2011 Mission Statement

I recently read a blog post a friend of mine had wrote yesterday (Monday December 20th) which you could find here, where she wrote her own mission statement for the new year. I liked the idea and wanted to write my own 2011 Mission Statement for I could look back on and try to keep the promises I shall make to myself. So here goes it. If it interests you, give it a try. Make sure you link it in the comments below so everyone could check it out!

My name is Mindy Crump and in 2011 I would like nothing more than to be myself again. I have had some pretty rough few years, mostly in silence, and I am beginning to want the old me back. Now I know I cannot possibly have the complete old me, but bits and pieces would suffice.

I would like to grow more comfortable with myself. I promise I will try to not back down from a challenge no matter how embarassing or frightening it might be (as long as it's safe of course). When things are not going well I promise to write about it, even if all I want to do is stay in bed. Critism is not my friend. I do not handle it too well. I promise in 2011 I shall work my tail off at defending myself a little bit more. It's about time I get some backbone.

Most importantly, I promise never to give up on myself or on others. I just want to be happy.

On a side note being published in 2011 would be a great thing too.

Holidays & Goals

Hello everyone!

Hopefully you are all doing well during this December.

Around this time, I begin to think about what I have accomplished throughout this year and begin to think about what I would like to accomplish in the New Year. Lately I have become quite anal about this and have created quite a few lists and charts.

I have three main goals next year to work on which include:

1. Opening my own Web Design Business - In 2011 I want it to be the year I finally make this come true. I have been thinking of having a bit of a niche of creating websites for authors which would tie together both my passions; writing and designing.
2. Sell a Script - I have planned 6 months of the year all devoted to Screenwriting. I would love nothing more than to sell a script but the biggest goal before this is to definitely send queries and pitches out to production companies and/or agents.
3. Publish a Novel/Short Story - This year I took one step closer to achieving this goal of mine when I sent in my short story to a local publisher. Unfortunately it was rejected but I was told by the publisher to try sending that short story to fiction magazines. The other six months are devoted to this goal.

These might seem like big goals to try to accomplish in just one year, but after the year I just had I am starting to have faith in myself that it could be possible to achieve anything I set my sights upon.

Throughout this year I have mentioned challenging oneself over and over again. Next year will be no different as I personally have a few monthly events to try out. Perhaps you might try them out with me:

• FAWM also known as February Album Writing Month. This is where you write 14 songs in a month
• NaNoEdMo also known as National Novel Editing Month. Many people already know about this one where you edit 50 hours in a month
• NEPMo (National Epic Poetry Month) This is where you write 5,000 lines of poetry in a month which is simple enough if you write poetry as it is.
• SoFoBoMo which I just love saying over and over again. This is Solo Photo Book Month. I am very excited to give this a try. This is where you create a 31 page or more photo book with photos you take during the month
• National Blog Posting Month. Perhaps you already know about this. I am definitely going to try it out. This is where a blogger like myself, chooses any month during the year and blogs every single day during that month. Perhaps I might try it twice.

Okay so now I have been dying to ask you all what challenges are you taking on in the New Year? They don't have to pertain to just writing. I know I would like to challenge myself to get over the fear of spiders.

NaNoWriMo, Snow and December

Hello Hello all my peeps out there!

I hope you've been having a great two weeks and I hope you did not miss me too much! Though it has been six days since November and Nano has finished up I wanted to let you know that I fortunately completed this year's National Novel Writing Month! WOOT WOOT!

I am very happy about writing my 50,000 words in a month but have come to the realization that my story is not even half way done yet. So I must reach deep down inside of me for momentum and complete this really rough first draft as soon as I can.

With that I would like to apologize for no post last week. My muse decided she had enough of Hawaii and moved back in with me. We decided to celebrate and have a movie night.

On another note if you done Nanowrimo, I really would love to read any excerpts of yours. If you put it on your blog, feel free to leave a link to it and I'll make sure to give it a read and leave a comment if you like. I find it's nice to have show and tell with other writers, especially when I see how excited or even how disappointed the writer is. It is crazy how much expectations we put on ourselves. We are our own worst enemies when it comes to our own talents, but do we not have those talents for a reason?

On a completely different route, remember I told you about my pitch back in October that I did with Muse It Up Publishing? I finally received an email back from them rejecting my poor short story. That is alright though, they were gracious enough to give me feedback and told me that it would suit a magazine, which I am planning on looking into. I have always been positive that if I ever received my first rejection letter from a publisher that I would be crushed. It really was not that bad at all. It made me want to do better. That's a good thing right?

With all that said I would like to leave you all with a 5 minutes video of it snowing somewhere I do not know. It has been snowing here all day! Gotta love December/winter.

Until next time, have a great week!

NaNoWriMo Update + Excerpt

So sorry for not posting much lately...NaNoWriMo has taken over my soul

UPDATE: I am dramatically behind in my word count but I am slowly trying to catch up little by little. As suspected, I think I'm writing utter crap but I still wanted to share some of my craptacular work with you all. I apologize for any of what I call you grammar-holics. What you're about to read will probably drive you up the wall with bad grammar.

The jist of the story is, an officer is kidnapped along with the only witness by a dangerous gang. I'm tyring to have it be a suspense/thriller type of novel. I know it's vague but my story changes from time to time thanks to the constant fighting I've been having with my characters. I have seven main characters so you could probably imagine the stress they're causing me. Also I would like to mention that I like to write screenplays more than novels, so some of my action is much like how I write a screenplay. Maybe you won't notice.

Exerpt: (I have bleeped out the swear words for the under agers)

CHAPTER 1

A howl echoed through the darken woods. This time it was unlike any other. It was abnormal. Non animalistic. Human so it seemed. A female human.

It was dark. Darker than the eye could see. Darker than dark, yet a small glow lit the only patch of meadow the forest surrounded. A woman, not much older than the legal age of nineteen, stood in the middle with her dirt infested toes resting upon the softness of the grass. Her sight blurred thanks to the swollen layers of skin trapping her blue grape like eyes. Five black figures gazed towards her.

She knew who they all were; Raphael, Gatik, Wolf, and Jadon. Most importantly there was Zaccur. How could she forget the one person she thought she trusted most of all. He was the one who planned the entire ordeal. The flirting, the dinners out, the long talks, the kissing, the sex; it was his plan all along in order to get back at her.

“Why...are....why are you” she tried to stumble out of her puckered bloody lips.

“Shut the $&#* up you whore!”

Life slowed down for her. One of the black figures' arm was approaching. She closed her eyes listening to the swooshing air the arm carried with it.

She landed upon the coldness of the ground. She felt nothing. Her face numb and swollen.

Until next time. Happy Writing Everyone!

It's NaNoWriMo Time eee yah eee yah!

For some strange reason I have the "It's peanut butter jelly time" song stuck in my head. If you have no idea what I'm talking about then please click here to see the YouTube video. This video is from Family Guy.

Now just replace those words with It's Naaano Wri Mo Time and you will get the newish song stuck in my head.

So at the time of writing this post, it is Day 8 of our beloved National Novel Writing Month. How are you all doing so far?

I am behind. WAAAY behind. I need to write at least 5,000 words today in order to almost catch up. My motivation took a holiday though. This morning a note was left upon my computer stating the following:

"Dear Mindy,

For the last seven days, I have worked really hard at keeping you going. You tried, and tried some more but I am seeing you are not cooperating with me. I miss the old times we had, like when we stuck together and wrote four novels last year! Or how about the time we slid down that slide and you fell off. We couldn't stop laughing for hours! I have decided I shall give you a break for a few days as I am taking my holidays now. (You know the ones I kept stashing away on my pay check for the past 22 years).

Call me if there is an emergency, and I don't mean the times you are lonely and want me back. I will be in Hawaii. You have my cell. Have fun writing your novel without me! ALOHA!

Sincerely, Mr. Motivation"

How sad is that? He left to go to a nice warm place without me.

Do any of you have any ideas on how I could get my motivation back? I tried sending him flowers, chocolates. I sent him emails, texts and phone calls, begging him to come back. He sent me a picture of the sunset there. I need him back!

Until next time, have a great writing week everyone!

National Novel Writing Month

As of today (Wednesday October 27) there is only 4 more days left until NaNoWriMo aka National Novel Writing Month. For those who have no clue what NaNoWriMo is about I will sum it up in seven words: One heck of a crazy writing month! This is, what I believe to be, my sixth year doing this event and I still find it crazy!

The jist of this month long event is, you come up with an idea for a novel then, starting on November 1st, you write 50, 000 words by November 30th. Sounds simple right? Haha it's not. However just because it's not simple does not mean you shouldn't try it. I believe I mentioned in an earlier post this year about challenging myself more. This is certainly one challenge I look forward to each year. If you're interested in doing NaNoWrimo click here for more information. You could always leave a comment here as well, and I'll be more than willing to help out.

So, for those who already know what NaNoWriMo is all about I wanted to know what you find to be the most challenging part of this event?

Personally, for me I always find that middle week is the hardest. My sleep deprivation catches up to me at that time yet I know I cannot allow myself to sleep more than I have to or I will waste precious time on my what-I-think-is-a-fantastic-novel-being-written.

I wanted to share a YouTube video with you all, relating to NaNoWriMo. A few people wrote a song about the event and decided to make a video for it. I find the song is very catchy.
Click here to see it.

Until next time, have a fantastic week.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Update

I apologize for no post last week. I was attending the Muse Online Writer's Conference as mentioned before, with that on top of my everyday life it was one heck of a busy week.

With that said, I wanted to update you all on some good news that has happened to me during the conference.

I may or may not have mentioned that I was chosen to pitch my short story to a publisher (Muse It Up Publishing). The entire week I spent many hours working on what my pitch would contain. It is extremely hard, especially when you tend to be a bit of a perfectionist. One day, I believe it was Thursday, I worked on my pitch for 8 hours straight. I still ended that day unhappy with what I wrote. It took me until the hour before the pitch to write one that I was extremely happy with.

Anyways to keep the story short, I pitched my story online while I shook uncontrollably. It was pretty difficult to type. That last minute pitch must have been really good because I was told they liked the originality of it and the emotion that I put into the pitch describing the story. At the end of the pitch they asked me to send my short story in along with a synopsis YAY!

All week I have been doing my happy dance!

I wanted to ask all of you writers out there what was it like for you when you pitched or was interviewed by a publisher for the first time?

Do you have issues writing a pitch and/or query?

Until next time have a good week. Be kind to each other!

The Muse Online Writer's Conference

If you are a writer and haven't heard of The Muse Online Writer's Conference then you are in for a treat this week!

This is my 3rd year attending the FREE conference, yes you read right, it is free unless you register late of course.

This year is also my 2nd year of volunteering which has proven to be quite chaotic to say the least.

The conference is plenty of fun for being completely online. I have met some fantastic people for whom I have befriended and talk to quite often.

The volunteering this year has been CRAZY to say the least. I have never learned so much about spreadsheets in such a short amount of time as I have this year.

With that said, if you are a writer and have no register for this year's conference, registration for next years conference is two weeks away so be sure to register!! Make sure to check the site by clicking the link above!!

If you are already registered and are going to be an attendee or maybe even a presenter, please do me a favour and say thank you to all the moderators, transcribers, techies and of course Lea Schizas for all their hard work this year! Believe me, from experience all these volunteers are working Full Time hourse to ensure this conference runs smoothly!

If you're attending this year let me know what you're username is for I can look out for you!

Basics of Web Design

Back in July I talked about Why a writer should have a website. To reread that post you can click here.

I thought, hey why not help those who want to make their own website by giving them the basics aka HTML.

A site can be made simply in a program you already have on your computer: Notepad.

In this program you can make a basic page using HTML (HyperText Markup Language).

HTML uses tags (ie. such as

) which are simple instructions of where everything is placed and/or what that item should look like.

Now if I were to write a very, very basic page in HTML it would look like this:

PLEASE NOTE THERE ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE SPACES BETWEEN BRACKETS AND TAGS! (ie. html> not html >)

<>
<>

<> This is Your Heading < /h1 >

<> This will be your paragraph of information < /p >

< /body >
< /html >

Let me describe to you what each tag does for that particular page.

<> starts your page, letting the program know you are going to use html to build a web site
<> is the beginning of your page and where your HTML will go
<> Heading 1, headings range from 1-6 (ie. <>, <>, <> etc.)
< /h1 > closes the heading tag
<> This is the paragraph tag and the < /p > closes the paragraph... information is typed in between these tags
< /body > closes the page of html codes
< /html > lets everyone and every browser know that html codes are done at this point

Now go try this. Open up Notepad and type in the above code. Save it as a html file (ie. doc.html) and then open it in your internet browser (usually by opening your browser, click on file, open and then find your doc OR press ctrl + o).

Knowing the very basics, you could now incorporate more tags onto the page to elaborate what it looks like.

You could make font bold by using the <> < /b > tags or you could make it italic by using the <> < /i > tags. How about making a list?

For an unordered list ( <>, < /ul >) the code could look like this:

<>

<> Item to be listed < /li >
<> Other item listed < /li >

< /ul >

OR and ordered list:

<>

<> Item #1 < /li >
<> Item #2 < /li >

< /ol >

There are so many tags out there that help form your page. You can make forms, you could have scrolling text, you could change the colour of your text, you could add images, videos, audio... the opportunities are endless!

If you would like to learn more about HTML w3schools is a great website to check out. Now go ahead and try the code up above. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to leave them here and I will be more than happy to answer them!

Until next time, Happy Web Designing!

Screwing Up Your Writing by Christina E. Rundle

I must share with you all an incredibly informative blog post I have just read.

It is called Screwing Up Your Writing Career over on Christina E. Rundle's blog for which I follow.

She gives a nice detailed list of tips for any writer who does not want to screw up his/her writing career. The tips are endless yet the first thing I done once I finished reading them all was print it out.

Thanks Christina for all the wonderful info!