Two-year-old children are scary. Absolutely terrifying. They don't stop moving. Ever.

I'm babysitting my cousin Carson with my sister, and both of us need a nap. Carson, however, appears to be going strong. I think she's the Energizer bunny in disguise.

I've also watched about six episodes of the Backyardigans today. They're actually a lot of fun, haha. The stories are cute. My favorite is one about samurais who make pies. Such fun.

I have just sent off the first fourteen or so pages of my baby reaper story to Kevin. It's a relief and this hugely terrifying thing all in one. I despise having other people read my work for fear that they won't like it... which is silly, because my biggest dream is to be published. Go figure.

The picture is the one that inspired the story. Mortimer doesn't really look like that, though.

So I just got off the phone with Rob (he's 21 today!! yaaaay!!) and he reminded me that I haven't posted anything in a while. Therefore, I dedicate this particular blog post entry thingy to him. Woo!

My baby reaper story is going pretty well. I've named him Mortimer, thanks to Nelson, though I think I'm going to call him Timmy. (Morty just sounds like an old Jewish guy to me.) I've got about nine pages, double spaced, so far, and I hope to get maybe twice that by the end of today. I have to turn it in on Friday, so I need more pages, lol. I've decided my other story with the weird family stuff isn't ready for that yet. Or I'm not ready for that yet, anyway.

I just spilled a little tomato soup on my trackpad. Crap.

Anyway, I don't have much more to write about today. Richardson cut our reading down to only 50 pages for Thursday, which makes me super-happy - I'm already at 40, and I thought I was gonna have to read the whole rest of the book. (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce - a good book, so far.)

I probably had better go do homework.

I'm having a writing day with Ary and Nelson. It also happens to be International Talk Like a Pirate Day. If you know Ary and Nelson, you know they are dressed as pirates (Nelson even has the eyepatch) and both are using a lot of "Aye"s and "Avast!"s in normal conversation. Or they were, anyway - they've sort of left off that for the past little while.

Writing days are interesting. Very little writing actually gets done - we pretty much just sit in McClurg and play games on gsn.com. Surprisingly, I've written nearly two pages - a feat unrivaled in the history of our writing days.

Nelson just finished recording a message to his mother, in Italian, with a piratical accent. Yeah, he's weird.

Ary's reading Breaking Dawn and making a lot of random squeaks and squawks in reaction to what she's reading. This is normal.

And I... I'm thinking about baby Grim Reapers and what one should do when one finds such a thing in a graveyard on Halloween. Is that scary?

This whole writing-a-little-every-single-day thing isn't really working for me. I keep editing what I've already written and then I can't seem to move on. I mean, I have moved on, a little, but then I go back and edit everything and then write some more and edit and write and edit and write and... so on. I have nearly twenty pages, double-spaced, and I haven't even gotten to the main part of my story yet! This won't do. I have to turn it in a week from Friday... scary, scary things. I don't think it'll be done, and then Kevin will be mad at me. Maybe if I give him enough pages to play with it won't matter so much.

I imagine my inner editor looks a lot like Kevin... except evil. Like Kevin dressed up in a devil costume, cackling maniacally and jabbing the inside of my head with that pitchfork thing every time I don't get something exactly perfect before moving on. Not that he would really do that - he's actually pretty cool about helping fix problems within stories, and coming up with suggestions and all that funness. Actually, I think the closest I've seen him even come to 'evil' would be when he was irritated at us for not turning our papers in early enough that he could grade them without having to rush, and that was really more mild frustration. My imagination is just weird. For example, my conscience looks and sounds like my mom does when she's mad about something. It yells at me a lot, but it keeps me from making (most) stupid decisions.

Okay, I've wasted enough time. I should probably get back to the story.

Well, I'm home for the weekend. I was supposed to be using this time to relax and work on my story some... but of course, I'm not. No, instead I'm helping my little sister learn how to factor equations, going to eat fish at my grandmother's house, and maybe hanging out with Drew and Jacob. And packing up half my books at home to take back with me to school. Ary and I might need to invest in even more bookshelves than we already have.

I had a breakthrough with my story not too long ago... and it's getting close to 25 pages, double-spaced. It's going to be epic, this one. I'm supposed to have it done by the 26th, but I dunno how done it's going to be - maybe close to half, if I get lucky. I'm sure Kevin will understand if it's not done and I'm still turning in like 60 pages, lol. Yay novels! Or what might be a novel - I'm not sure.

So I'm pretty sure my dad thinks I'm crazy. Here was our phone conversation of just a couple minutes ago.

"Hello?"
"Hey, Daddy. Do we have any morbid family secrets you haven't told me about yet?"
"...What?"

Yeah. He thinks I'm crazy. But that's okay, because I kind of am. The main reason I asked that question is because I need some family history for a story... and I can't seem to come up with any out of my head. I'll get there eventually, but I thought it wouldn't hurt to ask Daddy, as he's done the whole genealogy thing. Unfortunately, it seems we don't have any really interesting stuff. Hmm.

I had an idea!! I love the feeling I get when I come up with an idea for a story. It's like discovering a hundred-dollar bill in the pocket of an old coat, or finding chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream in the freezer when all you thought you had was vanilla, or maybe even winning the lottery, though I've never done that. It's a great feeling.

Now I sit in the library and type away furiously. It's not going to be one of my huge eight-hour writing stretches... I don't have the time to do that today. So I will work as long as I can, and then come back again tomorrow and write more, and again the next day, and so on until it's finished. I've never written this way before - all the stories I've ever finished have been completely written in one day. I'm a little worried that this will disrupt the flow of the story, but maybe it won't. Maybe it'll work. It has to work, right?

I hate writing.

Okay, no, I don't hate writing. But sometimes I dislike it very much. You see, I have this 'process' that I have to go through in order to complete a story. I sit around for days, sometimes weeks, trying to come up with an idea for a story. I go through countless pages of Word documents and loose leaf paper, freewriting, complaining to myself about how stupid the creation of a story is, how pointless and useless and worthless my writing is, so on and so forth. And somewhere in that period of time, an idea comes to me that actually sticks for more than a few minutes. I head to the library and get into an eight- or nine-hour writing frenzy, in which I go through my entire "Epic Writing Mix" (composed of various movie soundtracks like 300 or Pan's Labyrinth, plus some of my favorite classical pieces). I find that this type of music is wonderful to write to - no words to distract me, and the music itself is sufficiently...well... epic to give me momentum and keep me writing for a while. The entire playlist is about seven hours long. Hopefully, once I come out of my soundtrack-and-Stirling's-smoothie-induced haze, I'll have created a rough draft of a story. Then I get to edit... joy... and out of that comes a story that, hopefully, is worth something.

Unfortunately, today is one of those days in the first part of the process - the self-loathing, hatred-of-everything part of the process. So I get to sit and stare out the window, hoping maybe some monumental idea will come crashing through the glass yelling "TA-DAAA!!"