“W” is for “Writer” – An A-to-Z Blogging Challenge Post

For the A-to-Z Challenge 2017 I’m writing all about myself. Every post will be some random fact or bit of information about me that you may or may not have already known. Maybe you’ll learn something! Feel free to let me know! ^_^

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This fact should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone, unless you’re just showing up here today for the first time, so I won’t take up too much of your time with this particular post.

I am a writer. I’ve loved writing since I first started coming up with stories in around the third grade. The first time I ever remember writing fiction was for a class project, and I remember it clear as day: I wrote a story called “The Mystery of the Emerald-Eyed Cat”, and signed it “Tracey Lynn Marie Clarke”, even though “Marie” is not part of my name, because I was going through a weird phase. I drew emerald eyes for the cover and pasted it to green paper, and bound it together with green yarn. I was extremely proud of it, and my teacher gave me perfect marks for it.

After that I loved writing stories, and I used to come up with tons of them involving myself and my friends. Eventually I started writing fan fiction, and after that I began coming up with original characters and more intricate plots. I didn’t always write, growing up, but I always came back to writing, one way or another. I always knew that, no matter what else I did with my life, I would also be a writer. That all came together and felt real on the day I self-published my first novel, “Nowhere to Hide“, and recently I published my second novel, the first part in a series, “The Other World: Book One“.

That’s all that really needs to be said about that. It’s a key component of my self, my personality, and my past and future. I’m a writer. Period.

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Did you know that I was a writer? Do you even care? 😀 Feel free to leave a comment!

“O” is for “Other World: Book One” – An A-to-Z Blogging Challenge Post

For the A-to-Z Challenge 2017 I’m writing all about myself. Every post will be some random fact or bit of information about me that you may or may not have already known. Maybe you’ll learn something! Feel free to let me know! ^_^

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More self promotion today!

“The Other World: Book One” is my recently-published novel that is the first book in a series. It is the story of a teenage girl who has lost everything but subsequently gains a strange and unusual purpose when she is transported into a parallel universe.

This story, like my previous novel “Nowhere to Hide”, was a National Novel Writing Month project, but that’s not where it started. The original story, which I then called “Parallels”, was a single novel that I began writing after my high school sweetheart broke up with me. I was a complete mess – as one tends to be after a break-up – and one of the things I did as a result of that was to get back into writing for cathartic reasons. It was a Mary-Sue project at first, because I was writing simply to make myself feel better. The main character was based on myself, and the bad guy was based on the dude who broke up with me, and that’s really all you need to know, because no trace of that original story made it to the final cut. Those first chapters that I wrote way back then were picked up a few years later and re-written twice before being dropped again. The following year I picked it up again as my NaNovel, and a few years later I picked it up AGAIN as my NaNovel. A couple of years after that I had the idea to change the single story into a short series, and after about two years of working on it I finally came out with Book One.

The final cut (or, at least, the final cut of Book One, I suppose) is not even the tiniest bit like the original draft. As the years went on my views on life changed, my views on what is good literature changed, my skills as a writer grew, and all in all the story just evolved, became much, much better, and turned into something completely different. That’s a good thing, but in a way also very weird from my perspective, because I can remember all the bits of story that never made it in, the things that I realized were stupid, or literary suicide, or just didn’t fit anymore as the characters changed entirely.

But I’m mostly rambling. The point is that the story that was is just a memory now, and the story that is is all the better for it. So if you’d like to check it out and support your local indie author, please click on the image or link above for both the ebook and paperback options. 🙂

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Are you going to check out The Other World: Book One? It’s okay, you can be honest with me! XD Leave a comment as well, if you’d like!

August Goals in Review

We are into September, ladies and gentlemen, and although I do have a few good things to mention, I’m going to go ahead right now and admit that it has been a stressful, headachy month, so let’s just jump right into it, shall we?

Goal #1. Take good care of myself, specifically by walking 10,000 steps per day and taking at least 15 minutes per day to do something fun/relaxing.

This, right here…just no. This was a really, really bad month for this goal.

Okay, I’ll admit that the steps part wasn’t all that bad. I did manage to have nine 10k step days and about a dozen other days that were extremely close to 10k but just didn’t quite make it. On the average I walked 8509 steps per day, although that number isn’t exact because my FitBit actually crapped out on me and I ended up losing two days, so I had to estimate based on what I remembered seeing those days. (Sidenote: after a long and arduous troubleshooting session with FitBit they did, in fact, send me a replacement tracker).

The other stuff though? Man…I did not take care of myself this month, and to be honest, I was a ball of stress most of the month. I only managed 21 days with “me” time, and most of that was just watching Sailor Moon at the end of the night at camp while half falling asleep. And it wasn’t actually for lack of trying so much as it was completely forgetting to even try. I’ve been so busy, so tired, and so supremely stressed out (have I mentioned that yet?) that on several days I just flat-out forgot to try to have a few minutes to myself. It’s been absolutely ridiculous.

One thing that I’m trying for September is just to write a few paragraphs in a journal every day. It’s not going to be a useful journal with anything that will ever be shared; the whole point is basically just going to be to get stuff off my chest, even if it’s just to my computer, so I can hopefully breath a little afterwards.

So that was that.

Goal #2. Build more readership/viewership by putting more focus and energy into my blog posts, shooting more fun YouTube videos, and putting more effort into self-promotion.

Strangely this was probably the best goal of the month. Jason and I did lots of fun videos, including a Facebook-only live event that we called “Pops & Shots” (spoiler alert: I got really, really drunk). I also began contacting possible sponsors/partners in an attempt to make the YouTube channel more viable and have new content, and I’ve already managed to hook three subscription box companies into sending me a free box to review. One of them is even running a giveaway along with the video, so hopefully that’ll bring me some new views and subscribers.

On the book side of things, I finally got the new cover and summary up for “Nowhere to Hide“. If you’re looking at this blog from the actual blog and not the WordPress Reader, you’ll see that I’ve updated the theme to reflect this fact. I’m not sure I like it, but I wanted to have my one published book be a defining feature of the blog, so feel free to tell me what you think. And, of course, check out the book! I’ve been sharing it on different social media, and several of my lovely Basement Geeks have already picked it up, so that’s pretty awesome, although it looks like sales are stagnating again. I’ve set up my first ever ad campaign through Kindle, so fingers crossed that that goes somewhere.

Goal #3. Write as much as I can, including writing an entire novel from start to finish.

And finally, there’s this goal, which is almost never where I want it to be, but on this particular month it was just absolutely pitiful. There was just no time! I couldn’t find moments to write, never mind genuine chunks of time. All in all I managed to write a grand total of 3279 words this month, which – I’m not absolutely positive, but I think – is my worst month so far this year. That in itself is extremely depressing, and is definitely one of the subjects of my stress. At least most of the words I did write were fiction, but still, that’s so pitiful. Most serious writers have that kind of word count in a DAY, never mind an entire month. Gah. I don’t even want to talk about it anymore.

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So yeah, long story short, that was my month. It wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, although I’ll definitely admit that the marketing side of things isn’t going half bad. But seriously, if anyone has any ideas as to how I can get 2-3 fewer hours of sleep each night without turning into a howling, emotional wreck, that would be extremely helpful because there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.

And with that said, I’m off to try to relax for 15 minutes. 😛 What was your month like?

GUEST POST: Tom Slatin’s “My Father was 64 When I Was Born”

Today’s post comes from a good writer friend of mine, Tom Slatin. In this post Tom writes about what it was like to be born to a father who was already old enough to be a grandfather, and the generation gap that resulted.

In addition to writing, Tom is also a very talented photographer and web designer, so take a look at his site if you’re interested!

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My father was 64 when I was born, and that in and of itself created perhaps the greatest generation gap I have ever encountered in my life. In some respects, by fathering a child so late in life, I may have skipped a generation.

Throughout my life, my father told me that everything in the world was always subject to change, and if anything could change, it would. My father looked down upon my generation and told me that with every new generation came a new set of challenges upon the generation before it. According to him, every generation would be, among other things, less respectful of their elders, much less productive, and far less responsible.

Somehow, he predicted the coming of the so-called generation me. A generation that believed that the world revolved around them. A generation that believed that the world owed them something. A generation that was indeed lazy, uninspired, egotistical, and borderline failure. A generation that, sadly, embodied every possible attribute that my father expected it would.

I was raised differently. My parents raised me to do good work, even if I wasn’t being paid or somehow compensated for it. My father used to tell me that you either do good work, or don’t do it at all. I was raised to believe that quality, doing the right thing, and personal responsibility and acceptance of others was most important. As time went on, these
lessons became personal attributes, which became both a blessing and a curse.

At a young age, I was thrust into the world believing in fairness, equality, and caring about the feelings and needs of others. My depression came as a result of learning that not everything in the world was as my parents told me it would be. The world is full of unfairness, inequality, and fascism. The utopian society my parents made me believe in simply did not exist.

My father looked at life with pessimism. I couldn’t be sure exactly what it was, and at first, he wouldn’t tell me. He always said that there was something he needed to tell me. Something vitally important that hinged on the basis of the right timing. Something, he would say, that he claimed needed to be said before he passed away, but that day never came. He passed away days before he promised, once and for all that the time was right that he would tell me what he had waited so long to tell me.

The most important conversation was the one I never had with my father. There was an unpleasant feeling that came over me every time I brought up the topic. For the last few years of my fathers life, I would bring the topic up every now and again. It was almost as if my father was waiting for me to ask the right question of him, almost as if the right question would be the key to solving the seemingly unsolvable mystery.

The morning my father passed away I knew that I would never have the most important conversation with my father. Perhaps the conversation was not as important as he said it was, or maybe it was something simple that needed to be discussed. It may have been a question my father wanted to ask me; some facet of my life that was always a mystery to him, but I seriously doubt it. My parents were very much involved in my life, perhaps too much so, even when I was a full grown adult.

They say that sometimes things are better left unsaid. However, in this case, I may never know for sure.

Blogging 101, Day Twenty: Add a New Page

Sometimes you might want to share some information with your readers that you want them to be able to find quickly and easily. For these moments the best option is to create a “Page”, which is why Michelle W. assigns us today to add a new page to your blog, and make sure readers can find it easily.

In a previous assignment we created an “About” page for our readers to learn a little bit more about us. This is the perfect kind of thing to have a separate page for, so that readers can quickly check out this info without having to do an extensive search on our blogs. Other common “Page” ideas? How about a “Links” page to share important websites? Or a “Contact” page to share your alternate online presences and info on how to best reach out to you?

But it’s not just all about the common options. Pages should be tailored to the information that you think is important for your particular blog and your readers. For instance, I have a page set up for information on my projects. As a writer – with followers who are both fellow writers and readers – I thought it would be nice to have an easy and noticable spot on my blog where visitors can check out what I’m working on. Someday when I’m published I’ll create an alternative page with information on my books and where to purchase them. Once I’ve gotten a few more unboxing videos made and uploaded to YouTube I’ll probably create a page that consolodates all the information on those.

It all comes down to figuring out which information is important, and then creating an easily noticable page to reflect that information. Ready? Set? Go!

Blogging 101, Day Eight: Make Your “About” Page Irresistable

Day eight’s assignment blends in nicely with something that I’ve already said for several of these topics, which is that people care more about you if they feel like they know you. That’s why having a good “About” page is an important asset. Your “About” page is a place where you can talk a little about yourself, show the world who you are, and hopefully make prospective readers feel like they’ve become familiar enough with you to be interested in what you have to say on a day-to-day basis.

That’s why day eight’s assignment is create and publish your About page, and adapt it for a widget on your home page.

You might not think that having an “About” page is really all that important, but let me tell you this: I’ve been posting on this blog for over two years now, and of all the posts I’ve written, my “About” page is the most visited page on this blog. That means that on a regular basis, people wander past my blog, stop for a second, and then click on the “About” page to see – duh – what I’m all about. Whether or not they decide to stick around after that point is their own call, but without that “About” page, many prospective readers may have simply wandered back to wherever they came from, uninterested in someone who isn’t even willing to give a little bit of personal info.

I’ll admit now that before I came across this particular assignment, my “About” page was not thrilling. I hadn’t thought about it in a while and when I went to take a look I found this:

No Page Left Blank is a blog by Tracey Lynn Tobin, pre-published writer.

I am a 29-year-old Instrumentation Tech by trade, a writer by choice, happily married, and I have a three-year-old daughter. My aspirations are to publish some of the many novels and short stories I have in the works. My favorite genres are fantasy and horror, and I have a particular fondness for zombies.

Not an overwhelmingly interesting little blurb, is it? There are a couple of important bits of information in there, such as the pre-published writer bit, and perhaps people might be a little bit interested when they see that I’m a tradeswoman, and that I like zombies. But there is so much more to know about me, so many more things that I could mention that would possibly help convince people to stick around on my blog. So, in light of this assignment and that realization, I decided to do a little rewrite. My “About” page now reads:

Well hello there! Thanks for dropping by! My name is Tracey Lynn Tobin, and you’ve stumbled onto my blog!

I’m a pre-published author of various genres of fiction, who moonlights as an industrial instrumentation technician (tradeswoman, for short). I’m happily married to the man who turned me into a zombie-maniac, and we have a three-year-old daughter who is already more into superheroes than I could ever hope to be. When I’m not working on my blog, I’m writing mainly in the horror and fantasy genres, but I’ve also been known to dabble in supernatural, sci-fi, and even a little bit of romance. On the blog I discuss everything from my writing process, to the wonderful world of parenting, to my goals and aspirations, and whatever happens to spark my interest at any given time. My ultimate desire? To become a published author and spend my life writing awesome books.

Want to know a little more? Here you go!

See how that’s a lot more informative, a lot more personal, and a lot more fun? Now, if given the chance, which of the “About” pages would inspire you to stick around, hmm?

The second part of the assignment is, of course, to adapt your “About” info for a widget for your home page, and while I understand the importance for such a thing, I’m going to skip it. Why? Well, as a writer who plans to be published sometime in the future, I’ve already taken the leap of sharing a personal photo on my blog, and while a blurb from my “About” info would be nice as well, I feel that the photo itself is enough. Lots of bloggers aren’t going to want to share something like a photo because it puts you out there to the world in a way that not everyone wants, and in such a case an “About” widget would be an excellent compromise. Myself, I think that when people see my photo it’s enough of a jump-start toward convincing them to stick around for a moment, and hopefully that moment leads them to the “About” page. If I’m wrong, please let me know. I’ve been wrong before, and I’ll be wrong again.

So go ahead, have some fun! Make your “About” page one that gets people interested!

A to Z Challenge Day 15: Other Mother (the Other-World Evil)

I have a literary confession to make: I have read precisely one Neil Gaiman book, and only because it was made into a movie. I’ve been brought under the impression that someone who fancies herself both a reader and a writer should have, at some point, read a couple of Neil Gaiman books, but to be perfectly honest none of them ever really appealed to me. I don’t know why, they just didn’t.

So it came to be that the first time I ever so much as picked up a Neil Gaiman book was when Coraline was first advertised as the newest 3D movie to be coming to theaters. I’m a sucker for kids movies (hey look, two confessions in one post!) and this one looked quite different and interesting, so I was moved to look up the book that it was based on. I grabbed a copy of Coraline and devoured it in one setting.

My favorite aspect of the book (and the movie) was the villain (are you starting to notice that I have a bit of a thing for villains?), the “Other” mother. Everyone in the “Other” world is a creepy duplicate with buttons where their eyes should be, and Other Mother is ruler of that land. She is (obviously) a duplicate of Coraline’s mother, and she’s a sneaky, creepy monster if ever there was one. At first Coraline adores her Other Mother because she gives her the love and attention that the girl feels like she’s not getting from her real mother, but as time goes on Coraline realizes that there’s something not quite right about this “Other” world, or the woman who seems to run it…especially when Other Mother reveals her intention to sew buttons onto Coraline’s eyes!

When I first came across the ads for the movie, and subsequently the book, I assumed that it was a kiddy-story, but I have to say that if I had read this story (or watched the movie) when I was a kid, I probably would have had nightmares for weeks. The story isn’t necessarily of the horror genre so much as a kind of fantasy, but Other Mother may just be one of the creepiest villains I’ve ever come across, the kind that gives you chills up your spine and makes you think twice about anyone who appears to be a little bit too nice. Definitely worth a read or a watch, trust me on this one.

Sometimes a Little Deprivation is a Good Thing

Week 4 of The Artist’s Way is about “recovering a sense of integrity”. It mostly speaks about listening to your gut feelings about what is and isn’t good for you. Cameron urges you to look to your morning pages for clues – things you’ve been complaining about or getting angry about every time you empty your mind – of things that you can change. This chapter urges you to consider making the big scary changes that you know you need to make but that you can’t bring yourself to make for whatever reason. (For example, leaving an abusive lover, or ditching a friend who is an emotional vampire.)

This week I’m not going to share an exercise, because instead I want to talk about something else that pops up in chapter 4: something that is surprisingly difficult but totally worth it.

At the end of chapter 4 Cameron suggests a week of “reading deprivation”, and that’s exactly what it sounds like. She suggests that artists, by nature, tend to spend great quantities of time reading (whether it be books, magazines, newspapers, websites, etc) and other like-activities (watching TV and movies, playing video games, etc). She suggests a week of cutting yourself off from these activities. The reasoning is that they are distractions, that artists have a way of doing everything but what they really should be doing. Cameron goes on to talk about how whenever she brings up this idea of “reading deprivation” to her classes, she is inevitably met with anger and disbelief. People insist that this is impossible, that they can’t just cut all forms of reading out of their life for a week, and besides that, “what will I do with the time?”

Even before Cameron went on to explain just exactly what you can do with that time, I found this a little funny. “What will I do with the time?” REALLY?

Not many people know this about me, but I have a very addictive personality – not when it comes to drugs or alcohol or anything like that, no. I have an addictive personality when it comes to casual gaming and internet use. Several years back now I discovered a site called Gaia Online. For all intents and purposes it’s a multifaceted online community where you play games, follow storylines, and interact with other players in order to…well to be honest, the point is pretty much to keep earning money so that you can keep buying pretty outfits for your character. There’s not much more to it than that. I hooked on to this site when I was first working at the paper mill. I had moved away from home, and my husband (then boyfriend) hadn’t yet followed me because he was finishing school. So I was up in this new town, all alone, with only my new job to fill the day…and my new obsession. I can’t really convey to you how much time I spent on this game. It was day in and day out. Sometimes I’d be up until 1 in the morning playing it. It was the greatest time vampire of my existence, and it took a surprising amount of effort to quit it.

For me, this crap is worse than crack.

These days I’m more wary of this kind of thing, but my little addictions pop up in other ways – binging on other peoples’ blog posts, reading countless Cracked.com posts on my iPhone, playing Angry Birds with the baby on my tablet – and I have to be wary of them because time just vanishes when I allow them into my life. But here’s the thing…when I am able to abstain, to keep myself from wasting time on one of these little habits of mine, the absolute last thought in my head is “what will I do with the time”?

I will fully admit that I am failing the reading deprivation suggestion, mostly out of good old fashioned stubbornness, but in the past couple of days since I read about it I’ve been very mindful. I’ve been working my “reading” into little pockets of the day when I’m able to multitask (reading a Cracked.com article while stirring a pot for supper). As a result I’ve been squeezing more time out of the day, and do you know what I’ve been doing with it? I’ve been writing. I’ve been cleaning. I’ve been organizing. I’ve been doing all the things that I constantly avoid doing by way of these little time vampires that weasel their way into my head and make me feel like I should be focusing on them instead.

And that’s the key, I think. If you are able to inject more time into the day, and your reaction to that is to ask, “what do I do with it?”, you’re in denial. If you take half a moment to look inside and think about all the things you need to get done – or even all the things you want to get done – I’m sure you’ll come up with a million things that you can do with that extra time.

So get to work, people. Check Facebook a few dozen times less today. Put down that mobile game that just goes on and on and doesn’t really have a purpose. Turn off that TV show that you don’t even really like. A little leisure time is good (important, even), but our time is also too precious and too short to waste so much of it on everything but what we really need (or want) to get done.

Have you ever tried something like “reading deprivation”? How did it go? Do you have any little addictions (reading, mobile games, TV) that take up way too much of your time and keep you from getting anything done? Why do you continue to give in to those addictions? Please share!

Accountability Tuesdays – Week 34

Fellow bloggers, do you ever peruse the spam section of your comments folder? I’ve been flipping through there lately whilst permanently deleting them, and I’ve got to say it’s quite a riot. The spelling and grammatical errors, the blatant inability to properly speak English, the giant walls of Chinese character text, the ceaseless waves of adds trying to sell me things like Viagra. It’s really quite amusing. That said, thank the makers of WordPress that the spam filter on this site seems to work really, really well. I think if I had to put up with all this stuff popping up in my main comments folder every day I would absolutely lose my mind. 😛

Okay then, let’s get on with it!

Health and Body Image Goal

Last week was the very embodiment of “sitting on the fence”, wavering between healthfulness and the exact opposite of thus. See, last week my husband, our daughter, and I went on a shopping trip. We traveled one province over to Fredericton, New Brunswick and shopped for two days straight…then we drove backwards a little to Moncton and shopped for another day…and then drove all the way back to Halifax and shopped for another day before finally heading home in the late hours of the night. Now the thing about four straight days of shopping is that it involves a lot of walking (healthful), and in our case also a lot of carrying the baby around because she’s a lazy little bugger (healthful to everything except my back). By all rights, by the end of that trip I should have lost about five pounds, that’s how much “exercise” I got. Ah, but then there’s the other part of a four-day shopping trip away from home…fast food. Yeah. I believe we had a healthy breakfast on two of those days, and an actual restaurant supper on one of them. Everything else was Tim Hortons coffee and donuts, Taco Bell Big Box Meals, and A&W Chubby Chicken Wraps. It goes without saying that no, I didn’t lose any weight while I was on this trip.

In other news, however, the leak in our basement that I mentioned in yesterday’s post – along with the overwhelming stench of cat urine that I couldn’t seem to locate the origins of – led me to began scouring down the basement yesterday. I’ve got it clean almost back to the pellet stove, which (you’ll have to trust me on this one) was a good bit of work. I have some more to do throughout this week, but the point is that soon I’ll have my basement back in working order and cleared of all the junk that we’ve been tossing down there, and I’ll be able to start exercising down there again. That’s not to say that I will (I’m a terribly fickle person, you see), but that’s my intention. Those of you who pray, please pray for me to have some motivation, please and thanks.

Editing Goal

This one stands exactly where it stood last week. I’m still transcribing my notebooks (they seriously feel as though they’re never going to end), and through this am also editing as I type. By all rights I should be working on editing my zombie apocalypse since that was the original subject of this goal, but these notebooks are another distraction like the supernatural romance was – I feel like if I don’t get them out of the way I won’t be able to focus on my apocalypse. It’s really quite frustrating. Sometime in the future I have to figure out how to better organize myself. I’m the very stereotype of the scatterbrained writer who can’t keep track of anything they do.

1,000,000 Word Goal

Because of the aforementioned shopping trip, I didn’t exactly have a lot of time to write this week. It’s not an excuse, it’s an explanation. The trip had a purpose, one which we achieved gloriously in my opinion, so that’s all there is to it. Despite this distraction which tore me away from my writing, however, I did manage to pluck out 11418 words. Most of that was morning pages, but there’s a bit of blogging and transcription in there as well.

And with that, I have a mini-goal for myself. My best week yet was somewhere in the range of 24,000. This week I’m going to try to break 30,000. That’s over 4200 words per day. It will be very difficult, I think, but all the transcription I have to do will surely help me. Wish me luck!

Getting to Know Yourself

The third week of The Artist’s Way is about “recovering a sense of power”. This week looks into several concepts. One of these is anger, and how we should use angry feelings toward ourselves (“Oh my god, I’ve gotten so fat!”) to reveal those things in our lives which we need to be focusing on.

Another of the topics is “synchronicity”, which basically refers to great things that happen to us (coincidences, most of us call them) that help us work toward our goals. Most of us ignore these things, (“Sure, I met this awesome writer agent who is really friendly and helpful, but it’s totally a coincidence and she won’t want to read my manuscript.”) because we’re more scared of actually achieving our goals than never achieving them.

And the third topic is shame, which most of us have way too much of. We think poorly of ourselves because of concepts that society forces on us (“Artist’s are just lazy people who don’t want to get a real job.”) and that keeps us from following our dreams and goals for ourselves.

As of the writing of this post I haven’t been able to find the time to work on any of the tasks for this week, but there is one exercise that was in the bulk of the chapter itself that I thought I could share. It’s a series of “finish this sentence” lines that are meant to evoke some thought and emotion into who you are and what is important to you, as well as your feelings about certain concerns and issues that might be blocking your creativity.

The bold part of the sentence is the prompt, and the normal font is my response.

1. My favorite childhood toy was…probably my Super Nintendo. I can think of dozens of other toys that I absolutely loved, but the SNES holds a special place in my heart, along with such games as Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy III(VI), and Uniracers (yes, Uniracers…shut up!).

2. My favorite childhood game was…Jailbreak. It goes by other names in different areas, so for clarification it’s basically hide-and-seek in the dark, where “it” sends people to “jail”. If one of the hiding kids is able to get to the “jail” without “it” catching them, he/she can yell “JAILBREAK!” and everyone runs off to hide again.

3. The best movie I ever saw as a kid was…probably the first live-action Ninja Turtles movie. I saw tons of movies as a kid, but I can specifically remember waiting in line at the theater to see this one and I was definitely not disappointed.

4. I don’t do it much but I enjoy…reading. I read more than most people I know, but still not much considering that it’s one of my favorite things to do. I love reading, but it takes up so much time that I don’t have.

5. If I could lighten up a little, I’d let myself…attend a “Write-In” during National Novel Writing Month. “Write-In”s are basically when a group of writers were are participating in NaNoWriMo get together and hang out at a cafe or at someone’s house and just enjoy each others company while trying to write as much as possible. There are a couple in the next town over every year but I never go because it feels like a very un-adult thing to do for some reason.

6. If it weren’t too late, I’d…go away for college. The degree I got has served me well, so the university I attended was fine, but I always regretted not going away just to experience the whole “dorm life” thing.

7. My favorite musical instrument is…the guitar. It has always been a little difficult for me to play since my fingers are so short, but it’s more fun than the piano, and I just love the sound of a good acoustic guitar.

8. The amount of money I spend on treating myself to entertainment each month is…almost non-existent. In the past couple of months I’ve spent a bit of money on video games for the Vita my husband bought me, but normally I don’t really spending anything at all. If you work it out monthly over the course of a year it’s probably less than $10.

9. If I weren’t so stingy with my artist I’d buy her…some craft courses. There are lots of awesome-sounding writing courses on WANA International and Writer’s Digest, but I just can’t bring myself to spend money on my writing when I have no way of knowing if I’ll ever make any back.

10. Taking time out for myself is…almost impossible. When I was working out West I was accounted for 23-hours of the day, and when I’m home I can’t even sneak away for two minutes without the baby hunting me down and wanting something.

11. I am afraid that if I start dreaming…I’ll crash and burn. I’ve been allowing myself a hope and prayer for the past while, but it’s a tenuous grasp. I worry that I’ll put all this effort into something that I never get anything back out of.

12. I secretly enjoy reading…all these cheesy sexy-vampire-novels-that-are-marketed-toward-teenagers that are out these days. Don’t get me wrong, I still like my vampires to be scary-ass monsters that will rip your throat out, but there’s also an inherent charm to the sexy ones, especially if they’re sexy and dangerous.

13. If I had had a perfect childhood I’d have grown up to be…a writer, for sure. It’s what I’ve wanted since the third grade, so if everything had fallen into place perfectly, that’s definitely what I’d be doing today.

14. If it didn’t sound so crazy, I’d write or make a…series of novels based on all of my favorite video games from my childhood. Games like the Final Fantasy series, Chrono Trigger, the Breath of Fire series, and Secret of Mana all had such amazing story lines, I’ve always thought they deserved to be fleshed out and paid more attention to. I’d love to put 100% of my attention into these things, IF I had any belief that the respective copyright holders would ever allow me to publish them. For now, I’m just spending some of my writing time on the Final Fantasy VI one (a girl’s gotta dream).

15. My parents think artists are…artists? I really don’t know how to answer this one, since I’ve never really asked them. My parents are supportive; whether that reflects their actual attitudes toward artist or not, that’s all I really know.

16. My God thinks artists are…non-existent? I don’t have a God, so I doubt he thinks very much about anything at all.

17. What makes me feel weird about this recovery is…just an overall sense that it’s silly and pointless. I can honestly say that some of the tasks have prompted some “Ah-ha!” moments, but overall I just feel like it’s going to turn out to have been a huge waste of time.

18. Learning to trust myself is probably…one of the harder things I’ve ever tried to do. I might seem confident sometimes, but inwardly I’m pretty sure that I have no real talent and will never succeed in my goals.

19. My most cheer-me-up music is…mostly alternative rock from my younger years. Oddly, even when the lyrics are the exact opposite of “cheer-me-up”, things like the Offspring, GreenDay, and Blink 182 give me a little burst inside. That’s why I have tons of their songs on my phone.

20. My favorite way to dress is…jeans and a tank top. I don’t really like dresses because I hate having to sit properly, and I’m not a huge fan of shorts because I’m not a huge fan of my legs. I prefer tank tops to any other kind of top because they’re cooler (I get overheated strangely easy) and they show off some of the qualities I actually like about my body, like my shoulders and upper back.

So there’s a little piece of me, as per The Artist’s Way’s exercises. Did you learn anything?

What about you? Care to share your answers to some or all of these questions? 🙂