Some Updates

Well...it's been a while, eh? Surprisingly, though, got a couple things to update on. 

Finished my website redesign

I don't even want to admit how long this has been in the works, but it's finally done and the insanely blue, hard-to-read, poorly-formatted old site has been replaced with a much nicer page that actually links to relevant things. Also gone (hopefully for good) is the "click to enter" page. Whoo! 

Freshly-baked new page: http://www.chelseymagnuson.webs.com/  

(I do want to tweak the colors a little bit and possibly add some images, but we'll see how long that takes).

Videos might happen?

I might have some time and space now to actually record some more vlogs. Hopefully better ones than the last two. I've been getting back into YouTube and therefore back into the idea of vlogging again, just gotta make that push into actually sitting down and recording something =P

I'm NaNo-ing

Not really a new update, but it's definitely A Thing going on right now. Potential writing buddy and word war partner here: http://nanowrimo.org/participants/dragonfang/ (if you can associate with a dirty rotten NaNoCheater!)

Another Year, Anoth...uh, the Same Novel, Actually.

Welp, officially signed up for NaNo this year. I’m nervous because this November is looking to be pretty busy - work, need to be making progress on documentation for design seminar and on my term project for web tech, and I’m going to try to keep working on my current book, which I’ve been writing a chapter a week for for the past two months. Don’t want to lose the continuity there, but that's a lot of extra writing to do.

In a move that will possibly(?) make thing a little easier, I’m cheating on this year’s NaNo. Instead of starting a new project (at this point, I swear I’m going to start forgetting the names of characters from all the unfinished novels I have lying around), I’m continuing Third Life from last year. I’ve made a couple chapters’ progress since last year, but not nearly close enough to finish the darn thing. Whether this hinders me or saves me from novel-start jarring, we shall see. 

No pain, no gain, as they say. And some writing’s better than no writing, I say. 

Looking to join in on NaNo? Wondering what the hell it is? Does writing a 50,000 word novel in a month sound like fun to you? Get the details here: http://nanowrimo.org/faq

Writing Funk

I made a video yesterday and forgot to post it here. 

This one's quite a bit shorter than my last. 

Fun fact; I once tried to write a post for this very blog about this very topic. The video version is actually much better than the old draft.

The End of the Challenge

So - here we are, the last Saturday of April and my final post for the Blog-Post-A-Week Challenge.

The goal of this whole affair was to get more comfortable making posts. Sort of a shock-therapy thing; get rid of the panic of posting, and I could get to all the bloggy stuff I'd imagined doing back when I had the idea to do this.

When I made this blog, it was late at night in a rush of tired recklessness. I can second-guess and hesitate my way out of just about anything, and I've learned that sometimes I can give myself a push and everything will turn out all right. In this case, though, I think my hesitance was well-placed.

I may be a writer, but I'm not a blogger yet. Practice makes perfect and all, but every week it became clearer and clearer to me that I just had nothing to talk about, or if I did, no real proof that I knew what I was talking about, so it came off feeling very pompous.

Another thing I realized while working on posts was that I was neglecting other things - like getting to know other writers on Tumblr, an opportunity I should have taken advantage of the moment I found writing blogs, or just plain working on my own stories. I'm really wasting the time to use the resources I have...for not very good reason.

All in all, though, I'm glad I stuck with the challenge. It's good to know for sure now, so I can get to work on more productive, useful things without any doubt that I've given up too soon.  And hey, I got to rant about a movie, so it wasn't all bad.

If I get ideas for posts I'll give writing and posting them a shot - but for now, the weekly updates are over. Thanks for sticking with me if you did; hopefully I'll be back at this, but better, soon enough.

Classes for Worldbuilders

This entry is gonna be short and sweet, let's do this!

Sociology
The study of culture and how it affects people and people affect it. Sociology is a great class in general, but for writers specifically it helps shatter your ideas of "normal" and how a culture "should be". It also breaks down a concept as enormous as culture into smaller blocks that are a little easier to work with.

Psychology
Get a better understanding of how humans/sapient beings tick.
Abnormal psychology - which most intro to psych courses at least touch on - will help anyone looking to write mental illness with more realism.
Bonus points if you have to write any sort of scientific journal articles for these classes; go through a few psychology classes and you'll never have trouble writing excerpts from textbooks or scientific documents in your stories again.

Biology
A bit more for sci-fi writers or those interested in non-human characters, but it's still an intriguing look at how life as a biosphere works. Building cohesive ecosystems is easier when you understand what a cohesive ecosystem is.

Anthropology
Cultural anthropology is especially helpful. It's something of a sister class to sociology, peeling back the veneer of social norms a bit. It's also useful for learning about how cultures and parts of culture develop among different groups.

History
How have economics, culture change, revolutions in technology, war, environmental disasters, and much, much more, affected humans in the past? They say the past is the best indicator of the future; if you're looking for human behavior, it's hard to get more accurate than the huge test chamber that is human-inhabited earth.

This incredibly short post brought to you by the huge Software Engineering project I have due on Monday, and by the letter P. P stands for such wonderful words as "panic", "pressure", "pain", and "please please please let this be done on time".

Rant on Ice Age: Continental Drift

I missed posting for my challenge last week, had absolutely nothing prepared for this week, and then I made the mistake of watching Ice Age 4 around 9PM. By the time the movie was over, I was awake and angry enough to record a vlog, but too tired to judge if vlogging was a good idea.

I really kind of want to polish this up, make a more scripted version that would summarize the plots of the movies - all four of them - a little better, maybe show some of the scenes that were wrong and compare some of them to the original... That probably won't happen since the sequels have to go back to the library and it'll be a while before I have any time for that sort of project on my hands, but it might be fun to do someday.

Bookshelves Past

Anyone who's poked around my Tumblr probably knows I'm a fan of the show Atop the Fourth Wall; the show looks at and reviews bad comic books, and though it's my absolute favorite show, online or off, I'm not going to talk about it (today) except as it relates to this week's post.

For March, AT4W's producer and host Linkara is looking at the history of his favorite super hero team, the Teen Titans, who first got him interested in comics and leading him to where he is today. That inspired me to look back at the media that got me where I am today. My media, of course, is novels.

((And nope, don't worry, not doing this for a solid month. It'd make my posting challenge quite a bit easier, but I really don't have that much to say on each piece. I don't think I do, anyway. Let's stop stalling and find out.))

Animorphs

K.A. Applegate

A group of five teenagers take a shortcut through a construction site, and find the ship of the dying alien Elfangor. The alien warns them of other aliens known as the Yeerks, slug-like creatures who take over other creatures' brains, gaining complete access of their mind and body. The invasion has already begun - but Elfangor gives the teenagers a morphing cube, a device that gives them the power to acquire the DNA of any animal they touch, and transform into that creature.

Animorphs was an awesome book series, even if I was a little too young to understand how complex and mature the story was until I was older. This is a series about kids fighting a war, where they're inexperienced, incredibly outnumbered, unable to tell for certain who's a friend or enemy - it's a gripping story for certain.

This series also introduced me to a lot of my favorite animals, especially birds of prey, and again, although I didn't absorb it at the time, it was an early exposure to writing from the perspective of animals, with their unique senses and sizes and instincts.

And last but not least, the first "books"  I wrote were poorly-written clones of this series , so huge points in this series' favor.

Harry Potter

J.K. Rowling

Do I even need to summarize this one? Witches and wizards, magical boarding school, fun and deep storytelling…

Funny thing about this series; I started reading it almost on accident. In the fifth grade, my friend brought Artemis Fowl and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone to school one day. I had nothing to read and although I knew (well, thought) Artemis Fowl was science-fiction, I was more interested in reading that book than Harry Potter. My friend was already reading Artemis, though, so I borrowed Harry from him instead.

I was hooked. The day I borrowed the book I also had a bad stomach-ache from heat-stroke, and although I was too ill to go to a relative's party, I tore through almost the entire book that evening. Apparently fifth-grade me had decided far too early that science-fiction was the best genre.

While Animorphs may have toyed with the idea, Harry Potter went full-throttle with the idea of telling a story from a technically non-human point of view, and explored a whole different world that drew from old stories and legends, but brought them into a somewhat more cohesive, almost modern world. It was the absolute coolest thing.

So were the book's dragons.

Unlike Animorphs, which was pretty far along when I started reading it and finished not long afterward, Harry Potter was a series I felt like I grew up alongside, even though I was only on board for the final three books release.

Warriors

Erin Hunter

The Warriors series, by Erin Hunter, is the story of four Clans of wild cats. Each Clan has its own territory, leader, and reputation among in the forest, but all share basic beliefs and rituals, such as naming patterns and belief in a sort of cat-heaven known as Star Clan. The Warriors universe has since expanded to multiple series (though I've only read the original series and "The New Prophecy").

By the time I started this series, I was working on dragon novels, and this was nice confirmation that nonhuman point-of-view stories can work. It was also an important reminder that I needed to keep my characters animals and not cram in the human-like adaptations I was currently throwing into my stories.

Beyond that, it was another good series that was just fun to follow. Certainly my cat wishes I'd read it earlier so he could've had a cool name like "Lionheart" or something.

"But nooo, you stuck with ~*Butterscotch.*~ Way to go, Mom."

Michael Crichton/Jurassic Park/The Andromeda Strain

Science! Science is awesome! Michael Crichton put pure science  into thrilling book form, and it made me want to do the same. I try to include science explanations for things when possible, even though I write fantasy. Sometimes reality is just as fascinating as magic.

Dean Koontz/From the Corner of His Eye

I was probably too young for some of the material in this book when I first listened to it on tape, but I'm still glad I listened to it. Koontz writes beautiful prose, and although it can sometimes be overused, mostly it reminded me  - as his book still remind me when I get too bogged in mechanical plot details - that the language to describe what's going on is just as important as the action on the page.

The Obsidian Trilogy

Mercedes Lackey & James Mallory

 "Kellen Tavadon, son of the Arch-Mage Lycaelon, thought he knew the way the world worked. His father, leading the wise and benevolent Council of Mages, protected and guided the citizens of the Golden City of the Bells. Young Mages in training-all men, for women were unfit to practice magic-memorized the intricate details of High Magic and aspired to seats on the council. Then he found the forbidden Books of Wild Magic-or did they find him? The three slim volumes woke Kellen to the wide world outside the City's isolating walls. Questioning everything he has known, Kellen discovers too many of the City's dark secrets. Banished, with the Outlaw Hunt on his heels, Kellen invokes Wild Magic-and finds himself running for his life with a unicorn at his side." -From Goodreads

This is a very recent addition to my influences, but a much-beloved one. I'd The Obsidian Trilogy is probably my favorite piece of high fantasy, and like Warriors, it made me reconsider how deep my fantasy worlds were.  You can tell the authors spent a lot of time and creativity in setting up the world, the magic, the cultures, the characters, and the story. There's so much original material and ideas here; reading these books always makes me want to think a little more and work a little harder on all the elements of my worlds, and to be careful of using concepts the way they've always been used.

While these are far from the only good books I've read, and not the only ones that've inspired me somehow, these are definitely the ones with the biggest influence and most obvious impacts. I really encourage you to check out these books if any of them sound interesting. If nothing else, they all make for a great read.