The OFFICIAL, IMPORTANT (but not really) stuff first!

I have worked out a real, followable schedule for this website. Yes. Something I promise to follow or suffer the (self-imposed-) consequences. My plan shall be carved into the internet permanently as such:

Thoughts from Monday: I’m going to blog about whatever thoughts I’m thinking at the moment.

Writing Wednesday: I was Wednesday on Five Awesome YA Fans for a few months, but that project kind of fizzled when we all got too busy to post anything regularly. It was fun while it lasted, and I’ve kind of become accustomed to thinking about books on Wednesday. This will probably be my day to put up a book review, but it could also be a day for me to post about writing, because I dearly love to write! So we’ll see. Maybe I’ll alternate weeks.

Fangirl Friday: Each week, I’ll post something I totally fangirled over. God knows I fangirl over enough during the week, so it’ll probably be hard to narrow it down! But this will be fun. I’m looking forward to this the same way I look forward to Fridays.

Sound good? I think it sounds lovely (and totally doable!).

You’re probably getting here because I’m linking to this on Twitter and Facebook, but in case you aren’t, you should totally follow me on Twitter.

Now that that’s out of the way: Yes. That is Hogwarts. IRL. Really. Oh man.

I had the incredible, irreplaceable opportunity to go to LeakyCon 2011 and it was probably the best week of my life. If you see that registration has opened for LeakyCon 20__, you should totally not even think about it for a second–JUST GO!

Basically, in the last few months, I’ve moved up in the world from poor, lowly college student to poor, lowly full-time employee of a very expensive (very awesome) piece of partially eaten fruit.  I’ve plotted out half a dozen stories and failed to write any of them because I’ve been crazed. I met a ton of people I admire, including Stephanie Perkins, Hank Green, Evanna Lynch, and Darren Criss.

Did I mention Darren Criss? Dude.

Everything seems like it has gone by so quickly in the last few months. I think it’s the partially due to the fact that my entire childhood ended this summer. Scary, but true. Harry Potter is, for the most part, over. We have Pottermore to look forward to, but there will never be another Potter book or movie. It’s weird. And a little (read: very) depressing.

On the bright side, there are new, bright paths for this fangirl to follow into whichever fandom she chooses. The Mortal Instruments, a fandom I’ve been involved with for years now, seems to be gaining traction. That never ceases to blow my mind.

But we’ll save that for a Fangirl Friday!

Until next week,

We all have habits. Some are better or worse than others, right? Nervous ticks, mild compulsions–all habits that sometimes we don’t even realize we have.

Sometimes, when I reach my highest peak of stress, I have to clean. I normally hate cleaning. Like, I would rather go to the dentist than clean my apartment. But when I get so stressed out that I feel like I have no control over anything–anything!–I start cleaning, because the cleanliness of my apartment is something I can control. On some level, I think I let it fall into utter disarray because I know eventually I’ll need to have an all-night cleaning session (like the one I’m having tonight).

I’m naturally a neat person. I like things to be in order, but at the same time, I love organized chaos. I hate when a stack of papers or books aren’t straight. I need my makeup to be in order and for the tubes on my bathroom sink to be perfectly lined up. Slightly OCD, yes, but that’s how I need things to be. When I start to get stressed, I let these things fall out of order. Presently, there is a pile oozing out of my trash can and cat food cans littering my kitchen floor. Why are they there, you ask, if I am so neat?

Because I’m stressed. And as I got stressed, some subconscious part of me said “I’m going to need to take my mind off this stress” so it’s a mess.

I bite my nails (working on stopping, but it’s truly a work in progress). I chew my cheeks when I’m nervous. I make perfect piles.

And I clean.

What does everyone else do about stress and nervous energy?

For the past few weeks, a friend of mine on Twitter has been talking about this book called WITHER by Lauren DeStefano. I didn’t know anything about it other than the fact that it’s DeStefano’s debut novel and the first in a trilogy. I feel like most books these days seem to be debut novels that are also the first in a trilogy, so it didn’t really stand out to me right away among all the other books that people are promoting all over Twitter.

I watched the trailer on Monday night (embedded below this review and done by the lovely Vania) and was intrigued, but I still wasn’t sure. I’d read Matched and Delirium and the dystopian thing where the world is pretty controlled by the government seemed… done? (Of course this initial impression of mine was incorrect. If anything, there’s a lack of government in DeStefano’s world.)

The story revolves around Rhine, a 16 year old who has recently been abducted and selected to be one of the brides of Linden, a 21 year old who lives his life inside a bubble that has been carefully constructed by his father. Each of them will die in four years.

You see, in an attempt to create the perfect human race, free of disease, scientists accidentally created a genetic time bomb that kills men at the age of 25 and women at the age of 20. This leaves in its wake a world full of orphans, wealthy families desperate to continue their family line, and teenage girls who are kidnapped to be sold as brides to those very families.

Rhine finds herself in a vast mansion where she is housed on a floor with her sister wives. Rose, who is afflicted by the virus because she has reached the dreaded age, is the apple of Linden’s eye. He is devastated to have to watch her die. Jenna, who is 18, and Cecily, who is 13, are the two healthy sister wives Rhine must share her new husband with. But she doesn’t want to have to have him as a husband in the first place, so she isn’t pining for him to knock at her door each night. Rhine just wants to go home–far from the Florida mansion is her home in Manhattan, which she shared with her twin brother, Rowan.

The world DeStefano creates in WITHER is heart-breaking. All Rhine wants to do is escape and go home, because she knows she can never accept a life where she is in this cage with so little freedom. But along with her desire to go home, Rhine also has to fight with the knowledge that Linden is truly falling in love with her–and he is begging her to stay without truly understanding that she wants to leave.

The characters truly make this novel the brilliant piece that it is. Rhine is independent and desperate to be free, though at the same time she finds that she can be sympathetic toward her husband and the short leash his father (a pre-virus doctor desperate for a cure to keep his son alive). And then there are the two boys Rhine finds herself torn between: Linden, the man she has married against her will, and Gabriel, a servant in the house who could die if anyone learned of their secret attraction. Not to mention Rose, Jenna, and Cecily, who are all Linden’s wives, but are also all so different with their own stories–stories that are artfully interwoven with Rhine’s to make them seem like true sisters, rather than four girls who have been forced together by fate.

If you’re looking for a book that will really make you think, this is perfect. I finished reading it two days ago and I haven’t been able to get the questions of “What next?” out of my head. The ending left me wishing I hadn’t read this the week it came out–because now the wait for the next book is going to be that much longer. But I don’t regret it because this is a beautiful novel and it’s not to be missed.

Let’s face the sad truth, shall we? Your book isn’t going to write itself. You can’t leave the file open at night and cross your fingers that the next bestseller is completed by little keyboard-hopping elves while you sleep.

Even though I have always known this sad, sad fact, I’ve never really taken it into consideration. Sure, I’d say, I’ll get this draft done and have it out by the end of the month!

Lies.

Getting into the habit of writing every day has never been easy for me. I have a lot of bad habits that I’ve picked up over the years: I bite my nails down to little stubs. I procrastinate to the point of near-nervous breakdowns. Dorothy frequently talks about herself in the third person. And all of these things came on slowly until they were full-blown Awful Habits that became proper nouns all their own. If I can make these things habits, why can’t I write 1,000-2,000 words per day?

Because I have another habit. It’s called “Beating the Dead Revision.”

I’ve started to break out of this a little bit, but Obsessive Revision Disorder is tough to shake. Every time I open up my WIP, I stare at the screen, looking at all the words I could be rewriting; I wish I could look at it and think “Oh, that word choice is perfect” but there is always something that could be different.

What I’ve been trying to tell myself is that even authors who have bestselling books out on the shelves would change words–even entire plot lines!–if someone put that book back into their hands as a manuscript. Writing and revising is a process that never really ends.

But you can’t revise something you haven’t written. So, for the sake of my ORD, I’ve gotten into the habit of writing daily… so I can revise it later.