why hello

Wow, I haven't posted anything in like... a week? something like that?? Lands alive, I am super behind the times. I'm actually writing some articles, but I can't post them yet because I am an idiot living in a house with like five computers and no internet.

So todays post will be very long, rambly, filled with announcements, and mostly about my birthday!

Read more beneath the cut.




Alright, I'm just going to start out with the birthday stuff, to get it out of the way. I wrote this big long emotional post about my characters, who would've guessed? Scroll to the photo of chocolate sauce to get to actual announcements, I guess...

...so, I have now survived my eighteenth birthday! I now have full legal responsibility for my own well being. Sigh.

Turning eighteen is some kind of weird advertised rite of passage, kind of like your sixteenth birthday. Nothing actually happens except you turn a year older and the bills start getting addressed to you, but people make a big deal about it. 

Probably the most adult-y thing that happens to me, personally, is that I'm now officially older than my character Alex Valdez. Let me tell you a few things about Alex. One, he is eternally seventeen years old. Two, he's one of my oldest characters, as I made him up when I was thirteenish. 

really old ugly picture I drew of Alex and his sister like a billion years ago

About me at thirteen: I knew even then what a Mary Sue was, and I knew that I, being young and inexperienced, was probably creating them. (I was right, by the way.) To try to combat the horror and humiliation I knew I would someday experience looking back upon my old characters, I made a lot of rules governing how I was to be making these characters up. 

Rule number 1: no character I invented was to be more than three years older than myself. 

One interesting thing about myself: I an practically incapable of breaking rules. I just don't do it. I don't jaywalk, I don't go in the out door at stores, I always have to buckle my seatbelt. 

So with only one teeny exception, I never, ever broke my character rules. 

Who was this one exception, you ask? It was none other than Mr. Alexander "Alex" Valdez, who at age seventeen was four years older than me, thus breaking my age limit rule. 

I remember worrying about this for ages. I was so concerned about it, because I knew that I was not mature enough to be able to reasonably guess what the average seventeen year old's thought process was. It was a disaster. Why did I have to make this guy so old?? 

But somehow he stayed seventeen, in blatant revolution against my rule. And I got older and older and eventually I realized that not only was Alex a pretty decent character considering I made him up at such a youthful age, I had actually grown up to become some kind of real-life version of him. 

And now I am eighteen, and I have officially become older than the oldest character I dared to invent in my youth. 

If that ain't some kind of weird rite of passage, I don't know what is. 

(PS, I dissolved that rule eventually when I finally realized I had to invent adult characters that weren't just copies of my parents.)

(PS, other rules included ones about not writing girls who hated girly stuff, not writing pretty characters, and the necessity of research on every scrap of background information I included.)

(PS, I don't have any actual recent drawings of Alex because I am an idiot living in a house with like five computers and no internet, and so I keep forgetting to scan my pictures onto a computer that I can post them from. Yep. Instead, here's a bad photograph of a quick whiteboard sketch I drew of him and one of his, for lack of a better word, friends.)

Now, obligatory "what I got for my birthday" bragging:

 My family knows me well. They didn't get me any crackers, sadly. I love crackers. But plenty of chocolate sauce.


NOW!

ANNOUNCEMENTS!

Announcement One: Tomorrow begins Camp NaNoWriMo, a moste terrific program which is pretty much just ordinary NaNoWriMo, except in April.

Here's my camp profile, please say hi to me (I love it when people say hi): LINK

(HIIII!)

Announcement Two: Shortly after the beginning of April, another extremely momentous thing happens. I'll let you guess what it is. Hint one: it has something to do with my writing.

Another hint. Here's my calender:

(by the way, this was made for me by my very dear friend Greta who I mention upon occasion. She's the one who doesn't hate me for forcing her to play the House Game. This is one of my most beloved belongings. The April picture is of my sister's character Zevi Thomson. That whiteboard sketch up in my birthday post had that character Jake in it-- that's Zevi's elder brother. I digress.)

Okay, one more hint: a close up of my calender.

Okay, if you guessed I'm talking about my dog Beowulf's birthday, I will just redirect you to the first hint and remind you that my dog has nothing to do with my writing. Actually, though, I guess this wasn't a very good hint either, because "POST THING! (fix typos/date on page 1)" is a pretty vague sort of thing to be happening on April 14th.

Okay, I've drawn this out way too much as is, so. On April 14th I'm going to be posting the first few pages of my graphic novel comic thing!  YAY

My comic thing actually has a nice neat little Wordpress website of its own, which you may see here: LINK! I would, of course, be super happy if you checked it out. I haven't worked on the site since December, and it is pretty ugly and not very functional. So I'd also love it if you had any suggestions or ideas to make stuff better. Also, you get to look at all the old and terrible cast pictures, which are going to be removed from the Internet forever in a few days.

So!

That's all for now, I guess.

Listen to these two songs. They are now my two favorite Christian songs ever. (Warning, one is a boy's choir and super beautiful and the other one is totally theatrical and hilarious.)