For the curious, this is what my desktop background looks like. I think the (original) quote accompanying the avatar is one of the most important ideas I live by as a writer.
Do any of y’all have desktop designs that are writing-related or inspiring for your work?
I’ve been going through some old journals from when I was a child. I found this hilarious “About Me” packet I had to fill out in fifth grade—full of prompts asking me to provide answers to unimaginative questions that everyone asks kids.
In asking what I wanted to be when I grew up, it said “When I grow up, I want to be a . . . ”
I wanted to be an author.
So I wrote “author” and then I corrected the prompt above by changing “a” to “an.”
That’ll show those jerks who can’t imagine that any kid would want to grow up to be something that starts with a vowel.
I also found this prompted journal entry for “What Makes Me Happy,” in which I announced that I liked writing and wanted to be a writer . . . and that “not having a boyfriend” made me happy. Guess I was destined to be an aromantic asexual from a young age?
I subscribe to Word of the Day from dictionary.com, so I get neat words delivered to my inbox daily. Today’s:
Word of the Day for Wednesday, January 3, 2007
favonian \fuh-VOH-nee-uhn\, adjective:
Pertaining to the west wind; soft; mild; gentle.With dusk came cool, favonian breezes.
I LOVE this word. I want to start using it all the time, except I guess I don’t have that many occasions to talk about western wind.
Can I use it to describe when a country star farts?
No really?
I’m 100% serious. This was the fortune cookie I got today.
What a silly idea, that I might write a book, eh?
I thought I’d share this. I found my first short story, written when I was eleven years old, in fifth grade: March 15, 1989. It was written in pencil in a preteen’s careful cursive. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation has been left untouched. It’s called “Wendy West Saves the World.”
Wendy West was an explorer who had shiny black hair and light purple eyes. She could see farther than a million telescopes put together could see.
One day Wendy West was exploring a hole in Sudan, Africa. She heard some screeching inside the hole and a laser beam shot out of it, narrowly missing Wendy. It hit a tree and the tree evaporated into thin air.
Wendy was shocked at this. She looked into the deep hole. It seemed endless, so she used her special vision to peer deep into the hole. At the bottom, there was a huge group of tall, blue men! They shot lasers at her. They missed. She ran to a nearby police station.
The police were on coffee break. Wendy got a police man to come to the hole. He looked inside the hole. “Is this your idea of a joke? I don’t see anything,” Said the police man. “No,” said Wendy. She shined a flashlight down in the deep hole. Sure enough, nothing was there. She used her special vision to look around in Africa, then in Europe. When she got to China, there were the blue men, shooting huge buildings down.
The police sent helicopters to China, after Wendy West reported her story. They disposed of the aliens, and then they had a party for Wendy and proclaimed that day a holiday called “Alien day!”