THE MADNESS IS HERE!

ITS TIME TO NANO!! WOOT WOOT!

Winnipeg, Manitoba IS IN THE HOUSE!

Unfortunately I have to go to bed because I have a lovely 8am class this morning but thankfully I am going to be writing on  the bus so I am going to be able to keep upping my wordcount.

I hope that tonight my dreams will unravel my scenes that I have to work on. Or maybe they will just change it up so much that my poor brain will be spinning and going, “What the fuck was that?”

Pardon the language.

Goodnight, Peace out, Lets get this NaNoWriMo started!

Can you hear the words sing? Singing the song of Novels to come.

Its down to the last day October and already I can feel that the words of all our novels are starting to push against the barriers in our minds that are keeping them at bay.

My NaNoWriMo 2013 planning will be going into overdrive tonight as I hand out candy and treats to the tricksters coming to my door. Yesterday I finally figured out what caused my main character to lose her memories and consequently her ability to dream. I was inspired by the last passage in Inkheart by Cornelia Funke.  Essentially my character wrote a story when she was little and some of the characters popped out. One of the nasty ones (a warlock) decided that if she had her memories erased of this incident that he will not end up back in the book (side effect of his curse: unable to dream and reading level shot down).

As the story goes she meets her characters, who are now a bit older, and they make a solid effort to get her memories back.

I have yet to settle on names, but have a running list of names from either television shows or just random streets that I have seen in the city and thought, “Ooh that would be a brilliant last name for a character!”, but I have the “models” that I want for my characters. I think this year I am going to do the names last-minute or else halfway through the month I will come up with various amounts of names.

Maybe, if I feel like I have time, I will put my character traits and stuff up here.

FOR NOW THOUGH picture: (my character models so far) Skye Sweetnam, Nicholas Hoult and Kevin Zegers.

Pretty epic eh? Yeah, I thought so too. Its going to be a wild, and interesting story.

At first when I thought about the story I had decided that there would be romance that I would have purposely threw in, subtle though, but now I am thinking that I will just let the natural romance fall into play. I feel like this may be more natural and realistic rather than having a cliché romance.

How are your stories going? Any interesting characters or plots just happening to pop out of the wood work? Have your stories been messed around, scratched out, and surgically put back together?

Happy NaNo Eve and to all a good night write!

Bring it on, November. Bring it on!

2013 NaNoWriMo has been the years in the making.

I never knew it though.

The moment of *AHA!* had been at my favourite table, beneath my favourite poster, in my favorit library while I was working on homework (half heartedly at best).

(My homework was a cataloguing assignment for one of my classes)

“A book is a dream that you hold in your hands (explore your dreams)”

This quote, originally from Neil Gaiman (author of Coraline and Stardust), has sparked the world rumble for this years NaNoWriMo novel.

After staring at the poster, which features the Sandman holding a book that has books flying from inside of it, it got me wondering: What would happen if you could not dream? Would it be possible to regain the ability to dream? If it is how would I go about it and who would I talk to?

These are the questions which led me to the semi-basis for my novel planning. Then I thought up my first plot twist: what happened if I could not read OR dream? How would I go about getting through school, life, be able to decide on a career? What would cause me to be unable to read?

So I started texting my bestie and together we started to answer some of the questions. One of the things that was decided, well she coaxed me into doing because her ideas are always awesome, that there would be a bit more romance than I had anticipated in the beginning when I was mulling this idea over at the library.

Its quite satifying to see, with the help of her, that my NaNoWriMo novel will be getting up off its unstable word wings way before November. I even went online to my pintrest account to search NaNoWriMo and found some amazing character profile sheets as well as plotting materials that are almost like cue cards. The plotting materials even give examples of how to use them which I love. I absolutely wish that I could go back and link all those wonderful sources but my recomendation is:

1. If you have a pintrest account: Search on pintrest “NaNoWriMo” and EVERYTHING will pop up there, remember to explore all the articles from the blogs since they do have wonderful links themselves.
2. Just search on google “NaNoWriMo” “Pintrest” and you should find some links
3. Try searching on NaNoWriMo without the account and see what you can get.

I really loved searching on there. When I get around to it I will link up my pintrest account to my blog and you can go through there to find the lovely resources that I had found earlier yesterday evening.

What are your favourite resources for NaNoWriMo? How do YOU plan out your novel? Are you going to be competing this year? Remember you can add me on NaNoWriMo (Moonlight Raven) and we can be writing buddies.

xx Emerald Munchkin xx

Lab Results #4: The Debriefing of a Librarian Technician in Training

Have you ever really thought about how much information we have at our finger tips? Like really, have you just sat there and just thought about it? Take a moment, really, just take a few seconds to process this absolutely mindboggling idea.

Of course many people read blogs, news sites, etc etc. and this is what we focused on today in my Mulitmedia Class.

If we are so eager to learn about what’s out there how are we going to remember every single website that we like? This is where the handy

tool called RSS feeds come in to play. You can find a website that explains RSS feeds here as well as a fantastically done video on youtube here. Both of these links were given to me by my Multimedia teacher today during class.

I’ve dealt with RSS feeds in the past during highschool where for many years I had worked to make a fairly large and highly useful inventory of feeds from various websites in a Google Reader. I really loved my google reader; it was always a work in progress to sort out in the World Wide Web and discover new feeds which are more useful than others.

Unfortunately right now google reader does not exist. Its existance was cut short recently (1 July 2013) by google. If you want to read the blog post you can hop over here. I had originally forgotten that this would be happening so this is the blunt reminder that I had recieved after searching google for the reader. Sure they give you alternatives to the Reader but…No. I liked my reader and want it back!

Now though I put all my subscriptions in to my wordpress reader and have set it to immediate email notifications. Its not as good as

before but until something else appears (or I somehow magically become a HTML genius in the space of a few months and create my own version of a reader).

So how do RSS feeds and libraries work? Why would a munchkin Librarian in Training be instructed to learn about RSS feeds by her

awesome teacher? These RSS feeds are important because libraries can be linked to other libraries which leads into forming webs of interaction. These links can be vital in passing information as well as having a sense of what other libraries are up to.

Which RSS feeds did you look at while you were browsing for one to subscribe to? I knew exactly which library I had wanted when I saw the assignment. I chose the Cork City Public Library in County Cork, Ireland. While searching on the main page I found a variety of links to areas of the library that peaked my interest. These include a Music and Musical Exhibition, a Cultural Life, and even a Writer’s Corner!For our multimedia blog post today I am supposed to answer the following questions about an individual activity assigned to us.

Which RSS feed did you finally choose? In the end I chose the library’s main blog page.

Why did you choose this one, and what do you hope to gain from being a subscriber? I subscribed to this page specifically because it brings all the other pages into one blended blog. My hope is to gain knowledge about what is happening in the libraries in Cork Public Libraries especially since:

I love Ireland and I love books.

So that had been my multimedia class today in a nutshell or just over 600 words.

Comments? Questions? Concerns? Hit up the Comment box below or just like it!

(TeacherT, I really love your class! This blog is the best thing you could have possibly made me do)

You are now entering Dreamland; Please, choose a cloud

My head is heavy while my eyelids are even heavier. The beginnings of a headache are coming on which can only mean that I am going to be in a heavy sleep tonight.

I probably could fall asleep right here in front of my laptop but unfortunately I can’t do that. I need to be up before 6.30am my time in order to get to college for my 8.00am class (good to know my teacher doesn’t like getting up that early either). At least I can come home after classes (which end around lunch or 12.00pm) and get another hour or so of sleep before heading off into the unhelpful land of homework.

But for now I want to get at least six and a half hours of sleep. Its not too much to ask, right?

Perhaps tonight I will end up with a nice dream; one that I could use to kick off my NaNoWriMo outlining ideas. How many times I have found that I need to have a notebook beside my bed or even under my pillow so that in the morning as soon as I wake up, BAM! I can write out whatever the heck happened in my dreams…if I remember them. Usually I do though, which I think is pretty cool.

You know, I think I have an outline somewhere from a crazy dream that I had in the summer. Should I use that for my NaNoWriMo if I can find it? Nah. I’ll think or dream up something else instead. I wasn’t too crazy about the idea in the first place but maybe with some tweeking it could be a possible contender.

Do you use your dreams as writing ideas? If so, how do you record them?

What’s the most crazy (and appropriate to post on the internet for all to see) dream that you have ever had?

Do you write your dreams down? Sometimes I do but that also depends on whether  I am able to remember them.

You know what? I love how this post went from being sleepy and having a pounding headache to writing and NaNoWriMo. Sure sign that I need to back my pillow, catch the flying cloud, and head for Dreamland. Not going to lie, this will happen more times than any one is going to be able to count. *runs and hops on a passing cloud*

Goodnight!