Oh Nuts

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...

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 H...

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 exper...

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!