Okay, I finally figured out how to cross-post automatically from my wordpress blog at alexandrabracken.com! If anyone wants to know which plugin I used, just let me know and I’d be happy to help. Sorry if you were hit with three entries at once. You can read this journal or that one, but they’ll have the same content for the most part. I ever work up the courage to make anymore Vlogs, they’ll probably be at bracken.livejournal.com only. ab.com was just sort of… hanging there in limbo, so I thought I’d better use it.

Anyway, I’m still working at about 1,000-2,000 words a day on Map, but today wasn’t quite as productive. There were rumors that they were going to start posting the LSAT scores today(apparently, LSAC posts them earlier than they say they will?), so there were at least two thousand obsessive law school hopefuls attacking the inboxes and lsac.org every two minutes. Needless today, no one will sleep tonight. I sort of feel like turning my blackberry off so I don’t have a minor heart attack every time it buzzes.

Right now I’m watching yet another quality movie on the Lifetime Movie Network with Mom. I’m pretty sure that unlike BBC America and NattyGeo, this is the worst thing to happen to us in quite some time. It’s trashy movies all day, all the time. They seem to have nightly themes–one night there were girly flicks, last night it was about the Old Geezer/Hot Babes affairs, and tonight bodies are dropping left and right. I really want to know why the women always have to be the killers in these TV movies. We had The Perfect Secretary, where the woman became obsessed with her boss and tried to kill everyone around her, Christie’s Revenge on her uncle for apparently not supplying her father with gambling money, and now The Perfect Marriage which is, needless to say, far from perfect.

But in all honesty, the most disturbing thing I’ve seen on LMN has to be Katee Sackoff (aka the glorious Starbuck on BSG) in How I Married My High School Crush:

Not to typecast an amazing actress, but girl, chick flicks are not for you. You always need to beating someone up/driving a motorcycle/not taking crap, because your hair extensions in this movie truly were terrifying to behold.

Anyway, anyway. MAP is coming along; it still feels a little odd to be writing in the third person after using Syd’s voice for so long in the first. I also keep running into the problem where I have scenes full of boys, boys, and more boys so using “he” and “him” to vary the sentence structures can be confusing at times. I’ll feel better once I get up to 25k words and figure out exactly what I’m trying to do/say. I think this one is going to come out somewhere between a healthy 60k and 70k, so if I keep going at my current pace I have a chance of getting fairly close to the end before summer’s over.

I will tell you, I’m a little worried about how angry my MC is. Angry and laconic and generally an ass. I’d be worried about it if I didn’t find his companion to be so likeable (and a little silly). Later in the story, he’s forced to realize what the consequences are for being focused only on one thing and denying everything else to yourself. It definitely is a departure from BW, but I love the challenge of it. After I finish chapter 2, I’ll print it out and go through what I have–I’m always trying to have my MC say what he needs to in as few words as possible.

Have a nice night, everyone. And, if you’re the praying kind, perhaps ask the Big Guy in the Sky for a decent LSAT score for me?

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn’t wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. - Sharon O’Brien