Reading List: Today

The Penderwicks Series by Jeanne Birdsall 
The family in these books always makes me laugh so much. They all have fantastic personalities, and the author has such a quirky and amusing style that really makes each book fun to read over and over again.

A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken 
I haven't read this one yet, but it became assigned reading when I moved into the boarding house. Every single person in the house has now walked up to me and said, "Oh yeah, that is suuuuuch a good book. I cried." Even the male boarding students have told me this.

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan 
Pretty sure I had this book memorized at one point in my life, but I haven't thought about it in eons. It's still pretty funny.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling 
I definitely had this book memorized at one point in my life, but I recently remembered a few odd details about it (for example, the spiders in Harry's cupboard) and decided to re-read it. I remember that when I read it for the first time at age thirteen or so I was surprised because it was obvious from the writing that it was meant for children younger than myself. I was surprised again. Great book.

Cross Creek by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
This was given to me as a "don't forget Florida" gift from a person at church when I moved. I've only read a few of the stories so far, but I like the way it feels almost like one of my own world building experiments-- piece by piece, Rawlings shows how it was like to live in Cross Creek. Pretty cool.

forgot to mention:

I was recently interviewed by Ella Douglas over at her writing blog, Nevermore November. You can read it over at THIS LINK, yeeeeaaah!

My siblings talk about my character:

First, an introduction by my magnificent sister, Codename: Maneater.

Who the (awesome!!) character is:
Orwell Barns-Myeong

Why you chose character:
Because Orwell is awesome and cute (duh!) and I'm going to steal him away from Chloe.

First off, what does this character look like?
I think Orwell is really cute with his ridiculous chubby cheeks and hilarious whiny face. He is always being called Chipmunk face by his sister Elliot (who I love!) which I think suits him perfectly. *squishes his chubby cheeks*

Eh, here's a picture I (Chloe) drew of him. This is also my computer background. I digress.

Does this character have any family?
His Dad was murdered by a bajillion murderers (not really just two) and I can't for the life of me figure out who they are because my sister is a genius who so happened to plan this out sitting on her bed.

They live in a tiny house (apartment thing?) that their Dad bought and they have a family dog named Iggy (which is short for Italian Grey hound or whatever) and another dog who I can't remember.

Tell me about their personality.
Orwell is a whiny-butt and a A+ student who works really hard and studies a lot. I think he cries a lot but he didn't cry at his father's funeral.  (oh my gosh he is totally the murderer!)


Now, here's a list of important stuff Maneater thinks you should know about Orwell:

• he has glasses
• black hair 
• chubby cheeks
• always A+
• likes peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
• his dad was killed
• two other kids in the family
• his sister calls him chipmunk face

And here's a list of stuff my other sister (Codename: Naveik) thinks is important:

• doesn’t like hamsters
• has brown eyes
• studies hard for school
• not the brightest kid
• is babied a lot
• doesn’t like rice-krispies (too sugary)
• prefers cold weather
• bites his nails
• always forgets to clip toenails
• has smallish feet
• is forced to go to book club (currently reading Little Men)
• has a Oscar the Grouch mug
• tends to roll his eyes a lot
• usually wakes up first
• has a hard time remembering faces (but is pretty okay with names)
• listens mostly to classical music by the “big peeps”
• also likes Elvis
• has a babyface
• was born in a hospital
• he broke his collar-bone when he was six
• has had the same hairstyle since he was three
• is very OCD when it comes to organizing books, movies, etc.
• doesn’t like heights
• always washes his dishes after meals
• is the age of twelve

stuff chloe likes: stand still, stay silent

 Today I am talking about: Stand Still, Stay Silent by Minna Sundberg

Admission time: The first time I laid eyes on Ms Sundberg's (practice???) comic "A Redtail's Dream", I got through like the first six pages and then thought, "meh, nothing special" and left.

this is a totally random page out of her (practice?!) comic.

Yeah, I know. I'm an insane and tasteless wonder of a human being. Anyways, now Minna Sundberg is working on a new comic that is shaping up to be more my speed than the first-- yes, that does in fact mean that it is post-apocalyptic. Sigh. I know what I like, and I know it's totally mainstream.

This comic is totally not mainstream work, though! As in her first comic, Sundberg sets her characters in the countries she is familiar with-- all the Nordic countries no spoiled Americans know about, Sweden and Finland (so far, with visits to Denmark and Iceland looming on the horizon), and she incorporates all the Nordic mythology that no spoiled Americans are familiar with.

(By the way, by "spoiled Americans" I mean me.)

Let's count what I love about this comic:

1. THE ARTTTT.

The art in this comic is exceedingly well done. The style of the lineart and colors and text all works together beautifully to create a stunning atmosphere for the storytelling.

Wow, so pretty. I'm going to learn how to do stuff like this one day.

2. THE CHARACTERS.

Just as a warning: don't get attached to the prologue characters. Since I didn't read the author's notes or comments section when I first found the comic, I didn't get them memo that the prologue characters were temporary and ended up becoming very, very attached. (Then again, when have I ever not become attached to a character?)

All of Sundberg's characters are delightfully larger-than life, and every page another facet of their personalities are explored, which really fleshes them out beautifully. What's more, the art (yes, I'm just gonna keep gushing about the art) really does its job at showing each character's unique body language and expression set, a quality I really appreciate in a comic.

(Emil Vasterstrom is my favorite, just so you know.)

Ah yes, Michael and Signe, my two favorite prologue characters. I love you and will never forget you, Michael and Signe.

3. THE WRITING.

Not gonna chatter about this that much, but let me just say that writing is just as important in comics as in any novel, and this comic nails it.

I love this page because the hypochondriac looks exactly like Lucky from my own comic... ha...

4. THE UPDATE SCHEDULE.

Most comics make you wait a week between updates. (Which is fine. I mean, artists have to eat, too.) But this comic? This comic is beyond fine. This comic is like the comic to end all comics. This comic updates Monday-Friday.

That's right, folks. It updates every weekday.

Look how paint-y and cool all this looks. I really like well done digital art.

5. THE COMMENT SECTION.

I begin every day Monday through Friday by reading through the comments section. I love the commenters on this comic-- they're creative, funny, and have wonderful theories about the characters, world building, plot, etc. They always point out a lot of stuff I don't notice about the comic, and are filled with cool facts about Nordic stuff that I, as a spoiled American, am not familiar with.

Not sure what to say about this page, but ok.

IN CONCLUSION:

I don't know, guys, this is just a really good comic. I highly recommend that you read it and then fangirl with me. You can read it HERE.

also in conclusion: Sundberg can draw some really creepy yet pretty stuff.

pirate comic

Click HERE to read pages 1-10, because I posted them on the blogge months and months ago.

 I tell anybody who will listen that this entire project was a big joke I played with for my siblings that just got ridiculously out of hand. I finally finished up chapter one with 54 pages, and am now fourteen pages into chapter two (with several more chapters after that planned). My siblings all demand more pages. My sixteen year old sister has done the math and demands that I have 900 pages done by the end of next school year. (And yes, that is nine hundred, as in one hundred times nine or nine-zero-zero.)

I'm actually not complaining, though. Comic making is what I love to do (I love love love to do it, seriously) and this goofy pirate comic is wonderful practice for my mystery graphic novel project, which I'm planning to reboot and start over on really soon.

And yeah, despite its mediocre art and terrible writing, I'm super proud of this baby. After all, I get to carry around sixty-plus pages of a story I'm creating, right? And I even have fanart for it, drawn by legitimate fans!

So, this isn't quite the end of chapter one, but it's a good stopping place (and I haven't scanned the rest yet, so.)

I just want to end by saying that this is an unusual project for me in the character department, too. With the exception of Richard Parker the fifteen year old, all the characters are waaay older than characters I usually have. (You can't tell because I'm awful at drawing old people, but Ginger is actually a grandpa.)

Also, since this is a supergoofy comic, character development is a good deal harder.

ALSO, most of these characters are types of people I don't usually cast: not that you can tell this early in the story, but you have Khan, who's totally a remorseless villain; Matt, who's brilliant but also very prideful and also a manly-non-sensitive-no-nosense dude; Stan, who besides having the most spur-of-the-moment name ever is an eccentric (and probably very stupid) rich person. Ekat (who's basically an old lady mix of Severus Snape and Jack Bauer), Ginger (who is based entirely on my grandmother), and meek Richard Parker are more up my alley, but still pretty unusual types for me.

Alright, that's all!

Gonna go do some Greek now... dang it, I was hoping school would never restart.

new stuff announcement

I now have a "story ideas" page to my blog!

Basically, this is all the random ideas that I have ever had and written down on my beloved iThing.

Since I rarely use my ideas, and it helps me to have them all be in one place, I decided to post them all here. They're free use to literally anybody, I don't care at all. (They're really all a bit simple anyways.)

Sooooo... that's all! Have a nice Friday, enjoy the terrifying page of Stand Still, Stay Silent that was posted today, and be sure to pray for my sister Maneater, who is celebrating her thirteenth birthday!

Camp NaNoWriMo... I finished this time!

YAAAY

Stuff I Googled during NaNoWriMo:

• Scottish accents and slang
• arthritis
• natural dreadlocks
• how much does a yacht cost
• superman returns
• the dark knight rises
• Roman Emperor Tiberius Caesar
• stuff people smuggle
• guns
• how to get rid of sore throat
• self sufficient houseboats
• fish getting head chopped off pictures

Stuff you should know about my experience:

• This month was really awesome.
• I didn't think I was going to make it but I ended up pulling ahead 700 words ahead of my goal. 
• I can't wait to do it again in November.
• You can read the horribleness that is my project HERE.

"If other people read their blogs as much as you read your blog, there would be a lot of really well-read blogs out there."

-my sister

superpowers: a list of stuff to think about

Okay so I'll just start out this blog post by saying that this is a subject very near and dear to my heart.The first story I ever started writing was about children with superpowers, and while I have never actually finished any story with superpeople at the helm, one of my life goals is to do so.

While I am no expert on the world of superpeople, I do think about it an awful lot because I love it so much, and I read a lot of other people's ramblings about writing superpowers and everything that goes along with that.

So, a few thoughts for pretty much anybody who is similarly obsessed with other people's ramblings about superpeople:


We should totally think more about team superpowers and how they work.

Like, seriously. Every time I have written a super group of people, they get their abilities because I go, "ooooh I have a cool idea! I want a character with that ability!" and then I make a character in the group with that ability. This is not such a hot idea for a few different reasons, I guess, but the one I'm getting at here is that in a story the different characters' individual skills and personalities should have a chance to shine and add a different and important dimension to the group. Same goes for their superpowers-- if their abilities aren't important to the plot, why bother giving them out at all, other than just for the "ooh cool!" factor (which gets a little dull after a while, since you can't realistically show something unimportant to the plot)?


Characters first, superheroes second.

Not gonna lie, since most of my superhumans were made up simply because I had a cool idea for a superpower, they were all originally nothing more than superpowers with a name. Personality? No. Appearance? Not really.

Fortunately for these lifeless superpeople I tend to go back to them and play with them and eventually turn them into something neat. Jake Thomson, lifetime winner of "Chloe's Favorite Character" award...

good job, baby, you won something

...originally started out as nothing but a name (Jake Thomson) and an ability (healing other people but not himself). Over a large period of time (we're talking years) I eventually threw the superpower out the window because it was hindering his development. Free from the burden of his stupidly assigned ability, Mr. Thomson became this simultaneously anxious and snobby British kid without many brains, relentlessly fretting about other people's safety since he was capable of healing himself and he didn't want these poor delicate normal people to kill themselves.

now I love Jake, I really really really do.

I really really really really really truly do.

But despite my love for him (And I know you don't believe me but I so love this guy) he is not really that wonderful of a character. I'm pretty sure I would get tired of him if I ever wrote a book about him, and I'm pretty sure other people would get tired of him if they ever read a book with him as a character in it. It isn't his fault, it's mine-- his whole character has been hindered by the fact that I put no thought into him. He was just this guy who could heal stuff, the end.



Telepathy is hard to write and makes for boring characters.

Everybody knows about ordinary mind-reader characters, right? They're notorious in their abilities to creep all the other characters out, even while being as completely vague about their supposedly all-encompassing abilities as possible.

Telepathy is hard to write for a number of pretty good reasons. (Bullet list time!)

• Good characters have secrets
• Telepaths remove all secrets
• (unless they are ridiculously useless and vague telepaths. me no like vague telepaths)
• Thus, good telepaths destroy good characters.
• and make your novel kind of wordy.
• and boring.
• why is this a bullet list??

Oh, that was supposed to be a bullet list of stuff that made telepaths hard to write. Ugh. Okay, I'm going to do a real bullet list this time:

• Telepaths cannot have ordinary relationships with people due to lack of privacy.
• Telepaths will always know an infinite amount more than any other character, and the reader, and the author. 
• You can't have a telepath filling up your novel with aimless and pointless words about a different character's musings of their childhood buddies (unless your name is Chloe. People named Chloe are the only people allowed to get away with filling novels full of random musings.) (That was a joke.) (I wish it was true, but sadly it just means I am a bad writer.) (I digress) To combat the issue of excessive rambliness, your telepath must have his or her voice curbed. The easiest way to do this is to only bring up their telepathy when they have something relevant to the plot to say, which makes them pretty much extremely boring.
• How do you write how a telepath thinks? Help!
• That's about all for this bullet list because I am getting bored.

These poor characters are pretty much just more trouble than they are worth.

All this said, I do have a telepathic character who is one of my oldest and dearest creations. I didn't specifically try to make him break all the annoying habits of telepathic characters listed above, but through his own general personality and my own weird writing style he ended up being a pretty weird example. My personal favorite thing about him is how specific he is in his mind reading. How much information does he glean from other people? 100 percent. How much of this information is he going to spill, as matter-of-factly as possible? As much as he can say while still breathing. More on him later.


We hear so much about not overpowering our characters. Why can't our characters overpower themselves?

Remember about five seconds ago when I said I'd tell you more about my telepath character later? Well, that time is now.  My telepath character, who we'll call Duncan, is a terrible character. (No offense, character who we are calling Duncan.) He's kind of in that stage that is a little bit like C.S. Louis's Wood Between Worlds-- a sleepy little place in my brain where the characters are thought about nigh-constantly, but nothing really helpful or exciting ever actually happens. (Is that actually anything like the Wood between Worlds? Not really.)

I will say one thing about Mr. Faul-- uh, the character we are calling Duncan. I really, really enjoy his telepathic abilities. I have had other telepathic characters, many of whom I spent far more time on than this lad. But this one takes the cake, by which I mean I would cheerfully bake him a cake with the words "Chloe's favorite telepath" in cursive on top.

I digress.

The best and most fun and most plotty-problematic thing about this kid is, quite simply, that I threw out all those rules you always see about superhero characters. You know the ones: "Superman is too strong", "Batman is too prepared", "Overpowered = unrelatable". When faced with the knowledge that my precious character who we are calling Duncan was becoming a tad too overpowered, instead of saying "NOPE NO MORE POWERS FOR YOU" I took his powers away, made them about 400 times more powerful, and then gave them back to him.

Best decision I ever made. The poor lad was so overwhelmed with his abilities that he went kind of insane and became unable to communicate with the outside world. He is now a poor overloaded computer of a being-- he has a hive mind connection with the entire universe and he cannot organize their thoughts well enough for his own brain to function.

He is so much fun to write.

Now, what is the point of this long and rambly bit of chatter? Basically, just me wanting to talk about my characters. But also, as personal advice. If you are writing a story, and your story has a character in it with superpowers, and this person is starting to be a little bit of an omnipowerful Mary Sue as far as powers go... don't take the easy route out and water them down a little bit. Give the ability consequences. Make it stronger than the character can handle. And have fun perfecting your evil author's laugh.


I will talk about superpowers more at some later date, probably, because I really love superpowers.

Also, if you have some kind of superhero story that you want to write with a partner, I will volunteer.

Also, SUPERPOWERS.

Also, read more stuff at this awesome website, which I am sure says all the stuff I just said except more clearly: SUPERHERO NATION

setting inspiration from google maps: Nam-gu, Busan, South Korea

Click this link to explore. BOO YAH

Suggestions for usage: 

• post-apocalyptic city (yes, this will be my first suggestion every single time I do this.)
• slum on the outskirts of a futuristic utopia
• former futuristic dystopia now crashed by rebels that saw through the facade of utopianism
• alien city that used to be a space port but is now settling into a shopping district
• superhero hometown
• slightly unsettling dream world
• urban fantasy suburb inhabited mostly by middle-class creatures
• setting of an unusual but upbeat musical

And now, for pictures:

(PS I DELIVERED ON MY PROMISE HA)