Book Tour Tuesday--Dangerous by Shannon Hale

This week's Book Tour Tuesday is, Dangerous by Shannon Hale.  This book seriously is one you will not put down once you pick it up.  It is that good and fast of a read.

It's about a girl, Maisie, who is accepted into a astronaut boot camp with a lot of other smart kids.  When a group of the kids at this NASA-style boot camp gets the opportunity to see something out of this world, things change for Maisie.  She is now part of a group of kids that have the opportunity to save the world, but it isn't easy.

Through this story, it is fast paced to begin with.  I was captured with the character of Maisie from the beginning.  She is a very intelligent girl who decides to write an essay for a contest that is on the back of a cereal box.  After being accepted, she is just like anyone else who would win a contest to a NASA-style boot camp, excited and unsure about the adventure before her.

I love every aspect of this story.  I love love love the characters!  I love the character growth and depth, and Shannon Hale does a great job in her details.  Not too much and not too little.  Just enough to make you believe you are reading an action/science fiction movie.  It only took me about three days (without kids, it would be about one full day) to read this book.  I am very grateful to my friend who recommended the story to me one day and said I just had to read it.  That's what I recommend to you today.  GO READ THIS!  It's great for pre-teens who have read The Hunger Games, Cinder, or anything else in this genre.

Shannon Hale easily became one of my all-time favorite authors through this story.  I can't wait to read more by her and await eagerly to see what Shannon has next up her sleeve to capture us all.

Get out there, get reading (especially this book!) and get writing!

Monday Mayhem this Week

My week is uber busy.  My oldest has a birthday party this week I have to prep, and which part of includes a scavenger hunt as part of the festivities.

It will be all good though.  I mean, even though I haven't written anything for my new story yet, I still have the physics books to look through, and other books to just relax and read for now.

Today though, I wanted to talk about the mayhem in my life and why I have a love/hate relationship with it.

For the past three years, I have been doing online school through BYU-Idaho.  Sadly, it's only been one or two classes per semester.  This makes for getting a degree very long winded.  I already have an Associates Degree, but it's something that will get me nowhere since it's in General Academics.  However, I love school.  I really do.  But it's so much harder online than it is actually going to a lecture class for me.  In my online classes, you have to read the lectures and they aren't the most fun things to read most days.  Plus, with the past two years, I have been doing one class a semester because of my feisty child.  As an infant, she wouldn't sleep very well unless she was held.  Now as a toddler, she is better at sleeping, but the homework load is still just as big and keeps me up all night instead of on the computer every second of every day.  Because of this crazy mayhem, I decided I'm dropping my schooling for now.  I wish I could finish, I really do.  I really recommend you finish your degrees!  But for now, I am a mom wanting to become a published author some day.  And being a mom gives me the greatest mayhem ever--my children.

So, that was my hate side relationship of mayhem in my life.  Online schooling: really cool, great for stay at home moms, yet takes twice as much time as originally planned.

My love side relationship of mayhem in my life is my family.  I love spending time with my family.  I'm trying to get to know my kids again since the online schooling made it so that I could count on one hand things I actually remember doing with the kids while I was in school for the past couple semesters.

I really do love my family and they come first in my life.  My days are filled with diaper changes, floors covered in toys of all kinds, and food crumbs all over the house.  It took me a while, but I'm more okay with having a messy house now than I was a year ago.  I used to think that my living room needed to stay clean all day long to impress those that may stop by.  Now I don't care what people think of me when they stop by and I have crayons, toy animals, puzzle pieces, and superheroes scattered around on the floor.  It makes me happy to see my children be happy.  And even though their mayhem is the kind that I love, it can still drive me crazy.  But it's the kind of crazy I don't try to second guess whereas school was.

To make things easier in my life, I am going to drop online schooling and be a mom wanting to be a published author.  I will write when I can, I will blog still, and I will read.

So, make sure when you are writing, to put the first things first in your life.  If you have a family, stop typing and go attend to them.  Get to know them.  Remember that all the actual real-life experience you have helps you give that to your reader later on.  The feelings and reactions to the mayhem in our lives, both the good and bad mayhem, make you a better writer when you tap into it.

Get out there, get reading, and get writing!

Challenge Fridays

Don't you love Fridays?  I normally do.  Unless I have kids soccer games at 9 am on Saturday, which since it's soccer season, I do.  Luckily it's the last day of soccer for the Spring season until the Fall season begins in September.

So, for Fridays, I think I'm going to initiate the Challenge Friday.  It will be a writing prompt, learning about something new, or just challenging yourself to something you don't normally do.  Work on it over the weekend, then if you want, let me know in the comments on the next week what you worked on.  Every week I'm hoping you'll share your challenge in the comments below so that it gives others ideas and we can be supportive of each other even though we may be states apart.

For this Challenge Friday, I am going to challenge myself to learn how to make hooded towels for my kids.  My kids needed new hooded towels since their current ones are too small for them now.  I decided I would make some.  I have everything, I just am always afraid that I will mess up so big that I can't recover from it.  I've done it before, and plus, I have a sewing machine that hates me most of the time.

I'll try to post pictures of the finished product next Friday and talk about working through it.  I believe as a writer, if you want to be a good writer, you have to be able to face challenges head-on, even if you think it will blow up royally in your face.  Whether we get Writer's Block, or are just trying to learn how our character will face a challenge they are faced with, we need to know how we react in situations that challenge us.  Challenges make us stronger, more fierce, and more ready to face the day ahead.

Get out there, get reading, and get writing!

New Story Share

For Thursday, I wanted to make sure you saw what I was working on.  I'll be secret about it for now mostly, but I will tell you that I'm really excited about this one.  It's like a version of Evil Doctor Who.

So, I went to the library yesterday and checked out books on physics and time travel and Albert Einstein (Theory of Relativity stuff).  I'm a little daunted by it all, but before I can really dive into my science of my story, I have to learn some of this stuff.  I love it when stories are inventive and creative, but I also love it when it's mixed with proper science and math.  It has to make sense in order for it to be believable and grab the reader's attention.

If all I said was that I'm writing a story on time travel, but I didn't care about the science of it all, how would that make my story exciting at all?  Having a basis for where your story pieces come from can help your reader become more engaged in the story itself.

Get out there, get reading and get writing!

Writing Excuses

Here's the deal.  Wednesdays I thought I was going to make a "Wacky Word Wednesday" or writing prompt day.  But I'm having a hard time coming up with anything for it right now.  So, I'm going to tell you about my favorite podcast in the world!  Probably the only one I listen to or have really listened to ever, but it's my favorite.

It's called; Writing Excuses.  Here's the link to the website: http://www.writingexcuses.com/

Anyway, it's a few authors telling us all about writing.  They are fun to listen to and funny.  It makes learning about the craft of writing FUN!  Learning about something isn't always fun, but if you love doing something, you have to learn the fundamentals and nitty gritty stuff about it.

Example: I like soccer.  I hated practicing and doing drills, but it's what made me better in the game.  It's what made me faster, more alert, and able to work with my team.  If you can't get through the nitty gritty's of learning about writing, you're not going to get very far and no one will want to work with you.

That's why I recommend listening to and even trying out the writing prompts from Writing Excuses.  One of the authors, Brandon Sanderson, is also a professor of creative writing at Brigham Young University.  His class is a master class in novel writing.  You have to submit your writing to his class in order to get into it in the first place.  Lucky for us who don't go to BYU or live in Provo, Utah, or even can't afford writing courses right now, a lot of the classes you can catch on Youtube here.

He's the author who has written many of his own best selling novels, but was also slated to finish out Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series.

There it is.  Go check out Writing Excuses.  It's on Itunes for free, or you can listen to the podcasts on the website as well.  They aren't very long.  I think the longest one was 30 minutes and I listen to them while I fold laundry on laundry days.

Get out there, get reading, get writing!