A YA Dystopian Novel of My Very Own!

Today is the last day of November, which means the last day of another year of NaNoWriMo.  Just in case anyone (meaning the one or two people who actually read this blog) needs a refresher, NaNoWriMo happens every year from Nov. 1-30, during which time aspiring novelists attempt to write an entire novel (well, more like a novella) of 50,000 words during a single month.

This was my sixth year participating in Nanowrimo, and I'm glad to announce that it was also my sixth year successfully completing a 50,000 word novel!  I was pretty sure that this year was going to be the year I finally threw in the towel.  I had been working far ahead of time on outlining a plot and creating character sketches this year, so I was ready to go.  But maybe I was just a little bit too prepared - when I started writing on day 1, I was already bored with the plot and the characters I'd chosen.  Not a good start.  I decided that taking care of an 18 month old full time while being pregnant with a second baby might not be the best time to be undertaking a new novel.  So I decided on day 1 to skip it this year.

But for some reason, I can never not do Nanowrimo.  So I took a day off on day 2, but on day 3 I was back, and I decided to start all over, completely from scratch.  I reset my word counter to 0, which was a bit intimidating, but then I managed to surprise myself by churning out 5,000 words that day, and I stayed ahead the whole rest of the way.  I've been reading a ton of YA dystopian fiction lately, and I'd been jokingly saying that I needed to write a YA dystopian novel of my own.  Well, no better time than the present, right?

So this year's novel ended up being very different from anything else I've written.  I was able to combine my love of YA, my love of sci-fi, and my new-found love for dystopia into what turned out to be a really fun exercise in writing for me.  Cy has been reading it as I've been writing and is almost done, so we'll see if my one reader thinks it's any good once he finishes.

And now for a spoiler.  Or a synopsis, rather.  I realize as I'm trying to condense my novel into a brief summary that it's the kind of plot that will appeal to only a very small niche of people.  But it appealed to me, and I had more fun writing than I've had writing any of my Nano novels yet, I think.  Anyway, without further ado, the novel is called Alter Nation, and it's set in a dystopian United States that is no longer the United States but instead, the Disjointed Territories of America (each territory ruled by a Moderator), the Union having been dissolved after a Second Civil War.  The main character is a rising high school senior named Asher Aiken, and when the story opens, he's just stolen his dad's car and crashed it, paralyzing himself in the process.  Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view) for him, his dad has booked him a trip to Alter Nation.  Alter Nation is a privately funded research facility that spans the west coast of the Disjointed Territories.  It is surrounded by a huge stone wall, behind which scientists have managed to harness alternate realities.  They have the ability to pluck people from another reality and Switch them with someone in Asher's reality, swapping their consciousnesses so that someone like Asher can wake up as good as new in a healthy, whole version of his own body, and forget that his accident ever even happened.  But the Switch doesn't turn out to be the perfect fix it's touted to be, and Asher of course meets a girl while he's waiting to be Switched, and then of course, he becomes aware of some sketchy practices happening behind closed doors at Alter Nation and ultimately has some tough moral decisions to make.  Coming-of-age, identity, all the usual suspects as far as YA themes seem to pop up.  That's basically the gist...if you're interested, you'll have to wait until I (hopefully) edit the novel and (hopefully) publish it to find out the rest!  (I say hopefully because, if you will notice, I said that I have finished Nanowrimo 6 times.  Out of the past 5 years, I have finished editing and self-published exactly 2 of those books!)

But like I said, I had a ton of fun writing it this year (despite my yearly bout of anger at the discrepancies between my word counter and the one on the Nanowrimo site) and I'm really glad I decided to go ahead and dive in.  I'm also extremely relieved November is now over.  I'm ready to take a break and read something that someone else has written instead of writing something myself!

Thanksgiving at Lake Murray

After our trip to the ob/gyn on Wednesday morning, we swung back through West Ashley to pick up Gemma (she was having a blast playing with Noah and Liam at their house) and then we headed up to Cy's parents' brand new house on Lake Murray (near Lexington, SC) for Thanksgiving.  The new house is gorgeous - it is full of windows and light and you can see the lake almost everywhere you look.

For example,  here is the living room:

And this was by far Gemma's favorite spot in the house: the huge screened-in porch.

She got very upset any time we made her come back in, even when it was really cold out and her poor little nose was all red.  She didn't care; all she wanted to do was play on the porch!

Anyway, we got there around lunchtime on Wednesday.  We took a tour and then spent most of the day in the kitchen, preparing for the big Thanksgiving meal the next day.  I made a pumpkin pie with homemade crust:

And hummus deviled eggs:

I had never made them before but they were super delicious!  I also made corn spoonbread (which I neglected to take a picture of), and ended up making and helping out with quite a few other things on Thanksgiving Day.  (There was a ton of food!)
 
This is the view we woke up to on Thanksgiving morning, a very nice start to our day:

Again, we spent most of the day in the kitchen getting ready.  Then late that afternoon, Wes, Kelly, Noah, Liam, and Uncle Mike and Aunt Jean arrived.  We enjoyed a very delicious Thanksgiving dinner together.  Then, after dinner, chaos ensued, as is typical with three little ones.  They had so much fun together the whole time we were there, and I was really impressed by how well they played together.

We also *attempted* to take some family photos on Thanksgiving (it didn't work out terribly well):

The day after Thanksgiving, we headed out early in the morning for a trip to the zoo.  It was really nice - the weather felt great and the zoo was not very crowded.  The kiddos seemed to enjoy it - Noah got to see a cool 3D dinosaur movie, and they all rode the carousel:

(Gemma actually didn't enjoy the carousel as much as it appears - I found out later that Cy was tickling her just so that she would be smiling for a picture!)

And of course we saw some animals (real, stone, stuffed, you name it).  Gemma's favorite animal seemed to be the ostriches for some reason.  I thought she was going to crawl through the fence to try to climb on one of them or something.  Then, when we were ready to move on, she kept running back over to them - I finally had to pick her up and carry her off so we didn't get left behind.

Gemma saw this elephant in the gift shop and latched on to it.  She has been dragging it everywhere ever since.

I was way too excited about this flamingo tree.  Thank goodness I have a flamingo tree of my very own already.

We enjoyed our Thanksgiving lake/zoo trip very much.  We headed back home yesterday morning, but before we left, I had a chance to walk out early that morning and snap a few photos of one last beautiful lake sunrise:

Baby Boy

We kicked off our Thanksgiving trip by first making a stop at the ob/gyn Wednesday morning for our 20 week ultrasound.  We were so excited to find out that we will be adding a little boy to the family sometime around April 10!  (With Gemma, we weren't sure what we were looking for on the ultrasound, but this time around it was very obvious to us that it was a boy, before the technician even told us!) Everything looked fantastic on the ultrasound - the baby seems very healthy and doing great.  Now we just have to buy a ton of blue stuff because everything we currently own is very pink!

Fun at Brittlebank Park

The weather has been beautiful in Charleston the past few days, so yesterday afternoon Gemma and I accompanied Cy downtown while he got his haircut.  We enjoyed a stroll up and down Broad Street, then when Cy was done, the three (well, four actually) of us headed over to Brittlebank Park.  We had a really great time - Gemma enjoyed riding a dolphin and swinging on the swings (and staring at all the other kids). 

Weekly Reading Roundup (Nov. 13-19)

I decided this morning that I'm going to try to blog about books more.  Usually, at the very end of the year, I'll do a blog post with a list of all my favorite reads from the past year.  But I never do much in the way of actual reviews, or warn people to steer clear of all the bad books out there!  So in the tradition of of a few favorite authors whose blogs I follow, I'm going to attempt to do a post each week about what I've read over the course of that week.  A word of warning: if you're not a fan of YA lit, you probably don't even want to bother reading these posts, since that's mostly what I'm into these days.  That disclaimer being said, here is my inaugural weekly reading roundup. 

What I read this past week:

Crossed by Ally Condie -

This is the second in a trilogy that takes place in a dystopian America controlled by a government called the Society.  The Society controls everything, including the person with whom you are Matched (the main premise for book 1).  In this second installment, Cassia has rejected the strictures of Society and rejected her Match (sort of, she still waffles back and forth between her feelings for Ky and her feelings for Xander a little too much for my taste) and headed to the Outer Provinces in search of Ky, who has been sent away basically to die.  This book is very different from the first one, mostly in tone and setting.  The author is from Utah and she does an amazing job describing the canyons the characters travel through.  The writing is beautiful and the story develops well, but I was a little disappointed with the ending.  Spoiler alert: after spending the majority of the novel trying to find each other, Ky and Cassia are shipped off in different directions immediately upon their arrival once they finally reach the Resistance.  That kind of bugged me, but what bugged me even more is that they both seemed totally okay with it.  Having been right there with them on their journey, I wasn't really okay with it and thought they should have protested.  I felt like the entire journey was rendered a little bit pointless.  But that's my only real beef with the book.  Overall, I really liked it.  And since there's still a third installment to come, I'll try not to put too much stock in the ending of book 2 just yet.  

Seizure by Kathy Reichs -

This is the second of a new YA series written by forensic anthropologist, murder mystery novelist, and producer/writer of Bones, Kathy Reichs.  I really liked this book.  I thought it was even better than the first in the series.  This may be because the main plot centered around a search for a long-lost pirate treasure, buried somewhere near Charleston.  I am a bit partial to all things pirate.  But I truly thought she did a great job of setting up all the clues for the treasure hunt, and everything came together very cleverly and believably.  The only thing I didn't like about this was that the dialogue between the teens seemed a bit contrived and kind of got on my nerves occasionally.


The Death Cure by James Dashner -

This is the final installment of the Maze Runner trilogy.  This whole trilogy reminded me a lot of The Hunger Games.  And like The Hunger Games, I was kind of bummed as the books got progressively less great.  I loved the first book in this trilogy; I couldn't put it down.  I was less into book 2 - it got really zombie apocalypse-esque which is just not my thing.  I am only about halfway through book 3 and so far I'm struggling to even want to finish it.  Right now I feel like it is just a ton of pointless action happening sporadically without much of a plot.  Some of the main characters (ie, Teresa) have completely disappeared from the pages as well.  I'm going to try to finish it but I'm not loving and don't anticipate that my opinion will change much.  I strongly recommend book 1 but in my opinion, 2 and 3 aren't worth your time.

And now as I'm finishing this blog post, Cy just suggested that I should blog about watching Green Lantern last night.  Speaking of things that aren't worth my time, suffice it to say that I thought Green Lantern was a horrible movie and I wish I could erase the memory of watching it from my brain because it was that bad. 

Ready to Road Trip

I've had the book One Yard Wonders checked out from the library for a couple of months now and I finally got around to making a few things out of it.  This is an excellent book of simple sewing projects that are actually useful (I'm asking for my own copy for Christmas).  Since we have a couple of road trips coming up for the holidays, I decided to tackle a few sewing projects this week that might be useful for road-tripping.  Here is what I accomplished.

A pretty purple cover for my neck pillow in two contrasting fabrics:

This was not from the book; I made my own pattern.  This was my second attempt at making a cover for my neck pillow - the first one I made was too small.  This was also my first attempt at sewing a zipper which was rather painful.  I think I ripped out more stitches than I actually sewed but I eventually finished it. 

A trash bag for the car (this is from the book):

A bed pocket to hold my Kindle, books, etc. (also from book):

(My mom gave me a bunch of different colored camo fabric from her fabric stash recently.  Hence the camo.  Which means that most of the supplies for these projects were free!  All I purchased was a zipper, a parachute buckle (for trash bag), pink bias tape for the bed pocket, and I made the neck pillow cover from two fat quarters I had purchased earlier for 97 cents each.  So I made all of this for under $10!)

I'm all set for holiday road trips now!

Halloween and other things

Wow I cannot believe it has been two whole months since I've blogged.  That makes me kind of sad, but it's not without reason.  There has been a lot going on.  Mostly a lot of sickness...because we are expecting baby #2!  I am currently 19 weeks (we will be doing our anatomy ultrasound next week and hopefully seeing a very healthy baby and if things go well, finding out the gender!) and I have been super sick pretty much the whole time, until about a week or so ago, when things have finally started to ease off.  The baby is due April 10, which seems sooooooo far away right now.  But enough about that - hopefully there will be a post with more good news about that next week.

For now, I at least wanted to post some belated Halloween photos of the cutest little cowgirl around:

We had a pretty low-key Halloween.  Rachel came over after class and we picked up some pizzas and the traditional Brown family Halloween donuts.  Then we passed out candy for a bit and chased Gemma around the yard since she was getting very excited but didn't really know what was going on.  We had decided she was probably still too young for trick-or-treating this year.  Then we turned off the light and followed the Shealy family tradition of going to bed early.  (And that's not a Halloween-specific tradition; it's pretty much every day.)

An update on Gemma: she had her 18 month checkup last week and was doing well.  She still weighed only 17 lbs., 5 oz. (1.66 percentile), her weight was the 18th(ish) percentile, and her head was a whopping 84th percentile, so maybe she will be very thin and also very smart!  Go Gemma! ;)  The pediatrician made the statement that he had never seen a child be in the negative on a growth chart.  I told him to prepare himself to see this for the first time when we brought Gemma back in May for her 2 year checkup.  As far as her food allergies, he said that around age 2 we will start trying milk products and eggs again and that she can try some nut-based things at that point too.  And by that point things will be super crazy because Gemma will be a brand-new big sister!

In other news, Nanowrimo is in full swing.  I started a very well prepared, carefully outlined, and thoughtfully plotted novel on Nov. 1.  By Nov. 2, I was already bored with it (the pitfall of overplanning I guess) and didn't write anything.  I decided that this might finally be the year I didn't finish.  Then on Nov. 3, I dove back in with another, very sketchy plot that I'd just come up with (no planning involved whatsoever), but managed to churn out 5,000 words in one day.  Right now, I'm on target with my word count, but the ideas are coming more slowly, and at about halfway through, I'm fast approaching that point where I plateau and it starts to feel like a chore.  But I've never given up yet (this is my 6th year), so I think I will be able to power through.