Halloween (A Little Early)

    For those who didn't follow my blog last year, I LOVE HALLOWEEN. Almost as much as I love Christmas. I blogged about it last year and shared some of my costumes over the years. 
    Once again I'm going to reiterate that Halloween is awesome because of all the candy and dressing up in costume. It's fueling for a writer to get to be someone else for a day. That's why in past years I chose to dress up as characters from whatever story I was working on at the time. 
    This year was a little different. I thought about dressing up as Kylanore and forcing the husband to be Luzigo, but we didn't have the money to spend on costumes like that. Maybe one day I'll get to dress up as her.
    To go cheap, we were going to dress up as Chuck and Sarah from the tv show Chuck because it's one of our favorite shows that we watched a lot when we first started dating. But again, something came up and we had to do a last minute change.
    What came up? A little surprise I'd kept under wraps until last night when our apartment complex celebrated Halloween with trunk-or-treating. This surprise demanded that we change our costumes to fit. But since we were under a time crunch and a money crunch, we had to do with a quick and easy $5 costume (yes, it only cost $5).

Preparing for NaNoWriMo 2015

    I know, November is still a week away, but I'm not doing a proper NaNo anyway and I'm starting a little early because I really want to dive into the end of Powerful. 
    Our apartment complex is celebrating Halloween tomorrow (and I'm super excited for this year but I'm saving that for a later post), so I figured once that's over I have no more excuses not to write (except maybe cleaning the apartment). I spent last week catching up on all my tv shows, finishing the trilogy I started far too long ago, plotting, crocheting, stocking up on soda and candy, filling the car up with gas for trips to B&N, and doing everything else I possibly could to prepare for November. 

    I found some great articles about prepping for NaNoWriMo. Here are the links: In It to Win It, Getting Ready, and How to Prepare.

Interviews

    I've been interviewed again, this time by Jasmine Walt. Here's a little bit about her before you read more about me-

I’m a devourer of books, chocolate, and all things martial arts. Somehow, those three things melded together in my head and transformed into a desire to write. Usually fantastical stuff, with a healthy dose of action and romance. My characters are a little (okay, a lot) on the snarky side, and they swear, but they mean well. Even the villains sometimes.

When I’m not working on my next book… well, honestly there’s not much else I do aside from writing because I ghostwrite as my day job. But when I’m not chained to my keyboard you can find me trying not to impale myself working on my dao sword form, raiding my dad’s pantry spending time with my family, or binge-watching Bones on Netflix.

    Jasmine and I connected on Scribophile where she was looking for writers to interview for her blog. Previously she interviewed Ashley Capes. 

    Back to me, here's a link to my interview where we discuss dealing with Hypergraphia and writing Powerful. 

Giving and Taking

    A few updates on my life before I dig into my topic-

• I'm being interviewed again! Yay! It'll be up later this week, and I'll share it here for all you lovelies to read about my ridiculousness.
• I'm preparing for NaNoWriMo! This will be my last attempt to push out the end out my novel. I've got about 50,000 words left, so hopefully I can use NaNoWriMo to my advantage and really crank out the ending. This may mean I blog less because I might have to turn off the wi-fi so I can actually focus rather than Pinteresting and Netflixing the days away. I don't know yet, we'll see when November gets here.
• I'm not sick anymore! Whoo! That means that I can get back to being productive instead of laying on my couch in the darkness because my head hurts and I can't stop coughing.

    Due to the creative energy I've got coursing through my body after being sick for a week, I'm pumped and ready to continue writing. It's exciting. As I write, I post my novel chapter by chapter on Scribophile for fellow writers to read and critique. I get lots of good feedback on everything I post. But what exactly does good feedback mean?

For Boys, For Girls, and For All

    I was trying to find an image to add to this post, so I searched, "Children's Books" and the first option that popped up was "for girls". The seventh suggestion was "for boys".

    Curious, I clicked on the "for girls" to see what popped up. I was bombarded with one color- Pink. Every single book was drowning in pink. So I switched over to the "for boys" to compare. There wasn't a noticeable color choice for the covers, but something did stand out to me- There was a distinct increase in the distinction between "boy books" and "girl books", meaning books were specifically labeled "for boys" or "for girls". This ranged from coloring books to potty training books to a variety of Middle Grade novels. 

   So why is it that books have to be separated for boys and for girls? Why is it that books for girls have to be distinguished by bright pink covers? Why do we judge kids if they pick a book we wouldn't necessarily pick for them?

Stories For All

    Forgot to write a blog post yesterday as I was busy catching up on my reading. I'm kind of glad I did, because this morning I went online to find out that it is Stories For All week.

    Stories For All is a movement started by Bloomsbury and Shannon Hale (my favorite author) to stop gender stereotyping books to readers. This is based off of two assumptions made by society-

  1. Boys cannot enjoy a book if it is about a girl.

  2. Men's stories are for everyone, but women's stories are only for women.

    Based off these assumptions, book recommendations for boys are usually very selective. Boys are taught to believe they cannot read books written by a female author, about female characters, or about anything considered feminine. They are made fun of if they not only choose to not read a "girly book", but also if they don't loudly protest anything considered "girly". 

    You see what I mean? It's an everyday, widely accepted part of our culture.

Staying Creative (When You're Busy)

    I haven't really been focusing on writing so much lately, and it's really hard on me because I want to stay as creative as I can while I'm busy. If I don't stay creative, then when I find more time to seriously focus, I'm usually stuck in a block. While there are many ways to overcome a writer's block, I'd rather avoid it in the first place. So how do I stay creative and focused when I'm busy?

    There is more than one way to be creative. I named my blog Hypergraphia because when the creative energy overwhelms me, I tend to write over other forms of creative output. But when I'm not in a situation where I can write, there are other ways I can funnel my creativity to keep it flowing rather than blocking the energy.

Busy and Tired...

    Don't have a ton to post today, and I haven't written a ton either. I had a string of migraines last week, and migraines make me very unproductive. So I watched a bit of tv, did some reading, and I crocheted a lot. 
    I didn't stick to my schedule at all last week, and I'm not doing a great job of keeping up this week either. I'm trying to keep up on critiques on Scribophile since I'm not writing. If I can keep up on karma, then once I get back into my cycle I can write uninterrupted for a while. And that would be really nice.
    I've got family coming this weekend, so I'll miss 1 of my blog posts next week. But hopefully after that, I can get back on track with my schedule and keep writing. My goal is to finish the first draft of Powerful by the end of the year, and I'm still going to do that. I'm really excited to finish. I've gotten a lot of really good feedback from some friends, and once I finish this draft I'll be ready to move right into the next one with some improvements.
    That's really it for now, so I'll leave with this.

    ~Allie