My One Year Blogoversary!

One year ago...I had bright red (temporarily died) hair.

One year ago...I didn't know how to ballroom dance.

One year ago...I was fifteen-years-old.

One year ago...I didn't know what a fandom was.

One year ago...I was the oldest of six children.

One year ago...I sat down at the computer and decided to start a blog.

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Today...I have my normal brown hair again.

Today...I can dance the cha-cha, waltz, rumba, swing, samba, and foxtrot.

Today...I am sixteen-years-old.

Today...I have too many fandoms to list without taking up this entire post.

Today...I am blessed to be the oldest of seven children.

Today...is the one-year anniversary of my blog!

Blog Accomplishments

3 Most popular posts:

With 236 views: What's Left of Me by Kat Zhang - Book Review 

With 193 views: Vocabulary of a Fangirl - Part 1

With 157 views: Vocabulary of a Fangirl - Part 2

Post with the most comments:

Goose Girl by Shannon Hale - Book Review

Post with the most +1s on Google Plus:

Vocabulary of a Fangirl - Part 2 

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I've posted 65 posts.

20 are book reviews.

List of Reviews 

8 are related to writing.

And 18 are related to music.

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I had the most fun Writing:

Vocabulary of a Fangirl - Part 1 

 Vocabulary of a Fangirl - Part 2

An Amazingly/Weird Dream 

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green - Book Review 

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins - Book Review 

 

 

Thanks to all of you amazing people who follow, read, and enjoy my blog!

A Character's a Character, No Matter How Small

In this post I want to express the importance of 'small' characters; those extra characters that our MC meets throughout their journey.

Many authors seem to forget them. They forget to take time making them real, which makes them seem flat and useless. When you write a story, every character needs personality. At least jot down the basics (appearance, stronger positive trait, strongest negative trait, religion, and influence on the MC). Get to know them. In my opinion, you can't write about someone you don't know and make them seem real.

Granted, you should spend the most time creating your Main Character, but that doesn't mean ditch the others and make them up as you go. Have a plan for them. Give them a purpose. Otherwise, they're just dead weight in your story.

One way to study this is to watch movies and TV shows. Now, before you get all hoity toity with me, hear me out. Movies are stories that we watch, instead of read. When you watch movies, you can understand characters faster than when reading. It's all in their expression, body language, tone of voice, appearance, and personality. In books, it takes time to know a character, but in movies it usually doesn't.

Take The Hunger Games, for example.

-In the book, we slowly begin to know Katniss. Her talents. Her lifestyle. Her government.
-In the movie, you need only to watch ten minutes to know all of those facts and more.

Or, perhaps even a better example is one of my favorite shows: Once Upon a Time.

-Each character has a purpose and sometimes that purpose is even greater than you had expected. 
-Even when the characters don't have a huge impact, we still get a sense of who they are.
-You can make almost every character related to each other in some way, just to make things amazingly complicated.


Also, character profiling is always good practice. My very first blog post was an outline I found online and it has really helped me when I'm creating characters!


Here's the link:

Character Profile Outline


I hope that this post has either helped or inspired you to flesh out and spend time on ALL of your characters.

Towering by Alex Flinn

(From Goodreads)
Rachel is trapped in a tower, held hostage by a woman she’s always called Mama. Her golden hair is growing rapidly, and to pass the time, she watches the snow fall and sings songs from her childhood, hoping someone, anyone, will hear her.

Wyatt needs time to reflect or, better yet, forget about what happened to his best friend, Tyler. That’s why he’s been shipped off to the Adirondacks in the dead of winter to live with the oldest lady in town. Either that, or no one he knows ever wants to see him again.

Dani disappeared seventeen years ago without a trace, but she left behind a journal that’s never been read, not even by her overbearing mother…until now. 


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Funny story: On my 16th birthday I went to the library to leisurely browse and run my fingers on the spines of books. I bumped into a girl that I had spent last summer volunteering at the library with and we got talking about Doctor Who, Sherlock, and the like. Then she started recommending me more books than I could hold (literally!). The books took up a whole shelf on my TARDIS bookshelf. 

One of those books was Towering:

(my blurb)
Wyatt goes to live with a lady he barely knows, in order to escape his messed up life. He finds the diary of the lady's dead daughter. A mystery starts to unfold before him. Then, he begins to hear strange singing noises that no one else notices. Something bizarre is happening in this small town.

Rachel lives in a tower in the woods, in order to be safe from the people who had killed her mother. She is cared for by another woman, whom she calls Mama, even though she knows she is not. Rachel starts to sense a change coming. Something is about to happen.

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When I noticed that this book was written my Alex Flinn, I was skeptical. I enjoyed the last book of hers I read (Beastly), but it wasn't AMAZING and the movie adaption kind of sucked.

My expectation for Towering from reading the back: "This is going to be a sappy love story."

"Today, I woke knowing something would happen. Something would be different. I opened my window. I was a long way down. Still, I wanted to leave the window open, to smell the world outside. I would plaay my harp and sing my songs, and the animal, at least, would hear me.

I sang the saddest song I knew, about a girl in love with a poor boy but unable to marry him.

I know where I'm going;

And I know who's going with me.

I know who I love;

But the dear knows who I'll marry.

As I sang, I had once again that strange feeling, the feeling of being listened to, not by birds or squirrels or even deer. I rushed to the window to look. I saw something, or someone, moving. It was walking closer to me, struggling where there was no path, holding on to trees to keep its balance, but still coming closer. Perhaps it was the man I had dreamed of."


Halfway through the book I began to wonder why they had put that especially lovey part on the back cover. Then, it finally started getting sappy. I don't like it when there's some strange, magical connection between a couple, and then all of a sudden they're deeply in love and feel like they'd die without each other. It's unreal.

I mean, sure, love can be magical, but I think it's necessary for a relationship to have a foundation other than "I knew he was the one".

Overall I liked the beginning of the book, but the ending was predictable and the romance dripped with sticky, unrealistic love.


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3 Stars

Ages 14+