Jessica Ralston's Blog

In preparation for National Novel Month (a little less than three weeks away), I’ve decided I’m going to post every day for the rest of October.

You have been forewarned.

It’s part of Post A Day/Week 2011. I’m a little late on the 2011 thing (it’s October) and on the 30 days of posting thing (it’s October 13), but better late than never. It’s not just in preparation for NaNoWrimo, I’ve actually wanted to start blogging more. I used to blog a lot, on my defunct LiveJournal account, but it was mostly late teens/early-20s whinging. This time it’ll be mid-20s whinging with a side of writerly thoughts, as well as the rest of my stay in China, and what I’ve been reading/watching/listening to/taking pictures of.

So, tag along if you want to, comment, like, read along and let me know what you think.

I’ll be posting through the month of November too!

I dislike my job immensely. Except the pay is A+++

The end.

P.S. I get too excited for the Universal Orlando Harry Potter commercials. I am 10.

I’ve made my Screnzy decision!

I’m adapting a novel called “Sabriel,” by Garth Nix. The point was brought up on the Screnzy forums that you can’t do anything with an adapted novel, but it’ll be fun either way. I can just finish it and put it away, because I don’t know the first thing about shopping a screenplay adapted from a novel.

The plotting side of my brain is exhausted from NaNoWriMo, seriously. I don’t think that side of my brain could come up with something viable for a screenplay, with characters, a plot, an arc…I can’t even finish my novel without a struggle.

Anyway. Tonight I’m really going to sit down and finish out this chapter. I sketched it out in my notebook, because I really felt like the part I’m at needed to be written out longhand. That and the blinking cursor was just really intimidating.

I have to get a lot done during the nights leading up to Friday, because Friday and Saturday are pretty packed with Cage the Elephant in Buffalo with P (where I will not be a chicken shit, no!), and a baby shower to set up and attend on Saturday.

Maybe Sunday will be a good day for writing. I think it’s supposed to be sunny, so going out on the porch wouldn’t be totally out of the question.

there’s just a very strong possibility that this could be the best thing to ever happen to you and i don’t want you to miss out because you’re a chickenshit.

She is totally right. I have to get over this.

I’ve been trying to read a lot more lately. My thinking on this is that a good reader a good writer makes. Totally logical.

It also gives me incentive to buy new books. One or two a month, that is it! I have a limit.

I will probably want to talk about the books, so I’ll use this space to do that.

In my reading last night, I came across a nice paragraph in “The Polysyllabic Spree,” which is a compilation of Believer columns written by Nick Hornby. The paragraph is about how Hornby dislikes his writing. He says that anything he comes up with on his computer is like an overcooked undercooked stew-y thing, and it’s really not very good. I don’t think I can tell anyone how happy I was to hear this. Really. It made me realize that I can hate my own writing and still plod on regardless, because someone will like it and want to read it, right? Right.

In writing news, I cleared off my kitchen table yesterday and sat down with my unfinished novel and my characters, a notebook, and a black Sharpie marker and listed characters, did some character studies, and listed some of the subplots and issues that need to be resolved. Throughout the story, there are eight small subplots, four or five different personal issues dealing with relationships between a few of the characters (nothing romantic, just, two people can’t stand each other and the other is a mother-son relationship), and just basically I just wrote a lot of big letters in the notebook.

I felt better after doing it. The sheets are white with big black letters and the pages are all over my table. You tell me you wouldn’t feel better about things if you hadn’t just done that.

I was doing a character study of my MC, and the first words that came to my mind were “not a risk taker.” I texted my friend Bee to tell her this revelation, along with my worries that my MC is not a risk taker and she said that I could liken it to Luke Skywalker. He wasn’t a risk taker. “It’s about a scenario that happens regardless of personal risk or having a secondary character who’s a risk taker sometimes.” That made me feel better, too.

I also realized all those books that I like to look at at Barnes and Noble (and sometimes buy), the ones with titles like “From First Draft to Finished Novel,” are absolute crap. If J.K. Rowling and Nick Hornby and JANE AUSTEN wrote their books, which are frankly much better than I could ever do, without those books, then dammit, I can too.

I tallied a bunch of word counts of novels on my bookshelf. “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” has 107,000, “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe” has 60,000, “To Kill A Mockingbird” has more words than “The Twilight Saga: New Moon.” “The Picture of Dorian Gray” has just over 100,000. I don’t have the numbers handy right here, but I can update with them later.

In conclusion, I think that anything over 120,000 won’t do well because it won’t hold anyone’s attention to actually buy and READ the damn thing.

Ugh.