Sunday, March 27, 2011

...reject rebels!

raise your hand if you just HATE rejections. you could raise your hand even if you didnt ever get one and just heard how getting one bums you out and gets you all depressed. WOW! look at all those hands way up in the air.

lots of my cool blogger friends got rejections and got feeling hurt and bummed out and that made me sad. i got thinking we just gotta make it a little more easy. i think that rejection word is a big problem cause you get feeling like not just your work got rejected but YOU did too cause what you write is a BIG part of YOU. its a cold and mean sounding word. just say it. reject!  ACK!

me and my cp miss sharon decided were gonna be reject rebels and give that yucky “r” word the boot and get a word thats lots better. miss sharon liked the word raspberries and so did i. then we changed how it gets spelled and now it ended up being spelled RAZZBERRIES! just say it! razzberries! yep! its a cool word for sure.

whats neat about razzberries is its lots like baseball. when you slide into a base and get a yucky bruise on your thigh it gets called a raspberry or a strawberry cause thats how it looks. it hurts and stings for a while and you gotta take care of it but you stay in the game and keep on playing. thats how it needs to be with writing. and in baseball giving the ump or the other team the razzberries is booing them. so you could give that agent the razzberries. ha ha.

who whats to join with me and miss sharon and boot that ugly “r” word right out the door and be a reject rebel? raise your hand! .
x
WOWEE! i see lots of hands way up in the air. how cool is that!
x
hooray for razzberries!!!
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did you ever change out that yucky “r” word for something else? did it make it more easy when you got a you know what?
x
…hugs from lenny

Monday, March 21, 2011

...cool characters

WOW! i just found a cool tool for helping get characters developed. for sure the plot of a story mostly has to do with character. what if little red riding hood was a selfish snotty brat and didnt care bout her granny. that could of changed up the whole story. yep! characters real important for sure.

everyones way different from each other and its just real important to be a good people watcher cause thats how you could get neat ideas for developing the character of your mc and all the characters in your story.

heres a cool tool from out of one of my writing books that called writing magic creating stories that fly by gail carson levine. its a character questionnaire! heres the questions:

Name:
Nickname, if any:
Kind of being (human, animal, extraterrestrial, fantasy or fairy-tale creature):
Age:
Sex:
Appearance:
Occupation, if applicable:
Family members:
Pets:
Best friend:
Describe his/her room:
Way of speaking:
Physical characteristics (posture, gestures, attitude):
Items in his/her pockets or backpack or purse:
Hobbies:
Favorite sports:
Talents, abilities, or powers:
Relationships (how she/he is with other people):
Fears:
Faults:
Good points:
What she/he wants more than anything else:

all you gotta do it answer the questions and youre on the way to making a neat character. WOW! how cool is that!

you could use this before you get started with you ms or when youre working on it. sometimes you got a character started and get stuck on what he or shes like. just do this questionnaire and it could be a big help. remember its only ideas and you dont need to use all of it just only the parts that work for your story and you could change your characters any time you want.

did you ever use a character questionnaire. if you didnt would you try it? how do you develop your characters?  

...hugs from lenny

Sunday, March 13, 2011

…more books and author stuff!

wow! theres so much interesting stuff you could find out about books and authors. heres some more neat facts.

wanna read the most b-o-r-i-n-g book ever? its a book about the calculation of pi to two million places. its got 800 pages! ack!

the first published book ever written on a typewriter was the mark twains adventures of tom sawyer.

in the usa we buy 57 books per second and thats about five million every day.

a new book is published every 13 minutes in america. 125 new titles are published every day.

the first novel ever written is believed to be the tale of genji. it was written in the first decade of the 11th century by murasaki shibuku a japanese noblewoman. it has 54 chapters.

in charles dickens a christmas carol most of the characters were based on people he knew personally including ebenezer scrooge who in real life was ebenezer scroggie a counselor at edinburgh.

south african writer mary faulkner wrote 904 books and according to the guinness book of world records ranks as historys most prolific novelist.

the first recipe book was published in 62 a d. by the roman apicius. its called de re coquinari and it describes food the emperor claudius liked to eat.

shakespeare used around 29,000 different words in his plays. before that about 10,000 of them had never been used in any english literature .

now cause i promised heres the 10 most read books in the world. drum roll

1.The Bible - 3.9 billion copies

2 Quotations from the Works of Mao Tse-tung by Mao Tse-tung - 820 Million Copies

3. Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling - 400 Million Copies and translated into 65 languages.

4. Lord of the Rings by J R R Tolkian- 103 Million Copies

5. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho - 65 Million Copies

6. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown - 57 Million Copies

7. Twilight - The Saga by Stephanie Meyer - 43 Million Copies

8. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell- 33 Million Copies

9. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill - 30 Million Copies

10. Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank- 27 Million Copies

i hope you liked all this cool book and author stuff.

…hugs from lenny

Sunday, March 06, 2011

...books and authors

heres some cool fact stuff maybe you didnt ever know bout books and authors.

could you believe when youre reading a book for every 8 letters you read one of them is the letter “e”

an author named ernest vincent in 1939 wrote a 50,000 word novel called gadsby and guess what?  it didnt have not one letter  “e” in the whole book.  yikes! how weird is that!

a french author named michel thaler published a 233 page novel called  le train de nulle part (the nowhere train) and didnt use not even one verb in it. he said verbs are like weeds among flowers and should be taken out.  ack!

samuel clemens got using the name mark twain when he was just 27. he got it from how a mississippi river boat measured how deep the water is with a stone tied to a rope cause of so much sand bars. when "mark twain!" got called out it meant they hit the critical mark for the paddle wheel of two fathoms. twain is old english for the number two.

we got taught not to do run on sentences. right? well in the book les miserables the author victor hugo did one sentence thats 823 words long!  yikes! for sure you could need oxygen if you got reading that out loud. ha ha.

but guess what? when victor hugo did his query letter to his editor he just  wrote “?”   wow thats getting to the point real fast. and guess what the editor wrote back?  his answer was “!”  wow how cool is that!  dont you wish querying was that easy.

william shakespeare could write neat words for sure but did you know in his writing he made up lots of words. bet you didnt know he made up all these words and phrases:  hurry, boredom, disgraceful, hostile, moneys worth, obscene, puke, perplex, on purpose, shooting star, sneak.  puke? ack!

we all complain bout so much revising.  when there was no computers or copy machines leo tolstoy  wrote that loooooooong huge book called  war and peace all with a pen and paper and he did seven revisions! and guess who copied his whole ms seven times by hand. his wife! now thats love for sure!

got a writers quirk?  charles dickens had to be facing north before he could write even one word. 

cant wait to get your wip done?  it took noah webster 36 years to write his first dictionary.
 
ok thats enough cool fact stuff for now. but i gotta tell you im not done yet cause next week i got more neat stuff bout books and authors and guess what? im gonna tell you the 10 most read books ever.  wow how cool is that!

so how do you like this fact stuff?  could you guess what the top most book ever read is?

...hugs from lenny