Hi there,
I have been a very bad blogger lately. I haven't posted in, let's see...25 days. Things have slowly, and I mean very slowly begun to go back to normal. We have a new stove, there is new carpet in my room and everything is starting to return to its original place. My writing classes with John Bemis are still going on and I am having lots of fun. I wrote a story for school, which was the longest piece I've written so far. It is entitled, Prince Redrash and the Beef Stew. I really like it.
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. One the best things, strike that, the best thing that has happened to my writing career. This fall, 7th and 8th Graders at my school wrote pieces for submission to the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers. They have a yearly contest for art and writing. This year there were over 180,000 submissions. In my region of 26 states, there were about 600 who were selected to compete at the national level, and my story is one of them. I am so thrilled! We are still waiting for results on the final winners and I know that there is no chance of winning on the national level, but I wasn't even expecting this. The amount of entries that continued on to nationals was 0.5% of the original entries, and that blows my mind. It is a great honor to be one of them.
I had a great idea for a story recently that I think I could write a whole book on. Or maybe two . . .
John Bemis told me about a contest for a local magazine Bull Spec. They publish speculative fiction (hence the Spec) and they are having a teen writing contest. The winner(s) will be published in the next quarterly issue. I just started my submission piece today and I am really enjoying it. I am sad that there is a 1,000 word limit, or I could just keep on writing and make it really awesome with lots of details. I have been leaving it kind of late, as it is due on the 25th, but I have a 4-day weekend, so I can probably finish it by Tuesday and submit it via Email.
I am interested in something called National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. In November, a ton of people try to write a 50,000 word story. They only have thirty days to write a whole novel. Now, I could never do that (at least not while attending school and sleeping more than 4 hours a night). So it is a good thing that they have a "young writers" version. You set your own word goal and try to reach it in the one month period. I think this would be a great thing to try, and the story idea I just came up with (see above) would work perfectly. However, I don't think I can wait until November to start writing it!
I just noticed my Quote of the Day, which is perfect for this situation: "Don't delay, do it today!"
~B-Man
