Writer's Tips

 

Whenever I meet a fiction writer, I usually take one safe step back.  Sure to accompany anything I say next with a smile and an amount of uncontroversial chatter, I fail to mention that I, myself, like to write fiction.  In fact, I avoid the topic of writing fiction.  Writers, particularly writers of fiction, tend to be very defensive about their work.  They can take a few spelling errors or a remark of criticism on the grammar, but if you contradict their so-called style then they get very angry indeed.

Being a writer myself, I understand how this works.  Don't for a moment think that I'm picking on someone.  (I made a comment about stereotypical homeschoolers yesterday and quickly had to remind everyone that I'm a homeschooler myself.  Yikes, that was a close one.)

One particularly nasty area is hidden inside schools.  When young writers are told how to write their papers, they tend to indignation.  After all, they write all the time.  What the heck is a "topic sentence" and who needs them?  Is there anything to be gained by writing "by the rules"?

My class was recently assigned a paper which could either be descriptive or narrative.  These lines cross over, of course, but I focused on descriptive.  Someone in my class, we'll call George, wants to write screenplays (isn't that cool?).  He's a fiction writer – yeah, I've taken that safe step back a couple of times.  When he got his paper back with a grade that was not up to his expectations, he was understandably disappointed.  (Just a disclaimer, it wasn't a bad grade, but it wasn't an A+.)  I read his paper, and it was good.  There wasn't anything really wrong with it, but it perhaps wasn't up to the standard that the textbook chapters set.  Since that was the standard that the professor was grading by, it's only fair.

So is there anything to be gained by writing the way the professor wants and not in your "style"?  Uh, duh.  Yes.  Captain Obvious statement of the year.  There is always something to be gained in putting your ways aside and learning the ways of others.

Writers struggle with this.  George probably struggles with this.  My sister, who has published a book, struggles with this.  I struggle with this.  Everyone struggles with this.  Human beings apply labels and titles to themselves and so assume themselves experts in that field.  There are exceptions, there are limitations, and there are saints; but generally speaking, this is the case.  Scientists are often made fun of for this very reason.  Writers suffer from the same problems.

Am I saying that all of George's writing should have more description in it and should sound like the selections in the textbook?  I don't know, to be honest with you.  Certainly, his writing should improve as he grows wiser and gains experience, but I haven't formed an opinion on whether his writing should include more description or more this or more that.  We have all experienced different forms of writing.  Austen is different from Tolkien is different from Funke (Dragon Rider, Inkheart, Thief Lord).  Writers who write about current times in current places describe things differently than writers who write about past or imaginary times in past or imaginary places.  I personally love the spell that is woven when there is extensive painted scenery, but that may not fit a book about a war with terrorists.  On the other hand, who knows?  What if all books told a story with more illustration?  Description makes things a little more interesting, conveys feeling and tone, and fleshes out the scene.

But how to describe so that description does those three things?  You have to use metaphor, simile, personification, and strong action verbs.  Consider:

• It was chilly.
• The wind and rain chilled her all through.

Which is better?  Honestly.  The first is fine for conversation or emphasis in a complicated paragraph, but the second tells a story all by itself, doesn't it?  I'm even cautiously willing to bet that every writer that reads the latter sentence will feel their imagination kick into gear.  (Notice that chilly changed from a predicate subject adjective to an action verb.)

As I say all the time to my siblings, don't be afraid to try new things and learn.  Or are you a selfish coward?  I know I am, but no one has to know that.  I'm going to improve my writing by trying ways which are not my own.  I'll outwardly be just as brave as a heroic protagonist, and in doing so, become who I pretend to be.

And you?

~Meggy

Time Circle

The clearing waited in stillness.  The wind blew through the thickly-green upper branches, but nothing stirred below.  The earth slept under layers of dead maple leaves.  Three tall pines sheltered the spot form the sun, but no living soul rested in the shade.

Her skirt snagged thorny blackberry bushes, low and lazy, without warning.  Long had those brambles waited at the entrance to discourage all but the bravest from stepping foot within, but time had disillusioned them and tricked them into retirement.

Young birch trees, startled suddenly out of their nonchalance, grasped desperately for her.  They caught naught but her golden hair, which slipped like silk through their fingers.  Time had tricked them, too, into pride and forgetfulness.

A moat of thin, brown leaves enclosed the clearing.  They cried out in crackling voices to be so suddenly woken from their daze.  Time had made them old and weak; they could not endure and their backs broke.  Even under so light a tread as hers, they did not have the strength to bear her across.

In the heart of the clearing, three pines stood watch in a circle like great pillars, no more than five feet apart.  The earth around them was bare and exposed; and time had baked sticky pine needles and dirt together to form a springy layer of topsoil.  It molded beneath her feet and sprang back, akin to walking on a mattress.

One last lonely, scraggly branch lived low on the trunk of a pine.  All the branch's companions had withered and died in the shadow of the canopy above, but this sole branch had survived by stretching out beyond the shade and shadows to where a hole in the roof let in playful sunbeams.  There, in that sunny haven, a tuft of needles sprouted and drank in the warmth.

On this lone tree branch hung a homemade swing – a simple two-by-four, dangling three feet from the ground on a thick bit of splintery rope.  The rope slithered up from one end of the swing to the branch, coiled up along it a foot or two, and dropped down around the other end of the swing.

The branch pitched and jolted under the weight of the swing's passenger; the tuft of leaves chattered.  A dry, grey rock beneath the swing acted as anchor, and her feet kicked against the rough trunk of a tree to launch backwards – one, sweeping motion.  Barren branches, pine needles, and patches of maple leaves wove a dizzying mosaic against the blue sky overhead.

All was still.  The smell of age and rot wafted stealthily in the air.  The distant rush of the freeway went by in ignorance.  Stray sunbeams danced with old dust; and together, they blurred the lines, softened the edges, and transformed the forest.  The clearing had become a creature – wise, and maternal, and very, very old.

It was secret.  It was still.  It was timeless.

Wrote this for English class recently and got a great grade on it.  What do you think?

~Meggy

He Was Here

First, go read the version at The Thoughts of the Mad Elvish Poet.

It was interesting to read her interpretation, because we both had the same "on the brink of something big" impression, but her style was completely different from the one I imagined – I couldn't resist trying my own hand and comparing the two.  I'm not saying that mine is better, just that the two interpretations are different.  I liked hers, understand.  I wanted to compare the difference that two different people saw in the same picture.  I really encourage you to read mine and then read hers (or vice versa) and maybe write your own, and see just how varied perspectives can be!

 

He was in here, somewhere.  He'd gone down, down, down – somewhere.  I didn't know where.  But he was down here.  Something drew me in here and I don't know why.  But I knew, somehow, I knew he was in here.  He'd been missing for almost a year – isn't that always the way?  Somehow I knew he was in here.

No trick of science could explain this to me – no reasoning would keep me away.  He was in here.  He had gone down, down, down.  He was in here somewhere.  He had drowned, and no one had been around to see it.  Why, I didn't know.  But he was in here.  He was in here.  He had drowned, he had died – and yet he was still here.  He was waiting.  He was still here, waiting.  He was in here somewhere, waiting for me.  He was waiting for me to come and find him.

I need only step in and find him.  I need only feel my way in and find him.  I need only run my feet carefully along the rocky bottom and find him.  He was waiting.  He was waiting for me to find him.  I need only go in farther.  I need only go in deeper.  I need only go in farther, deeper, up to my knees in the icy water.  He was waiting, and my skirt grew heavy.  He was waiting and I need only go up to my waist.  He was in here somewhere and I only needed to find him.

He was here.  He was waiting.  He was here, waiting for me.  I could see him.  I could see him down there.  He was down there, waiting on the bottom.  He was here in the murky water.  I could see him.  He was here and I could see him.  He was waiting here for me to find him and I could see him.  He was here.  He was waiting.  He was here.  He was here....

~Meggy

New Day Dawning

I made a vlog for my family the other night.  It was a lot of fun, and my family loved it!  I've got to do that more often.  There's no doubt in my mind now that I was right to pick Multimedia for my major instead of English (even though I'm a heck of a writer ;P ).  Also made me realize how much I like to be in media as much as I like making it.  XP

I just got on Facebook recently – I must be out of my mind but there it is.  ...I mean, why do I need Facebook?  I don't have photos to share, and anything I have to share goes on my blog.  But Facebook comes in handy for finding a ride home – or it would, if I didn't suddenly have a ride already.  Even so, a friend of mine is a photographer and he'll have photos up of me and the gang here at college.  It's nice to have Facebook for some things I guess.

It's becoming more and more likely that people I know will discover my online presence.  I ain't got nuttin' to hide (although that sentence comes close – yeesh), but it's still a little scary.  I mean, I'm essentially the same person, but I'm a little more open here.  My guts are spilled.

Anyway....

It's funny – college isn't all that different from anywhere else.  People tell me that my hair color is gorgeous, and are impressed that it's natural, and are surprised that it's naturally straight.  I've also been pleasantly surprised by the amount of compliments I've received since I started wearing my glasses so often.  College life is so like anywhere else in many ways.

And yet... and yet.  I've never been accepted so much.  It's been, frankly, bizarre.  And the whole gang agrees with me.  This class I have is so close, and most everyone is so awesome.  Things I've said before and been the werido, I'm now hearing them say.  They want us to all be in the same English class next year.

People know my name, and not only say my name but talk to me.  Even among crowds of people who know me well, I'm so often ignored or given the simple pleasantries.  I've been in the in between place – not with the adults but not one of the kids.  But here – and I should probably be keeping this to myself – people value me, want to really know me, want to converse with me on absolutely nothing.  The small talk and laughter and foolishness that I had learned to shake my head at and detest, I now get it.  People do it because they can.  I've learned to ignore my name, a name which is so common around here.  People call it out all the time – in voices I don't recognize, sometimes I do – I always ignored it.  They never mean me.  Now people say my name and they mean me.  That's incredible.  It's not, like, a weepy moment.  It's just... different.  Weird.  We all know how precious names are – they hold our identity in ways we may never fully understand.  To hear my name on the lips of someone other than my family is–  But now I sound like a looser.  :P

Anyway, I'm coming to love college.  I don't really miss the drudgery of home, as great a satisfaction as it gave me.  There are other duties here that I must attend to, and they give me satisfaction as I never knew they could.  It's cool.  And I'm keeping my head.

But now it sounds like I'm writing home and not to people I barely know over the Internet.  If you got something out of this rant, then good – more power to us all.

God bless us, every one!
~Meggy

Test of Fire

~Meggy

The Messy Desk of Me: Pictures are from Tumblr

The Messy Desk of Me:

If you liked my post "Dr.... who?",  visit the above link for some awesome photos.  If I wasn't using my sister's computer, I'd definitely be using those to personalize everything.

~Meggy

Dr.... who?

Why didn't I watch this earlier?!  A shout-out to Maggie for her advice on approaching the show.  I'm glad you started me off with Matt Smith because that gave me a chance to fall in love with him before I met David Tennant.  I introduced my friend to "Dr. Who" and we're both hooked!  We just might spend our entire four-day on that!  It was interesting, however, that you introduced me to David Tennant through the "Blink" episode – not that I regret it – great episode.  But he hardly has a part in that episode.  Love him in it, all the same.  I just wondered if you had any particular reason for that.

My big conundrum is whether or not I should take it home to my family.  My youngest sister is twelve years old.  Being the youngest, she's been introduced to some strange things at perhaps an unprecedented age.  "Emergency!", "Adam 12", "Star Trek", "Star Wars", "Lord of the Rings", "The Mary Tyler Moore Show", and on goes the list.  These shows and movies aren't that bad, really, but she got to watch them much younger than I did.  It's not jealousy I'm feeling – it's anxiety.  When I called home, I told my family that I had a new obsession that I wanted to surprise them with when I got home, but now I can't help but wonder if I should bring it home with me at all.  Most of the episodes don't contain a lick of anything "inappropriate" (btw, I've come to hate that word), but they're action packed and someone dies in every episode.  Sometimes the people who die are insignificant, but that's not the point.  The very word "insignificant" is terrible, and that's what I'm worried about.  I'm not worried that my sister will be bothered by what she sees, I'm worried that she won't be.  I'm concerned that she might be rather desensitized to some things that she shouldn't be.

The Doctor is generally a very moral character, for those of you who don't know him.  He values life beyond all else, often even risking his own life and convenience to give the villain a second chance.  Death is rarely something used disgustingly.  There's a lot of "Theology of the Body", as some I know would say.  Lots of people sacrifice themselves for others – sometimes to the death, sometimes not.  That's kind of the whole premise of the show, bravery in the face of treachery.

So I'm not concerned on moral grounds about sharing it with people.  I don't care if death bothers my sister.  It should.  It bothers me.  My friend and I both cringed through the first whole episode we watched together (which had an unusual number of deaths).  If the show bothers my sister, she probably just won't watch it, and that's perfectly fine.  The way I understand my sister, she's at a point where she won't watch stuff that bothers her – which is a perfectly good state of mind, and hopefully we all go through it at some point.  So what scares me about the possibility of bringing my new interest home with me is that she will watch it with me, and that death won't bother her; or if it does, it won't for long.

There's also the need for my family to like it, of course.  Whenever you introduce people you like to something you like, you hope and pray they get along; and it's a little sad when the people you like don't get as enthusiastic as you.  So far, all our recent "family obsessions" have been stuff that my parents were already familiar with.  Look over the list above – all stuff that came around during their youth (or before) and early adult years (for the most part).  But this is something new, something modern, something of my generation that I have to convince my parents to like.

Consider "The Princess Bride".  We would never, ever, ever, ever watch that movie if it came out today (not to mention that it'd probably be a whole lot more immoral, but forgetting that for the moment...).  But because the movie came out when my parents were kids, and it's funny, and it's somewhat infamous among a certain crowd of their generation, my siblings and I were allowed to watch it.  Find a comparable "modern" movie and no one in my family would even think to watch it.  We probably wouldn't even think to watch the "this generation" equivalent of "Back to the Future".  Things gain a certain amount of forgiveness with age.  It's immoral consequences are somewhat irrelevant because it's damage was done and now it's just there, as sort of a museum piece.

But that's just a long rampage.  I'm sure most of my family will like "Dr. Who".  There's just the uncertainty of human unpredictability which always exists.  ...Not sure that's an English sentence.  Is it possible to get across my meaning without the double negative?  Is it a double negative?  ...Well, you know what I mean.

~Meggy

For those who do know the Doctor, here's just a fun video that, if you haven't already seen, you have to see!

 

(Must watch in full screen!)

A great little article my aunt sent me –

By Kevin D. Williamson

In the "National Review"

There is exactly one authentically radical social movement of any real significance in the United States, and it is not Occupy, the Tea Party, or the Ron Paul faction. It is homeschoolers, who, by the simple act of instructing their children at home, pose an intellectual, moral, and political challenge to the government-monopoly schools, which are one of our most fundamental institutions and one of our most dysfunctional. Like all radical movements, homeschoolers drive the establishment bats.

In the public imagination, homeschooling has a distinctly conservative and Evangelical odor about it, but it was not always so. The modern homeschooling movement really has its roots in 1960s countercultural tendencies; along with A Love Supreme, it may represent the only worthwhile cultural product of that era. The movement’s urtext is Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, by A. S. Neill, which sold millions of copies in the 1960s and 1970s. Neill was the headmaster of an English school organized (to the extent that it was organized) around neo-Freudian psychotherapeutic notions and Marxian ideas about the nature of power relationships in society. He looked forward to the day when conventional religion would wither away — “Most of our religious practices are a sham,” he declared — and in general had about as little in common with what most people regard as the typical homeschooler as it is possible to have.

“People forget that some of the first homeschoolers were hippies,” says Bob Wiesner, a counselor at the Seton Home Study School, a Catholic educational apostolate reporting to the bishop of Arlington, Va. In one of history’s little ironies, today most of homeschooling’s bitterest enemies are to be found on the left. “We don’t have much of a problem from conservatives,” Wiesner says. “It’s the teachers’ unions, educational bureaucrats, and liberal professors. College professors by and large don’t want students who can think for themselves. They want students they can indoctrinate, but that’s hard to do with homeschoolers — homeschoolers push back.” He relishes the story of a number of graduates of his program who attended a top-tier Catholic university and enrolled together in theology classes taught by the school’s most notorious liberals. They were of course more conversant with church orthodoxy than were many of their instructors. “The professors hated them. But the kids had fun. The president of that college at that time was trying to clean up the theology department, so when the professors would complain, he would call the students in and tell them to try to be polite — with a wink and a nod.”

One of those liberal professors is Robin West of the Georgetown law school, who wrote a remarkably shallow and evidence-free jeremiad against homeschooling that was published to the journal’s discredit in Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly. More a work of imagination than one of scholarship, the article ignores the wealth of data suggesting that homeschooling is a largely upper-income and suburban phenomenon, and that homeschooled students typically outperform their public-school peers. West offers a caricature of homeschooling families far removed from reality: “The husbands and wives in these families feel themselves to be under a religious compulsion to have large families, a homebound and submissive wife and mother who is responsible for the schooling of the children, and only one breadwinner. These families are not living in romantic, rural, self-sufficient farmhouses; they are in trailer parks, 1,000-square-foot homes, houses owned by relatives, and some, on tarps in fields or parking lots. Their lack of job skills, passed from one generation to the next, depresses the community’s overall economic health and their state’s tax base.” Education scholar Brian D. Ray, who specializes in homeschooling, found that West’s claims “basically have no foundation in research evidence,” and pointed out to the contrary that “repeated studies by many researchers and data provided by United States state departments of education show that home-educated students consistently score, on average, well above the public school average on standardized academic achievement tests. To date, no research has found homeschool students to be doing worse, on average, than their counterparts in state-run schools. Multiple studies by various researchers have found the home educated to be doing well in terms of their social, emotional, and psychological development.”

The problem is not educational outcomes: Students in the Seton program tend to score on average in the 80th percentile on standardized tests. The problem is that progressives operate as though the state owned children as joint property. Dana Goldstein, writing in Slate, urged her fellow progressives to resist the temptation to homeschool, arguing that the practice is “fundamentally illiberal” and asking incredulously: “Could such a go-it-alone ideology ever be truly progressive?” She went on to argue that the children of high-achieving parents amount to public goods because of peer effects — poor students do better when mixed with better-off peers — meaning that “when college-educated parents pull their kids out of public schools, whether for private school or homeschooling, they make it harder for less-advantaged children to thrive.” She does not extend that analysis to its logical conclusion: that conscientious, educated liberals should enroll their children in the very worst public schools they can find in order to maximize the public good.

The numbers are against them, but West, Goldstein, and like-minded critics still bristle with hostility at homeschooling. There are three related reasons for that.

The first is that progressives by their nature do not trust people as individuals and feel that, whether we are applying for a credit card or popping into 7-Eleven for a soft drink, Americans require state-appointed overseers. If homeschooling weren’t already legal — a happy consequence of the longstanding patchwork of exemptions in state-level mandatory-education statutes — it is highly unlikely that most state legislatures would vote to legalize it. Nine-tenths of American children attend government schools, and most of the remaining tenth attend government-approved private schools. The political class wants as many of that remaining tenth in government schools as possible; teachers’ unions have money on the line, and ideologues do not want any young skull beyond their curricular reach. A political class that does not trust people with a Big Gulp is not going to trust them with the minds of children. While West would like to criminalize homeschooling — she writes wistfully of the days when “parents who did so were criminals” — others have sought to regulate it out of existence, for instance by declaring homeschoolers’ residences to be public schools and requiring them to meet attendant planning and zoning standards, by installing such things as fire-safety systems, parking facilities, and emergency exits. “The good news is, there are very few people with authority and power who want to end homeschooling,” says Jeremiah Lorrig of the National Home School Legal Defense Association. “They’ve given up trying to outlaw it — and now are trying to control it.”

The second reason for this hostility is that while there is a growing number of secular, progressive, organic-quinoa-consuming homeschool families, there remains a significant conservative and Christian component. The reasons for progressive hostility to conservative Christians are many and complex, but one of them is that, like the homeschool, the church is something outside of government control, a forum that the triple constitutional protections of religion, free speech, and association place beyond the range of Leviathan’s leash. Progressives are by their nature monopolists, and the churches constitute real competing centers of power in society.

A third reason is that the majority of homeschool teachers are mothers. A traditional two-parent family with one full-time breadwinner and one stay-at-home parent is practically built into the model. Goldstein scoffs at that as the “dated presumption that children hail from two-parent families, in which at least one parent can afford (and wants) to take significant time away from paid work,” but of course the model is neither dated nor restricted to religiously conservative red-staters: Liberal enclaves such as Brooklyn and Seattle are full of stay-at-home moms. (Brooklyn, in fact, is a hotbed of crunchy homeschooling.)

Americans are dissatisfied with many things: Congress, insurance companies, Wall Street, the media. Many are dissatisfied with the government schools, too, and homeschooling has given them an opportunity to do something about that, taking matters into their own hands. They could do the same thing with health insurance and banking, as well, were the legal environment liberal enough. As its critics best appreciate, homeschooling is about more than schooling.

The Tea Party and the Ron Paul movement are in some ways the conservative flipside of Occupy, albeit with better manners, more coherent ideas, and higher standards of personal hygiene. They comprise conservatives on the verge of despair at trying to achieve real social change through the process of electoral politics and the familiar machinery of party and poll, with its narrow scope of action, uncertain prospects, and impermanent victories. There is a different model for reform being practiced in more than 1 million American households, by people of wildly different political and religious orientations. Homeschooling represents a kind of libertarian impulse, but of a different sort: It is not about money. Homeschooling families pay their taxes to support local public schools, like any other family — which is to say, begrudgingly in many cases — and the movement does not seek the abolition of local government-education monopolies. (It should.) Homeschooling families simply choose not to participate in the system — or, if they do, to participate in it on their own terms.

And that is a step too far for the Hobbesian progressives, who view politics as a constant contest between the State and the State of Nature, as though the entire world were on a sliding scale between Sweden and Somalia. Homeschoolers may have many different and incompatible political beliefs, but they all implicitly share an opinion about the bureaucrats: They don’t need them — not always, not as much as the bureaucrats think. That’s what makes them radical and, to those with a certain view of the world, terrifying.



(Bold is not original to article – it's great to get recognition in public media (reference to Seton))
~Meggy

Artsy Award!

The Golden Road: Artsy Award!: An award! Oooooo... yay! Thank you Miss Elizabeth from The Country Handmaiden for it! And here are the questions acco...

I was recently given the 'Artsy Award'.  Ironically enough, I think, I now have to answer five questions that I think artsy people can't answer.  But oh well!  Here goes:

1)  Skirts or jeans?

I will say this: jeans are very convenient on a number of levels, but not, I feel, terribly flattering almost all of the time.  They also tend to be too much affected by the little things.  Skirts are very feminine, easy, and flattering (usually), but not terribly practical some of the time.  I tend to feel that jeans are "cosy-er".

2)  Cats or dogs?

I'd rather not have one without the other, quite frankly.  Cats are snuggly and cuddly, soft and somehow intelligent.  Dogs are simpler, devoted, show an obvious need for your attention.

3)  Cows or horses?

Oh... really?  I don't like milk, but I love cows.  I love riding horses.  I'll not choose.

4)  Wood floors or carpet?

Wood floors have such a ring to them, and a smoothness after a good scrub.  Wide pine floors are beautiful.  Carpets are soft and softening.  They encourage warmth.  They each have their place.

5)  Rain or sun?

Sun on a day when my life is before me.  Rain on a day when my life is behind.  Sun on a day when my hopes are high.  Rain on a day when my dreams are soaring.  Sun on a day when I've conquered the world.  Rain on a day when the world conquers me.

And with that, I have been sufficiently vague.  I appreciate getting awards because it tells me that people read my blog, even when page views are down and comments are few.  When someone has an award to give and she thinks of me, I'm pleased, because you're pleased (pronoun disagreement).  And that makes me happy.

I will not pass on the award to "Raindrops and Moonlight" because I see that she has already received the award; but let it here be known that she receives honorable mention.

Shoes of Paper, Stockings of Buttermilk

The Thoughts of the Mad Elvish Poet

The Messy Desk of Me

Arda Nessimava

Petticoats and Muckboots

~Meggy

Alas! With what title could'st one name such a thing!

Alright, I feel like I've been shirking a duty to write about something fun.  Well... I don't have anything fun to write about.  I suppose there have been times when I just ramble on nonsensically about anything that comes into my head, but my head is so very ordered right now -- really it is!  *ahem*

....

I must be fighting a cold because I got to bed early last night and this morning I was more tired than ever.

Yesterday was Ministry to Moms.  If I haven't yet told you what that is, I'm a mother's helper for someone in town, and in return, she makes me dinner!  I always feel so useless when I'm there.  The boys are so easy to please, and so sweet, and I just have to help them do whatever they want to do -- and they're fairly bright kids for their age (I feel).  Then, at the end of the afternoon, she tells me what a great help it is to have me over!  I almost feel ashamed because I feel like I haven't done anything!  This isn't challenging -- it can't possible be helpful.

But I guess it is.

There was a sale on attire at the bookstore today.  Even with the discounts I decided I couldn't possibly afford anything -- so I bought a journal.  :)  And a postcard.  I think I'll send the postcard to my Nana, because she's always sending us postcards when she goes on trips.  But she's away from home right now, so I guess I'll wait until after Homecoming Weekend.

Other than that, I have little to tell you right now.  My mind, I think, is a little overwhelmed with the sudden inspiration that I could possibly finish an assignment here before my next class.  It'd have to be quick, but I think I can do it.

TTFN

~Meggy