Quick Update

So, yes. I've been extremely remiss about updating my travelling blog. However since I got back, I pretty much got wiped out by jetlag, started back at work, been seeing friends and actually having a life. Sooo, that will be updated once everything settles back down and I can actually be bothered (re: not just getting home, cooking dinner, shower, bed, repeat.)

However, aside from that I do actually want to post a list of books that I've read and want to do a quick review on. And I should probably add them to my goodreads list but eh.

Seer's list of books:

• Sasha, Petrodor, Tracato and Haven by Joel Shepherd.
• Heat Wave by Rick Castle
• Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl
• Host by Stephanie Meyer
• The Eagle of the Ninth Chronicles by Rosemary Sutcliff

To be fair, I haven't actually finished reading Beautiful Creatures OR the Host. Beautiful Creatures because it will become very apparent in the review why and the Host because I got side-tracked by The Eagle which is an infinitely better story ("burn").

Oh, and I do plan on doing the Animorphs book read through about the same time that I start doing my travel blog. I have however read up to book 20, so I've actually made process.

Animorphs!

I've decided that with the recent re-publish of the Animorphs Series by K.A. Applegate that I would re-read the old versions that have not been updated. There's a rumour floating around the internet that in addition to the new cover art that the references have been updated to more modern ones. Whilst this may bring in a younger audience, I personally prefer the old references (mainly because I recognise most of them).

So, during or after France I will begin my epic re-read for probably the first 30 books, I never actually finished the series. I read spoilers, got disheartened and could never actually find the complete series in the book store or my library. If any one else wants to also read along I would love to have any thoughts or musings on the series and each book as I go along, otherwise sit back and enjoy the ride.

I think there are a couple of places on the net where you can get a copy of the books online but I'm not 100% sure. Either way, I look forward to my re-read!

Characters (And Me)

So, current word count is sitting at 2631.

Sitting pretty at about five pages I've so far introduced my three main protagonists. The problem that I seem to have (besides pacing) is trying to make characters that are both believable and not so mary-sueish. Another issue is the fact where I'm trying to include several clichés and somehow manage to make it original. I'm also worried about the fact that I may be too influenced by things I read and my story comes out sounding like something I have read, thus making it slightly plagerised.

The prophecy has been done a gazillion times, in fact it pretty much seems to be a requirement for fantasy novels, so when I decided to use it for my main male protagonist I wasn't sure if it would add to his perfectness. Plus I always get worried when writing male characters because I have a hard enough time grasping female thought processes without having the added struggle of pausing and asking myself: "What would a guy do in this situation?"

Female characters are different, mostly I try to keep their emotional responses fairly normal because I had a tendancy when I was younger to have my heroines have huge moodswings and thus my stories would read like a soap opera and bad writing than an actual story. It was unbelievable and continues to make me cringe to this day. But this time I am detemined to get my characters right.

The book I'm reading to help me along with that is the Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing A Novel. Yeah, I know. Some of it is vaguely helpful but as for the rest... I'm not entirely sure yet. I haven't been a big believer in how good my writing is and so far I've hit another slump in regards to where my story is going but that's more of a pacing issue than anything else? How quickly should I start to get into the story. How many chapters should I wait before I bring in the main point? Those sorts of things. But I guess I need to write a bit more in order to flesh things out. And work on that whole "show not tell" aspect of writing that sometimes eludes me.

In any case, enough procrastinating on the story writing!

Been Travelling the Universe

Or rather I'm just a super lazy blog updater. Seriously, my lj barely gets updated nowadays. Mostly I'm a facebook hussy, I am on occasion prone to updating my status' more than is socially appropriate. Although, I do draw the line on updating from where I am located, no one wants to know that I'm standing in a queue for KFC or whatever.

Technically this blog was supposed to be about my journey into writing my novel. Sadly, the novel that I had planned (and which I was running a vague idea on) has been put on the very tall pile of ideas for later use. Most of these ideas are for my historical fantasy of werewolves which perhaps fortunately have not come to fruition. The market for paranormal romance is still running strong but seems to have taken a markedly strange turn into the fallen angels angle. But as an update apparently there is a zombie romance novel. I'm not going to try and think how it works. (Iago: "Braiinnzzz." Katerina: "Oh Iago, you are the one for me!").

The thing that mostly stopped me however, the massive case of writers block aside, was the fact that I got a bit too caught up in WoW. But now that I have briefly recovered from my intense addiction to said game - mainly due to most of the people I was friends with disappearing - I am now working my way back into writing again. So my goal is to try for 150 words every day or two until I've reached the level of inspiration that I had a few years ago where I could write 1500 words in an hour or so. The funny thing is, I actually had no real interest in knuckling down no matter how much I told myself I wanted to until I talked to one of my WoW buddies recently.

So now I've started making a plan, which is something I never really did for my writing. I've gotten down my ideas and characters and I've finally started writing. I don't particularly want to say much about it besides the fact that it's mostly modern fantasy and that people close to me won't even see it until I've written at least fifty pages. Mostly because I want to have written down something that long or substantial, to prove to myself mostly that I do still want to be a writer and that this is what I want to do for a living. I have tossed up the idea of having more than one of my friends reading over it though so I can get varied feedback that should help.

I also started reading again which is something else I sorely neglected. Finished about seven - eight books so far in a couple of months which is a lot more than what I was reading before. Mainly fantasy of course, one of them is an Australian author as well that I gave a second chance after buying the series on a whim.

Essentially, I am more or less going to try to come back so I can update more regularly on my progress like I originally planned to do.

Word Count: 547