I thought was interesting but I kept it. And when I went to validate my novel after reaching 50,048 words the website added a few more words making t

Happy Thanksgiving to all of my readers and NaNo-ers from the US. I hope everyone enjoyed reading the two articles that I wrote and shared the past two weeks as well as the first NaNo update I shared. Because this can be a busy holiday for people here in the states I know that the word counts won't get added too, but I thought I would share some encouraging words today with a brief update on how I am doing. Photo by  Element5 Digital  on  Unsplash In my last update , I mentioned how I had made a calendar with a personal word goal for each day on it as well as using an outline and doing research on several different topics. Well, I have managed to keep up and still stay on top of my word count even though I started my job at Kohl's last week. Over the past couple of weeks, I have noticed that I tend to write the most at night when my family is starting to either head off to bed or sit in a different room quietly reading. Typically that happens between 9:00 - 10:00 pm, som

This is another article that I wrote for I&F, which is now called Fellowship and Fairydust . And this article is, as the title says, about Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys books. Photo by  Nicole Honeywill  on  Unsplash In 1926, the dearly loved Hardy Boys books were created by Edward Stratemeyer. The year 1930 saw the creation of Nancy Drew, the greatly loved girl detective by Stratemeyer as well. Both series were ghostwritten under the names Franklin W. Dixon and Caroline Keene. Most of The Hardy Boys series was actually written by a gentleman named Leslie McFarlane, and the Nancy Drew series was written by a lady named Mildred Benson. When Edward Stratemeyer first brought up the idea of the Nancy Drew series to the Grosset and Dunlap publishing company, who were publishing The Hardy Boys series at the time, he suggested that they call the series Stella Strong stories , Diana Drew stories , Diana Dare stories , Nan Nelson stories , Nan Drew stories or Helen Hale stor

Originally I wasn't going to share an update. Instead, I was going to do a couple of posts, like I did back in September, where I shared the pictures I am taking during another Instagram photo a day challenge that is NaNo related. But after I thought about it I changed my mind and decided to give you an update instead, because they are fun to write and while it doesn't count towards my 50,000 words I still enjoy writing here and filling you in on most things NaNo related. So here is my update on how things are going! Normally when I do NaNo I jump right in on the first and just start typing my ideas out without planning or doing research. And about halfway through I end up stopping and giving up because I am out of ideas or I feel like I am just repeating myself. Then last year I tried using an outline that I created and I was able to follow it for the most part before I just gave up and fell behind like I always do. But this year I actually put more effort into it and did

This is something that I put together years ago for an online magazine that I used to write for called "Ink and Fairyfust." And I just recently rediscovered it while I was cleaning out a lot of old docs in my Google Docs. Since it is NaNoWriMo now I figured it was a good time to share it. Photo by  Yeshi Kangrang  on  Unsplash “Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?...If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!” ― J.R.R. Tolkien “At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. But at its best it can do more; it can give us experie

At 12:00 am this morning, this thing called National Novel Writing Month aka NaNoWriMo started. I have mentioned it multiple times before and I will probably continue to mention it multiple times again this month as well as for the next few years. As we begin this month of insane writing here are a few memes and writing prompts that I have found on either Pinterest or Facebook and decided to share here. Enjoy!

If you know me, you know that I can't draw at all. But I can trace things pretty well as long as there is enough light. So either at the beginning of the month or back in September, I don't remember which, I saw that other NaNo-er's were creating maps of the countries/towns/cities that they will be using in their stories so I had the idea to create one of my own. When I first had the idea for this I went straight to Google Maps and looked up a couple different towns/cities that I have either lived in or visited and printed out the maps and used them to create the border of my town. The first outline.  After creating the outline, it sat around for a while until just recently when I decided to add more to it. So I created a copy of my outline and went to town adding roads, some parks, and a river. I even included little dots to indicate a library, a theater, a middle school, a junior high, a high school, a train station, a rec center, a shopping center, and an area m

I don't know if I ever shared the first cover I had made for the novel I will be attempting to write next month, but in the even that I did I have since changed the name of my work in progress. The name I had originally picked was Shadows of the Night, but as my plot has continued to change the name didn't really seem to fit anymore. Then the other day I was driving home from somewhere and I was listening to music and the song Roundtable Rival by Lindsey Stirling started playing. As the song was playing I felt like it fit more with the idea that I have for my novel. I have probably shared this already but in case you haven't heard it yet, my novel idea is a loose retelling of the story/legend of King Arthur and the knights of the roundtable. So that is how the name for my novel changed from being named after one song to being named after a different one.

As you probably know by now I have taken to writing word crawls. This is my third one so far. Last year as my first crawl I did the book Anne of Green Gables and when I shared it again on the NaNoWriMo site* this year someone asked if there were other crawls from the series and I said that I was going to work on a crawl for the second book "Anne of Avonlea" and here it is. I hope you enjoy it :) And I promise that this will be my last word crawl for a while so that I won't bore you with too many of them. Photo by  Edoardo Busti  on  Unsplash Chapter I. An Irate Neighbor: Write 500 words as Mr. Harrison tells Anne that her cow was in his oat field again and she tells Marilla about it over tea. Chapter II. Selling in Haste and Repenting in Leisure:   If you're a planner, write 200 words as Anne and Diana Berry discuss the Improvement Society. If you're a plantser or a pantser write between 300 words and 600 words as Anne and Diana find a cow in Mr.

Back in November, during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) ,  I wrote a post on something called word crawls and I explained what those were. I also shared a word crawl that I attempted based on the book "Anne of Green Gables." Well, this year I tried my hand at writing another word crawl, this time using the book "Pride and Prejudice." Photo by  Aaron Burden  on  Unsplash Chapter 1: Write 1,000 words as Mrs. Bennet tells Mr. Bennet that Netherfield Park is let at last to Mr. Bingley. Chapter 2: Sprint for 4 mins as Mr. Bennet teases Mrs. Bennet and his daughters about not visiting Mr. Bingley when he did. Chapter 3: Roll a die and multiply the number by 10 and write that many words as everyone dances at the assembly. Chapter 4: Do a fifty-headed hydra as Elizabeth and Jane talk about Mr. Bingley. Chapter 5: Take the last digit of your word count and multiply it by 100 and write that as the Miss Bennet’s’ and the Lucas’ discus

Well, today is the last day of the #InstaWrimo prep month and I have enjoyed doing it all month and sharing the pictures with everyone here. If I haven't already I apologize if it seems like I am bombarding people with stuff for NaNoWriMo . But that is my "theme" right now since I don't know what else to write about at the moment. Of course, I will try to come up with other topics that aren't just about NaNoWriMo. Anyhow enough with my rambling, because here are the last six pictures as well as the links backs to the intro and days 1-6 , days  7-12 ,  days 13-18 and days 19-24 . Day 25: Theme song for your MC  While I don't have a specific theme for my male MC I think this sums up part of what he goes through in my novel. Day 26: What's in your MC's pocket?  In my MC's pocket is earbuds, a rosary, nail clippers, chapstick, a pen, a small notebook, a St. Anthony medal, and a St. Joseph medal. Day 27: Outli