It's been stressful over here lately, and I don't deal with stress all that well. Sometimes in the middle of the day I just need to escape. If I can put a pause on my own self, I usually can get away. There's a large rock just on the hill above our house. It has a good view and is far enough away to keep people from interrupting. Hopefully it also has limited distractions because I can get horribly distracted. My mind just gets so loud inside of it. Sadly, I always find these spots of peace in the wrong seasons. I don't imagine I'd do very good going out when there's snow on the ground.

Usually I spend half of an hour up there on my 'thinking rock'. Fifteen minutes of that time, I work on writing. I already section off a period of time to work on my novel writing; so this is actually the poetry type writing. Anything really that comes into my mind. I don't go seek endlessly for a perfect word or the perfect idea. I write the thoughts down as they come. After all, I only have fifteen minutes. The other poem I posted in the last blog was the first poem I wrote on the thinking rock. Here is another I wrote yesterday:

It will be cold in the morning.
There'll be a frost in the morning.
The flowers will die in the morning.
I'll have to say goodbye to the year.
You say there's two and a half months still left,
But it'll have ended in the morning
When the plants and the flowers fade.
The sun will rise up in the morning
And warm the earth and me with its heat,
But it willy only seem mocking to me.
Mocking me. Mocking life at its end.
As the earth warms. As the cold hides in the corners.
Corners of my garden.
Standing above where flowers have drooped and fallen.
My garden will be a graveyard in the morning
After the cold has crept and crawled through the night.
I'll wander through the ruin.
A glance here, a glance there, to see if it is the end.
The end of the year for flowers, for plants, for me.
The colors will be stolen in the morning.
All colors but the colors of leaves.
Summer's magic is over as another year goes dormant.
Another garden, another life, another me.
It'll be cold in the morning,
But I won't mind the cold.
There'll be a frost in the morning;
The reaper returning again.
The flowers will die in the morning.
I'll sing the funeral song.
I'll have to say goodbye in the morning.

Well, it did freeze this morning. Going into a garden after a frost is one of the saddest sights. It's the one morning that makes me dislike Autumn. We tried to prolong the life of some plants with blankets. I even put a sprinkler on my flower patch (cosmos, bachelor buttons, gazanias, rudbekia, etc.) to keep them alive a little longer. Unfortunately, they turned off our irrigation water for the year early this morning before the protective layer of ice melted. So, I went out to see a beautiful but very sad sight. Everything was covered in ice, reminding me of the glass art people do, and now they are mostly all frosted. It's sad business. I would have picked a gigantic bouquet of cosmos for my bedroom if I knew.

You said, "The snow is coming.",
But I couldn't feel it coming
In my room with the perfect view.
You said, "There's a bite to the air.
A nip that didn't exist before.
That couldn't exist before."
I guess you meant Summer was over
In your most round about way.
That Summer was over,
And you would be leaving.
You would be leaving before the snow came.
Before Winter was more than a bite to the air,
But you would not say that with words.
Only, "The snow is coming."
I didn't know the snow was coming.
I was still lost in Autumn's glow.
- A season you seemed to have forgot.
From my room with the perfect view,
The leaves were turning to gold.
They would drop when the colors were full,
And after a month or two,
Then the snow would finally come.
You would be gone when the gray turned to white
In a month. Two months and a week or so.
Still you felt the bite in the air
And confidently said, "The snow is coming."
I think I finally know why -
The snow was just an excuse for you to go.

It started out as a single character. A character with a funny name. The name wasn't suppose to be serious although it belonged to a character who was. It was suppose to be a contradiction of sorts, but as time progressed, her name changed to Rose Abigail Ningolsham.

Her.  Finally found someone who fit what I envisioned in my mind. The eyebrows and the cheeks fit perfectly. This makes my heart happy. People on DevianArt are awesomely talented.

I started wondering what exactly made her as serious and bitter as she was. That single question led me down an endless trail which I still haven't found the end of seven years later. I think I wasn't old enough to write the story yet, but I couldn't just let it go, even though I didn't have any idea where to start or what was the most important part of it.

At first I thought it had to be a three book series, beginning when the lead character was twelve and ending when she was thirty. I set the story in this world and spent hours and hours on researching different things, especially since I had her nationality German (I know the last name contradicts it, but that is a long, long story). Then I threw the whole 'present time, present world' thing out the window. I'm still working on how to fix a story world for it since I'm used to making Fantasy story worlds, and this really doesn't go under one. It's just normal...but not normal.

So, I wrote the first two books in the series. It came out to be 180,000 words or so and was mostly backboneless scenes. That almost made me throw the entire thing out, but the character wouldn't leave me alone. I wanted - I needed to give this character a happy ending, some way or another which meant all along I should've just written the third book in the series. As all stories work for me, a seat-of-the-pants writer, it did not go the way I planned. I had one idea, but it changed drastically by the time I finished the first draft, giving me plenty of ideas for a second draft.

I changed my ways on the third draft. I've been following the Go Teen Writers' Blog for years now, and they posted a scene list for the 3-Act structure. I used that as a guideline and figured out what scenes stayed from the second draft and which weren't necessary. Then I figured out which scenes on the list I still needed. I wrote them all out on little cards and divided them into chapters. That really went against every fibre in my being, but it somehow worked. I finished the third draft, and now I'm rereading the third draft and making notes for fourth draft edits. I never imagined I'd get this far. At all, but I feel like there's actually hope.

Now I'm wondering how many stories I can think about at once. I have two others that are hanging around in the back of my mind. Both Fantasy and very unlike this one. One (The Rain Cloud Forest) is in the first draft stage, and the other (The Girl by the Lake) is waiting for second draft outlining.

This is one of the other main characters in the Rose Ningolsham story. Pictures and soundtracks give me hope when all else fails.

I was going to do a 'September in Pictures' post, but as I scanned through my phone's pictures, I realized I had far, far too many for a single post. Looking back over the month, I didn't realize just how much I did get done. I only saw what I didn't get done, but that is an unfortunate habit I have...

In late August, one of my big brothers came home. He is in the Navy and currently stationed on the East Coast. It was the first time he has been back since he joined; so having him home was really nice. He and I used to do a lot things together, but since he has been away for 16 months, I kinda forgot what that was like.

The parents wanted to do something special since he was around. We decided to go to the beach for three nights. I'd been to the beach earlier this year, but we haven't gone as a family unit since my grandma passed away in 2010. We usually go to the Long Beach Peninsula. It's an incredibly boring beach (not really any rocks or shells, except we found a place where someone dumped their whole collection.), except for the North Head lighthouse on Cape Disappointment at the very beginning of the peninsula.

We stayed in the nicest cottage about a fourth of a mile from the beach. I felt like I could just live there forever. They have done so well decorating the entire thing with the awesomest pictures and stuff. These pictures are mostly from those three days. Be proud of me. I refrained and didn't post all of them ;)

Here are a *few* pictures:

A bowl of chili with cornbread probably doesn't seem impressive, but I made the chili from scratch. My mom wasn't feeling very well a day or two before the beach; so she wasn't able to make plans for our meals. I decided I would. We have never had that much food at the beach. I put together ingredients for pancakes, baked oatmeal, mac and cheese, frozen meatloaf (Also made that. Never have before. It's not very photographic, though), and the frozen chili. I've mostly grown up eating Nalley canned chili, and I was a little skeptical, but it was really good.

The first day we went over to Oregon and explored Fort Stevens. This was just a pathway to a bird observation bunker.

A random view from the bird observation bunker.

There was this rickety platform where you could see to Washington and then farther into Oregon. I don't mind most heights, but this structure was moving...that kinda got to me.

This was the real reason why I wanted to go to Fort Stevens. The Peter Iredale shipwreck from 1906 ( I believe). It wasn't quite as epic as I envisioned, but through the years, they have taken away parts of it. The bar where the Columbia River (which also divides Oregon and Washington there) meets the Pacific Ocean can be pretty dangerous, and they've had a lot of wrecks. I think the two lighthouses on Cape Disappointment are the closest of any on the West Coast.

This isn't an impressive picture. It's part of the actual Fort Stevens. This fort has been attacked by ships (I think submarines to be more specific) in two wars. In the Civil War and then by the Japanese. Neither of the attacks were very serious.

Finally a picture of the beach!! This was as much of a sunset that we ever got. It was pretty cool and rainy.

Second day we headed up the Olympic Peninsula because my brother wanted to see some rainforest, and places on the Olympic Peninsula get 144 inches a year (I cannot even imagine. We get 8 inches of precipitation). We drove up twoish hours to the Quinalt Rain Forest, but this was along the way. Just pretty places out the window.

The morning lighting was just so nice, and it was gray enough to disguise the car's dirty windows.

Green. Water. Cloudy. What more can I say?

My dad, brother, and I went on a four mile loop through the Quinalt Rain Forest. It was amazing. I love the moss. As a writer, I tried to dissect every sense in places like that to see if I could describe them with words, but man, a Navy jet kept going over and making so much noise...then the loop went around and past the lodge...so there was the food smell. Folks, evidently a rain forest smells like BBQ ;)

Along the loop was a marsh. This is the marsh area.

Everything was so beautiful. I started realizing how pitiful us humans are. We (at least I) try so hard to make beautiful places, and so often these places fall short, then we look at God's handiwork, and it's just so beautiful and perfect.

It's hard to tell exactly what this picture is of because so much is going on. But what happens in the forest is trees fall, and then small trees begin to grow on top of the old ones. Pretty soon the old ones decompose. Then it looks like it was just planted on the ground. In the meantime, though, the process can look pretty crazy. Example: This picture. I can't imagine that tree getting much bigger and still being held up by that other one. It's pretty cool all the same.