A new book blog

All book and writing related posts will be posted on Books are stories from now on! I want to keep this blog more focused on baking, crafting, photograpy, traveling and inspiration and on my new blog I won't have to feel like my bookish ramblings are out of place. You can also find a link to my other blog at the top of this page.

Why I haven't been posting anything the last week...

... I think my nanowrimo chart tells it all. I've been wrinting like crazy for the past few days. I think I'm starting to see a pattern here. Look at my campnano chart from juli for example:

See any resemblance? It looks like I can sort of keep up in the beginning, then I fall a little more behind. Somewhere in the middle I want to keep up again and start to write a little more per day. Then after a few days I lose hope again and pretty much nothing is being written for the next days. In the end I am really behind and start writing like crazy to reach the 50.000 words. It was just like last time, in the beginning writing 1.667 word pers day seems like an awful lot, but in the end I'm perfectly able to write 5.000/6.000 words per day.

The mysterie of the missing plot

Eventhough I did reach 50.000 words my story is far from complete. In the end I just didn't know what to write anymore so I mainly wrote backstories for my characters and subplots. At the beginning I thought there was a plot, but somewhere along the way I realised that somehow there wasn't really any. Hence the mysterie of the missing plot. I'm not sure what happened here, but I'm going to try to plan everything a little better next year, haha.

Music Monday #35

The past couple of days I had been a little stuck with my writing for Nanowrimo and I fell a little behind. Today I searched for some songs and they helped to get into my story again. With the help of these songs I easily wrote another 1500 words.

Peter Bradley Adams - Between us




The Head and the Heart - Another story

Preparing for Nanowrimo

Yesterday I got back from a two week trip to Sweden, coming week I'll share some of my stories and pictures ;)

The first of november is getting closer and I've started to prepare for Nanowrimo. Last two years of Nanowrimo I started pretty spontaneous, but this time I'm going to be ready! For me, preparting mostly just means that I'm constantly thinking about my story. Eventhough no one actually sees something happen, so much work is being done inside my head. Besides that, I'm also making a music playlist, because a lot of music really does help me to write (except for music with lyrics that I know far to well, because than I just have to scream along and I totally forget about what I was doing).

On my playlist are currently the following songs:
Levi Kreis - I should go
Sanders Bohlke - The weight of us
Northern Lights - Cider sky
Ryan Star - Losing your memory
Beirut - Guaymas Sonora
Ben Howard - Old Pine
Howie Day - Longest night
At the moment I have only songs with lyrics and I also want to find a lot of music without lyrics, so my list is far from complete.

Which songs inspire you and how are you preparing for Nanowrimo?

NaNoWriMo - Are you participating?

Last august I participated in Camp Nanowrimo and for the first time wrote 50.000 words in a month. It was hard, but I was so proud of myself when I had finished! This november I'm going to give Nanowrimo another try. Hopefully I'll be able to write 50.000 words again and also make it more of a complete story. Some parts of the story I wrote this summer felt more like a bunch of loose scraps.
The novel I want to write plays in the same world as my previous story and I'm really excited to write more about it.

Are you going to participate this year? Do you already know what you are going to write about?

Plot in a jar

Lately my writing has occupied most of my thoughts. I constantly go from having a lot of inspiration to having none and back. When I don't have inspiration for the story I'm working on, I still want to write something else to get better. I've created this Plot in a jar so that I will have a start for a short story and go from there.

How to make a Plot in a jar

Take 3 jars (or more if you want more seperate ones) and paint 'Who', 'What' and 'When-Where-How' on the lids (or whatever you want). Cut a lot little pieces of paper and write characters, actions, places and moments or conditions on them. I will give a few examples:

Characters
A king with no land
A masked barber
A retired circusmember
A crawling todler
etc.

Actions
fel out of a tree
bought an unreliable timemachine
joined the circus
entered an other world
met a long-lost family member
befriended a vampire
got arrested

Places
in a cave
in a hospital in the jungle
under a giant christmas tree 
at a masquerade
in an underwater world

Moments
on christmas eve
right before marrying the wrong person
during a pottery course
when he/she heard a family member had died
on the opening night of his/her restaurant
after just having an accident

Conditions
like he/she had expected
because his/her mom said so
like he/she had had a vision about
because his/her loved one asked him/her to
because he/she was sure it was a dream

Put the pieces of paper in the right jars and your finished! Whenever you need a simple plot idea to start writing a story you can just randomly take a piece of paper out of each jar and start from there!

Drawing characters

Ever since I completed Camp Nanowrimo I have had a lot of inspiration for my writing. New characters just keep popping up in my head and al those characters have family and friends who on their turn have a family. It seems like my character basis is growing exponentially.
A character that resently entered my story is Wende, of whom the quick drawing above is. Although she is not my main character she is probably one of my favorite characters to write. She is a bold girl who loves making costumes and dressing up. She does what she wants, whenever she wants it.
For me drawing a character helps me to get to know them. I then start to think about what they look like, what kind of clothes they wear and how they act. Usually I have some drawings laying on my desk when I write. I helps me to not lose sight of who the character really is and to stay true to it.

Achieving a goal

Past month I participated in Campnanowrimo, a challenge where people try to write a certain amount of words in Juli (and there's an April session too). It is sort of a spin-off of Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month), which is in november and people try to write 50.000 words in that month. I've participated two times in Nanowrimo and one time in Campnanowrimo (last april) before, but I didn't reach my goal.

I love writing and this goal of writing 50.000 words in one month has been a major goal the past few years. Now I am so happy to say that I finally acieved my goal! I wrote exactly 50.085 words and I'm pretty proud of myself. I have had a lot of moments were I thought 'I'm never going to reach my goal anymore, so why bother' and wanted to quit, but I'm so happy that I didn't!

On the website of Campnanowrimo you update your wordcount each day and then this graph appears. It looks so much like I was doing a project for school, haha. In the beginning I started pretty motivated and stayed on track, but soon I got behind and it was only in the last few days that I really put a lot of work into it. At the beginning the average 1.613 words you're supposed to write each day to reach a goal of 50.000 words seemed immense. On day 28, 30 and 31 I wrote about 5.000 words each day, so by then 1.613 words didn't seem as much anymore.

Confronting a fear

I write quite a lot. Usually it's just little pieces, but sometimes it's a bigger story. Rarely do I actually end up finishing them. Somewhere along the way of writing a story I start to feel like it's garbage. I'm always a little scared that my writing isn't good enough, even though I don't actually show my stories to anyone. So today is about confronting a fear: showing my writing to someone else.
I don't feel like reading it to my family just yet, but publicing it here is already a big step. This way a lot more people will probably read it, but mostly people that are strangers to me.

I'm sharing just a little piece with you today. Hopefully it doens't contain to many spelling errors or weird sentence structures. (English is not my native language) And ofcourse it's just fiction.

‘So, who is this guy?’ Valdemar asked. I searched his face. I could see he was trying not to show emotions, but het still looked angry to me. I didn’t blame him. It wasn’t the first lie he had cought me on. There was so much I hadn’t told hem, so much I didn’t want him to know. If I would tell him just this one thing, the whole facade I had created would crumble, and fall apart. I didn’t want that to happen, but I also didn’t want to lose him.
‘Go on, tell me’ he urged. ‘Okay’, I said and I took a breath. ‘I’ve known Alexander for a very long time. He used the work for my dad when I was a little kid’. I looked at him, waiting to see his reaction. He was surprised, as I had expected. I never talked about my dad with him. The only thing that I had told Valdemar about him, was that he was dead. Which was again, a lie.
I didn’t really know how to continue. I knew how to talk endlessly about every lie I had invented, but when it came to the truth, I wasn’t that great. I saw that he was getting a little impatient with me, when I hadn’t said anything for a while. ‘I just… need to figure out how to tell you this. That I’m pausing doesn’t mean that I won’t tell you, because I will’. I sighed and sat down on one of the big rocks that were scattered along the shoreline. Normally I would have minded the cold of it, but not today. The sea was calm and peacefull. Nothing like I felt inside. Valdemar sat down next to me and grabbed my hand. I felt good, and it was also a reassurance that I hadn’t completely driven him away.

Feel free to leave a comment on what you think so far!

Music Monday #4

I believe I was nine or so, when I got interested in the first singer that wasn't part of a childrens band, Dido. I bought 2 cd's of her and listened to them endlessly. When I turned twelve I also got interested in other music and Dido got sort of forgotten to me. Recently I remembered having a cd of her and listened to it once again. It still loved it as much as before. So I went on the internet, and found out that she, after taking 5 years off from recording music, released a new album called Girl who got away.
Her music is a little different than what I usually listen to, but it always has such a nice rythm.

Dido - Life for rent
One of the first songs I ever heard from her.


Dido - No Freedom
From the new album Girl who got away.


I also started with Camp NaNoWriMo. I've set myself a goal of writing 10.000 words in april. It isn't very much, but I think right now it's just more important that I keep writing, than how much I actually write. To reach the 10.000 words in april, I need to write 334 words per day. For now that sounds doable.

Memories of 2013

Januari already is a bussy month. I had to do a lot for school and I've been a little stressed out lately. Last weekend I held my 'endpresentation' at school. I really hate talking in front of a lot of people, and there were around 70 people. Before my presentation I was extremely nervous and at the beginning as well. However, while talking, I slowly got more comfortable, mostly because I was talking about something close to my heart and know a lot about. In the end the presentation went really well, and I received a lot of positive feedback. I was quite proud of myself and it really was one of those moments I didn't want to forget. So I wrote it down, on a little piece of paper and put it in a jar. I painted the lid of this jar a little while ago and used homemade mod podge to cover the lid (to make sure the paint would stay on).

Don't give up just yet

In my first blogpost I mentioned that I had started with NaNoWriMo. The goal was to write a novel of 50.000 words in a month. I have only written 19.687 words in November. But this time I don't feel so bad about nog being able to accomplice my goal. Last year I only managed to write 5.000 words, so I would think this is a big step forward. It's just that November is a month in wich so many things happen... My own birthday, getting ready for Saint Nicolas and so much more! So I'm actually quite proud of myself for coming so far. And I know,
One day I'll be able to finish. Maybe not this year, or the next... But some day!