Fiction Scribe

I have decided to take a brief break from Thursday Thirteen this week. Instead I will be taking part in the Velvet Verbosity 100 Words. I’m quite enjoying spending time (even though it is comparatively little) coming up with my 100 words for the one word prompt.

If you are interested in participating either here, on your site, or on the Velvet Verbosity site, go here to check out the other entries for ‘Eden’ as well as details about 100 words.

Without further ado, here are my 100 words on ‘Want’.

Want. Need. Lust after. Desire.

So maybe want isn’t such an unpleasant thing.

I’m honestly not sure where my mind goes sometimes when I write these things. They are a lot of fun and don’t take a long time to do. Perhaps that is why I like them so much?

Give them a try. You might enjoy yourself.

***This post is part of the 100 Comments Contest here on Fiction Scribe. Click the link to find out how you can win.***

Hello everyone! I feel like it’s been a while for some reason. Perhaps I am finally actually going crazy? Perhaps. This week has been busy enough for it.

A friend in one of the writing groups I’m in sent me a link for a fun writing exercise called 100 Words. I decided to check out the lovely Velvet Verbosity site. I like it a lot and am in the mood for some fun writing exercises, so here is my contribution to the current challenge:

Eden

Eden. The mythical, biblical land of absolute perfection and paradise. Thinking of Eden made John think of great expanses of very green grass with beautiful trees in sight in every direction. Some bore the purest beautiful fruit you could ever imagine.

Maybe after the betrayal of Adam and Eve, God burned Eden.

Ah, I enjoyed that. Sometimes I miss doing the exercises and other writing related activities that I did much more of while I…wasn’t working. Ha.

If you take part in this exercise, don’t forget to leave me a link so I can take a peek and a link at VV as well.

***This post is part of the 100 Comments Contest. Check out this post to find out how you can win.***

Hello and happy Friday, dear Fiction Scribe readers. Happy Leap Year as well.

Today I am taking a breath from the Friday interviews to bring you something a bit different.

For a while I have wanted to give something away on this site, but I didn’t know what to give away or how to give it away (random giveaway? Contest?). I have been a bit hard pressed for time lately, so I didn’t want to have the trouble of tracking something complicated.

Then I found a meme at the lovely Jenera’s blog.

I have seen this meme floating around the blogging world and have even done it a few times. It’s fun, quick, and occasionally humorous.

The meme:

Here are the rules:
1. Pick up the nearest book ( of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

First thing, you don’t have to tag five people. Just put your response in the comments. You can feel free to carry it over to your blog if you wish, but you have to leave your response in the comments here to get a chance to win.

Win what? A pre-loved copy of Lirael by Garth Nix. I bought this little lovely at a secondhand shop and later got another copy, so I would like to pass this copy on to one of my readers (chosen at random from the comments).

Be sure to leave a valid email address with your comment so I can get your postal address to send you the book. You have this weekend to enter. The winner will be announced in Monday’s Scribes blog carnival post.

Have fun and good luck! (And invite others over to win, eh? A good response to this could encourage more competitions like it in the future…)

Hi all!

I have been terribly busy since 2008 and it never seems to let up. Being the woman I am, this has led me to feeling philosophical about what I want my life to be.

But, there are things to do before I let my philosophy brain take over completely.

I have been nominated twice for this award by two very lovely people, so I think it’s about time I get to putting it up and awarding it to others!

Jim Melvin of The Death Wizard Chronicles and WriterWoman of She Writes Poetry have granted me the Roar for Powerful Words award.

The rules follow:

* Link back to the person who tagged you.

* List three things that you believe are necessary to make writing good and powerful.

* Tag five others and comment on their blog informing them that they’ve been tagged with this award.

Without further ado, three things I believe are necessary for making writing good and powerful:

1. Write truth. Whether it’s your personal truth, the truth your imagination knows, or truths you hold true to life, write the truth. Truth shines through. Truth can be written with confidence. Truth speaks of experience and belief. Truth speaks of power.

2. Be passionate. Be passionate about what you write. Care. Want. Need. Have the desire to write about a subject and to speak to others through your words about certain subjects.

3. Work for it. If you’re not willing to put the work (research, time, editing, proofreading) into your writing, then don’t do it. Find something else that speaks to you.

And there you have it! I would like to pass on the award to five people who do the above:

Elisa of Watching Dr. Who
Gillian of Food Past
Randi of Parenting Toddlers
Rooze on Literary Mary
And all of the writers on Fallen Words

Thank you to those who nominated me and to those I have nominated.

I found this meme at Tiny Treasury. Though it’ll be embarrassing to put it up, I will anyway so you can all kick my bum to read some more classics. (Keep in mind, though, that I didn’t exactly have a normal childhood. So there.)

Bold those you’ve read.
Italicize books you have started but couldn’t finish.
Add an asterisk* to those you have read more than once.
Underline those on your To Be Read list.

(They should include an option for “…if you have seen the movie”.)

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights*
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Anyone who has looked through my entire list is now challenged to put the list up on their blog.

Ah, more tags. There certainly seem to be a lot of them floating around lately. Today I get to talk about five reasons I love blogging. So here goes.

1. I like getting to know people I wouldn’t otherwise get to know if not for the common thread of my blog subject.

2. I like the sense of community you get after exchanging a few links, making a few comments, etc.

3. Writing is what I love to do, so blogging is a natural part of that. Whether I’m writing in my personal blog, weight loss blog, or here, I’m doing what I like to do and also giving people information at the same time.

4. The sex. Kidding. As far as personal blogging goes, I like it because I often get anti-social. People in my life tend to feel a little bit better when they know what’s going on with it, so personal blogging allows me to do that without having to open my mouth or pick up the bane of my existence - the telephone.

5. Blogging, in more than just a personal blog, is actually doing something meaningful online instead of getting the next high score on Bejeweled.

And now I get to tag five people.

karaokekitty at 101 Reasons I Hate Being Fat
Mallory of Mallory in the Middle
Chrispian at Nothing to Say
Aeryn at Aeryn.org
Kage at I have spread my dreams…

Sally over at Living Without Meat has tagged me. If you’re not familiar with tags or memes, Sally couldn’t have put it better:

In blog world you pass your friends a note by leaving a comment, visit them by hitting their site, show them love with a link to their entry, and hand off the silly childhood chain letter by tagging them to do a meme.

Sally, who was tagged by TaxGirl, tagged me to write seven random facts/habits about me…

1. I was originally signed up to be the Scrapbooking blogger.

2. I love sushi. Love, love, love, love, love it.

3. I have five piercings and two tattoos.

4. I heart Foamy, whom I only found out about by overhearing one of the episodes being played, remembering the quotes from the episode, and googling like crazy.

5. I collect snow globes.

6. I’m a sucker for true romance - not that bubbly “oops we bumped into each other and are now in love!” stuff.

7. My goal always has been to write things that make people feel, make people care about something beyond the day-to-day bubble of their lives.

I tag:

Gillian from Food History
Elisa from The Book Stacks
Paul at Toy Bender
Farley at Wine Outlook
Allison at Find Religion
Neelima at Healthy B.P.M.
and Leslie at Apple Reporter

The rules:

Each player starts with 7 random facts/habits about themselves. People who are tagged need to then report this on their own blog with their 7 things as well as these rules. They then need to tag 7 others and list their names on their blog. They are also asked to leave a comment for each of the tagged, letting them know they have been tagged and to read the blog.

This exercise/tag gets you writing about what you know best - yourself - and writing quickly with the short answer format. It should be a perfect warm up and a great spark for your thoughts.

The “I” Question

I Said:
I Want:
I Wish:
I Hate:
I Miss:
I Hear:
I Wonder:
I Regret:
I Am Not:
I Dance:
I Sing:
I Cry:
I Am Not Always:
I Make With My Hands:
I Write:
I Confuse:
I Need:
I Should:
I Start:
I Finish:

I found this over at Sandi Shelton’s blog and thought it would be fun to participate. She found it on Distraction no. 99.

Turn to page 123 in your work-in-progress. (If you haven’t gotten to page 123 yet, then turn to page 23. If you haven’t gotten there yet, then get busy and write page 23.) Count down four sentences and then instead of just the fifth sentence, give us the whole paragraph.

Here’s mine. I sort of did something different, as far as length, because my paragraphs are short.

He paused. Perhaps not so random times.

The train of thought left as quickly as it had come upon finding a certain piece of paper. He had been looking at the books on the shelves and realized one and only one was bound with a black cover. He took it off the shelf and, as he leafed through it, a paper fell out.

A contract, he discovered upon further examination. A contract of an unpleasant nature.

Ilan might not have known his name in this world, life, reality, but he now was all too aware of his occupation.

Post yours here if you’d like to join in!