A Kind Of, Sort Of, Maybe Love Letter To John Green

Its hard to measure how depressing it is that I didn't read John Green books when I was an actual, honest to goodness teenager. Part of this is totally not my fault; he didn't publish his first book until I was nineteen, so really, there was very window there.

But it took me a while to warm up to John Green. I distinctly remember going into the library in late 2008, seeing his books, and only thinking, "Hmm." Not, "I WANT TO READ THAT BECAUSE IT LOOKS AWESOME," but, "Hmmm." Mild interest. But not enough to even pick it up in the library! The shame.

Yeah, I'm embarrassed. But I was out of the habit of picking up new things to read. In 2009, I decided that I wasn't going to reread any books ALL YEAR LONG, so I was going to have to find new things to read. This was sort of like a rebirth in my reading style. Pretty much my entire life up until that point, I had reread almost every book I had read before at least once. I didn't venture out much away from my collection much before this. (The reasons: I didn't live within a library district, and books are expensive.)

So even though I was a huge reader, I hadn't read all that much until 2009. I remember interestedly googling John Green, because I had seen his books so often in the Young Adult section in the library (and yes, as an actual adult, I still venture in there). It was definitely in February, and I was definitely out of things to do at a receptionist temp jobs. I spent the rest of the day combing through a website that cataloged famous last words. The website he had linked to has now disappeared.

I was even more intrigued, and read The Abundance of Katherines, even though I thought that the premise was kind of silly. (I mean, how many Katherines do I even KNOW?) And I loved it.

I could spend all day linking to different videos John Green has done that I loved. I really, really could. One of my favorites is this one:



[If you enjoyed that video, his video about the penny is also pretty awesome.]

I wish that I had read these books when I was in the eleventh grade. But they didn't exist when I was in the eleventh grade.

I also have a copy of Will Grayson, Will Grayson that I just finished and loved to my right, and I could spend the next few hours combing it for awesomely hilarious things to quote here.

 This is pretty much it. I appreciate the John Green and everything he's been doing, and it only took two years for this to happen. And since I sort of kind of maybe should be writing in NaNoWriMo, I'm going to end it there.


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Frak It Friday: Sunset Rubdown - "Idiot Heart"

A song about having to "move around" and wander no matter what the cost, even though it makes no sense:

If I found you in this city called Paradise,

I'd say, "I love you, but I hate this city, and I'm no prize."

Even after finding the paradise, he's got to move on. He acknowledges that his heart is being an idiot ("You know your heart, but its an idiot heart"), but he's got to keep "moving around," until an embittered female singer sings:

I hope that you died in a decent pair of shoes,

You've got a lot of long walking to do,

Where you going to?

So even when he dies, he still can't be at rest. And he still doesn't know where he's going!

I had been saving Sunset Rubdown for a rainy day, and apparently "rainy day" means "eight hour stretch of time when I'm procrastinating on my NaNoWriMo Novel." 

And I'd spent even more time, procrastinating on said novel, planning out this post. Yeah, this song got under my skin. 

NaNoWriMo: this scene plays into the novel for at least 1000 words

Yeah, I know. For some reason, this stuck with me.

Even though during my last NaNoWriMo I had already seen this. For some reason, it comes up now. (And I'm about 4000 words behind. Ack)

National Novel Writing Month [Its That Time Of Year Again]

I wrote a ton about this last year, mostly because I had the time to both keep up with a blog and write a partially crappy novel.

With the full time job, though, neither of these things has been done properly. Although I'm succeeding partially at NanoWriMo, keeping right on pace. So that's going okay, but mostly because I'm getting a good thousand words in during my lunch breaks.

In other NaNo news, someone is apparently writing a comic strip while participating:

[EDIT: OMG for some reason the format was off. The cute comic and others like it can be found at the web address below. I can't figure out why its broken, I have a word count to catch up on!]

[Found here]

Apparently she's also created a hashtag for those behind in their word counts, called #nanopanic. Pretty awesome.

And now back to writing.

NaNoWriMo woes

I'm about three thousand words behind. Now my document is full of author notes for later revisions, so some of the words aren't actually the novel. They are points to be made later. I got back to basics and at the beginning of the document wrote out a description of the main character and the main suspect. I haven't met any other perpetrators or accomplices, but I'm trying to figure out exactly who they are so that I can write character descriptions and figure out how the main character meets them.

These are probably things I should have done before.

This is harder than I thought. This is even harder than when I attempted it as a sophomore in high school. (I eventually finished it, but I have no idea where it is now.) I'm discouraged. More than I thought I would be. But I think I'm going to (for now) continue with it.

Hopefully this weekend I will catch back up. I remember when this began, I was sure I'd be over the limit. You live and learn.