Haven Updates

Jeigh had a passion for one of the stories she'd been writing since last February. She'd been writing it off and on for month, and now was one of those on periods. This story was called Haven and could be found on her website, http://www.simple-assault.com/library.html . She loved the comedy that poured out, but she also loved the drama and there was even poetry -- and not even bad poetry by her standards. Seeing as the main character was a poet and Jeigh was not, she had to try very hard to make the poems sound like they came from a professional poet, something not easy to do. Others would probably argue with her, given the chance, but she liked them, and that was all that mattered in this draft. Jeigh had 42 pages written (20,893 words) so far and she hadn't even reached the middle yet.

So what made this story so special? Could it be that the characters were based on real people like in AUS? Or was it just that being her most recent project, this story enveloped all her knowledge of writing so far? No, more likely it was that this story was the only story that dealt with sensitive subjects, and it dealt with a lot of them. Unfortunately she hasn't gotten to most of those points in the story yet. She's been cunningly avoiding them, but it wasn't time yet anyway. The main characters live in a haven without all the muck of the real world. They've only just entered the real world a few hours ago and have yet to truly experience the horrors.

On another note, Jeigh has discovered the "add comment" button in MS Word and now uses it to write memos along the way because she has a reputation for picking up unfinished stories years later and not remembering why she wrote certain passages or where she was going with it. This also keeps her from writing more tedious outlines, for they tend to get unorganized, lost, and eaten. Also, since in college there is neither spare paper nor the room to store it, everything must be done electronically. This is a frightening thought for Jeigh because she wouldn't trust a computer to tell her weight; she'd trust a computer about as far as she could comfortably spit out a dead rat (see Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy).

On a completely different note, Jeigh has just discovered that she has changed tenses during the course of this blog and apolagizes sincerely to whomever she may have offended.

Two New Tales

In the time between homework and severe bordum, Jeigh wrote two new stories. One, she pulled out of the "thin blue air" and the other had been a dream over a year ago, sitting unhappily as a mere "idea" in her portfolio back in her home town. She sort of feared for this portfolio. It was on the top floor, so not withstanding tornadoes any time soon. Everything in it was made of paper, and the paper was in three rubbermaid boxes, so not withstanding fires any time soon. There'd been four fires within eyesight of her house over the past couple years and she was beginning to wonder if these were not coincedences, but like the "ward 1" experiement done in the archaeology book she'd been reading for class. Apparently long ago, ward 1 had 11% of mothers die giving birth and ward 2 had only 1%. It turned out not to be a coincedence but because ward 1 had mostly young doctors who didn't wear gloves or wash their hands after doing autopsies. Was Jeigh's neighborhood just badly built? Did it appeal to psychos bent on destruction? What, really, was the deal here?

Anyway, Jeigh's new stories: "Retreat" and "Goggled Eyes of the Imagination" can be found here: http://www.simple-assault.com/library.html as always.

Readability Statistics

Jeigh ran spell check on her whole Emerican Adventure novel to check the readability statistics. This was a simple task which only involved checking the "readability statistics" box under options, spelling/grammar and then going through all of the purposely missppeledd words. Here's what she learned.

56, 619 words
247,608 characters
2417 paragraphs
6316 sentences
2.7 sentences/paragraph
8.9 words/sentence
4.1 characters/word
1% passive sentences
81.7 reading ease
4.0 grade level


Uses of words:
probably: 30 times
maybe: 51
Like: 226
Moment: 14
Rather: 5
A bit: 14
Seemed: 35
Completely: 3

Liar Liar (no, not the movie)

More on the English language.

To lie is the state of being vertical (hopefully vertically). The past tense of lie is lay.

To lay is the act of setting an object down. The past tense of lay is laid.

To lie is also the act of speaking untruths. The past tense of lie is lied.

Jeigh got that.

Now, what if you are in the act of becoming vertical? You are not in a state of being like lie/lay, but you are not causing something else to go to rest like lay/laid. Do you use your body as an object as you lay yourself down? Now I lay me down to sleep. Or do you use lie because it is still about you doing something yourself? Jeigh decided that she should go to bed now because she had class at 7:45 the next morning, but she was having a little trouble because she couldn't decide whether to lie or lay.

Theatre

It was Tuesday and Jeigh had her first day of classes, two actually. After doing not much in the "intro to college" course, and the scary French class that turned out to be not so bad, she had dinner and went over to check out the theater program. She hadn't liked the theater program at her high school as much, that is to say, she didn't like working for it. Obviously they were doing something right because their performances were awesome, but when she'd tried to join stage crew, they turned out to not be reliable to her rather than the other way around, so she lasted a whole two days on that.

This production looked much better to Jeigh. Instead of trying to scare freshman away by telling them how hard they will have to work, a common technique to aquire only the serious theater-workers, these people lightened the mood and invited anyone to join no matter what the experience or major. They had some good laughs...and that was the staff. Jeigh could see herself fitting here just like an index finger in the ear of someone with a snoring roommate. Thankfully, this was not Jeigh.

New Movie

Jeigh had just moved to college. She knew very few people here and even them she didn't know well. However, she knew that if she created an activity that other people would be interested in, she could make fast friends. Also, when she wasn't working on movies, she really missed it. When she was working on movies, she was completely stressed out. Her middle ground was to make a short film, maybe fifteen minutes long. She'd already narrowed down the list and was now leaning toward her old story based on the "Crash and Burn" music video by Savage Garden called "Sans Design, Frozen Tune." This movie would be easy to make because it didn't involve a lot of actors and the location could be found in the basement of the dorms.

In other news, Jeigh had recently written a love climax to "Emerican Adventure." She was pretty happy about this. College didn't suck up all her inspiration after all. It certainly hadn't provided anything new yet, but it was only the second day. Being thrown into this new life, she constantly questioned herself, and this coming from someone who had always known exactly who she was and what she wanted to be. She couldn't even remember she was a writer for a whole day. Then she forced herself to write that climax and it all came flooding back. Unfortunately, this would not be the most creatively written blog. She was tired, wet, and getting ready for a movie night that would last until 2am -- Thank God moved indoors due to the black clouds rolling over, something she only noticed because someone had scribbled the notice on the bathroom mirror in some kind of black soap.