baby_sloth
- Age:
- 21
- Location:
- Goose Creek, SC
- Hobbies:
- noveling, fanfictioning, short-storying, reading, video gaming, drawing, thinking, imagining complexly, resisting simplicity, not forgetting to be awesome
- Favorite noveling music:
- Tom Milsom
- Website:
- http://otter-nanowrimo.dreamwidth.org
- Occupation:
- Navy Wife
- Favorite books or authors:
- Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, WIll Grayson Will Grayson, Paper Towns, The Fault In Our Stars, Stranger in a Strange Land, His Dark Materials, The Cat who Walks Through Walls, Young Wizards, The Demon's Lexicon trilogy; Sarah Rees Brennan, Robert A. Heinlein, Phillip Pullman, Diane Duane, John Green
Author bio:
I'm 21 years old, a Navy wife recently moved from Oregon to South Carolina. I own two cats, a three-year-old once-feral grey-and-white ragdoll and an eight-month-old black shorthair, named Leviathan and Colossus respectively (they go by Levi and Coal for short). I consider my job to be 'writing' even though I understand publication is a long way off, and I'm lucky enough to have a husband who supports my crazy habit. My favorite thing to do other than write is read, and I do it a lot.
As a writer, I'm not very practised, but slowly learning to be better. I've learned a lot from NaNo and reading and the advice of Real Authors, and I think it boils down to a few things:
1. Constantly make the choice to write, now.
2. Yes, it sucks. It will always suck. Keep writing it and it will get better.
3. A terrible finished rough draft can be revised and polished; you can't do anything with a sparkling half-finished one.
4. There should always be something the reader doesn't know yet.
5. A story doesn't have to be about Saving the Universe to be worthwhile and meaningful. In fact, as a gateway to understanding ourselves, meaningful fiction should be about people: there are seven billion people, and not very many of them will ever have the opportunity to Save the Universe.
I write young adult, sometimes contemporary and sometimes fantasy, often but not always with some romantic subplot. My current major projects are Paroxysms, my 2009 NaNo about a cured zombie's search for meaning and value in his life; Little Lion King, a story about a prince dressing as a princess in order to sabotage the evil king's plans; Kendra's Ghost, a murder mystery in which a ghost steers a young girl into investigating--and unwittingly duplicating--her hundred-year-old murder. I also have a few side projects and fanfics I occasionally plug away at when I'm stuck on my primary project.
I did a personal NaNo challenge in December of 2010 (I had more important things to do that November) and achieved about twenty thousand words, but not in any single story. I did Camp NaNo in August 2011; I also got married and moved 3000 miles away that month, and ended up with less than ten thousand words. I set a goal of 35k and "finish the story!" for a personal Nano-type challenge in May 2012. Collectively, the NaNos I've tried and failed have netted me 60k words I never would have written otherwise, all of my current pet projects and plot bunnies, one won NaNo, one completed story, a habit of choosing to write, and a rediscovery of the joy and meaning of writing.
I plan on participating in NaNoWriMo every year I'm able for the rest of forever.
