It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World!

Yes, it can be at times. But I'm not talking about the real world. I'm talking about a hilarious movie my sibs and I finished watching today, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World! It was so long, it needed an intermission. But this is a great movie, full of non-stop laughs, especially close to the end!

This film was made in the early 60's and is chock-full of famous funny actors of the time: Sid Ceasar, Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett, Mickey Rooney and a bunch of other guys I don't know. There was also Ethel Merman, who played a loud and really annoying mother-in-law. I hated her, but she was funny. You know, the character you love to hate.

And there were many, many cameo appearances by different comedians, like Jimmy Durante (HA-CHA-CHA-CHA), Don Knotts (after hearing this guy's name on Animaniacs all the time [he's Wakko's hero, for some reason], I finally got to see him), Jerry Lewis (you cannot miss him! He's the guy who runs over the hat making hilarious faces!), The Three Stooges (they're firemen for about 3 seconds), Jack Benny and Buster Keaton (who I didn't catch, but read on Wikipedia that they were in it). Don't worry if a lot of these names go over your head. I'm a fan of old comedy stars. (They're usually better than the people we have today. :P)

Even if you're not fans of these stars, I bet anyone would love to see this old flick. A run-away criminal flys off the road and when several strangers go down to see if they can help him, the criminal guy tells them with his dying words where a large amount of money, $350,000, is hidden. Of course, everyone forgets about where they were going before (whether it was on a honeymoon or moving furniture or vacation or something) and go full speed ahead in an unofficial race to get to the money before the other people do.

The story was really great, the filming well done. It seemed they were really good about giving each group of characters a fair amount of screen time without you getting bored of their situation. Sometimes I could predict what was going to happen, but it was still always funny. I guess after watching a lot of Animaniacs (we're almost finished with the entire collection! I'm half happy, half sad about it. ^_^|~,~), it seemed to have the timing of a well-made cartoon. I highly recommend this movie to anyone who even vaguely appreciate this kind of comedy. I guarantee that you won't be disappointed.

~~~

In the meantime, I'm still looking forward very much to getting my ARC of The Maze Runner from Dashner! I hope it comes in before the week is out! Ooh, I'm still feeling the excitment of winning such an awesome prize!

The other day at the library, I reserved books with an inter-library loan for the first time. I could have done this at any time I wanted to read a cool, recently published book but couldn't reserve it because it was still too new. I wish I'd known this before! :P. So I put holds on The Hunt for Dark Infinity, by James Dashner (won't have to wait to go to the bookstore again!), The Hourglass Door, by Lisa Mangum (I've heard it's a great book for Twilight lovers ^,^), and Farworld: Water Keep, by J. Scott Savage (also a book I want to read). Right now I feel a little silly, because I forgot about asking about Alvor, by Laura Bingham! I don't know why it slipped my mind. Now that's a book I believe I'd enjoy a lot. Meh. Guess I'll have to do that next time. (Sorry, Laura.)

Much Happiness, Have I!!!

Sorry for the Yoda talk. But as my family and some of my closest friends knows already, I have been incredibly lucky to win a very special contest!!! One of my big-time author idols, James Dashner, set it up. He was giving away a signed and personalized ARC of The Maze Runner (well, at first it was one, but then he saw how many people wanted it and upped the ante a little!) to a lucky, random commenter who followed him and wrote about the last book they'd read. For full details, here are the two relevant links:

Where I found about the contest (I can barely believe the almost 100 comments Dashner recieved... though at the same time I wasn't much surprised. ;P)

Where I discovered that I was a winner!!!

This book has been incredibly hyped up about, especially on James' own blog ;P. It's even already being published in a few foreign languages! It will hit shelves sometime in October, but lucky me, I'll know what happens before most everyone else! I've sent James my address so he can mail the book to me. I can barely wait to get it! I actually had some trouble emailing him, because this message kept popping up. Turns out it was some silly email-filter trouble! 0,o

I'm also feeling pretty good, because I emailed a special someone that I'm probably going to stay close friends with forever... ^,~

Thanks, everyone, for all the support and congratulations I've so far recieved on my big win! It's all certainly made my day, perhaps even my week!!!

***

Must say that I'm also pretty happy that I saw Coraline today for the second time ever. I saw it with my parents this time. I hope they enjoyed it, because I'll admit that in some parts the kids show off some mean attitude. I love these kind of movies, but sometimes I feel funny when I've already seen it and I'm showing it to my parents because I recommended it highly to them. Like, I know what happens, and as I watch I keep wondering if they're getting a good impression from it.

Well, I think that's enough for now. I'm still pretty awful happy!!!

Lots of stuff

I haven't posted in such a long time, it's crazy. I don't know why I haven't made the time to blog until now. I hope this makes up for me missing a lot.

• My birthday is in exactly 6 weeks, as you can probably see from my little countdown clock. I'll be turning 18 on September 7th. Can you imagine? I'm going to be a legal adult for the rest of my life! Yipee! *partyparty* Oh, but you know, when I stop and think about it, it's actually a pretty sobering thought as well as a happy one. Because, well... My official childhood will be behind me. I'm never going to be a kid again. Except in my imagination, of course. I always want to keep the heart of a child.
  
  
• I should have written about it last week, but on Tuesday the 21st, Annette and I joined our mom and brother for a homeschooling meeting at our library, to meet some new families that would be joining our group. There were 2 families, and one of them had a 16-year-old daughter, Abi (short for Abigail. I think that's how it spells. Oh well, Abi is easier). After some awkward starts, me, my twin and Abi got into a good groove of conversation. We talked about movies we liked, our interests, (She likes to draw and write, a combination of both Annette and my talents! Fascinating) and other stuff. She seems like a good new friend. Now I'll have a reason to go to more homeschool meetings, if she's there.
  
  
• Somewhere in our talk about movies, Abi told us about this cool website called TV Tropes. We'd never heard about it before, and she tried explaining what a "trope" actually was, but it's hard to describe. Now that I've checked it out a few times, I can hardly blame her. Here's the link: http://tvtropes.org Just make sure you've got a lot of time on your hands before you check this site out. It's almost more fun than exploring Wikipedia. Just type Harry Potter or something in the search box, and you'll see what I mean. You might even get hooked on it, like I did!
  
  
• Last night my sibs and I finished watching the entire 2nd volumes out of the 3 Animaniacs DVD sets we borrowed from the library. Each volume has 5 discs in it, and each disc contains 5 zany episodes. Can you do the math? Well, I'll do it for you anyway. It means 50 episodes down, 25 to go. I'm loving this. This is just like the time my sibs and I got into seeing the entire 9 seasons of Seinfeld. The only difference is that Seinfeld was a live action show focusing on 4 characters, and Animaniacs was variety show of different, hilarious, semi-regular cartoon segments. The sad thing is that only 75 episodes are on DVD, and there were 99 episodes in the whole show. No one's made a Animaniacs Volume 4 yet. I hope they do.
  
  
• The other week my family wanted to see Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (I wasn't all that into it, because I've heard from various reviews that it's not all that), but it got sold out, so we had to see another movie. We watched My Life in Ruins, which is a romantic comedy about a tour guide in Greece leading a weird group of tourists who, quoting the Wikipedia article, "would rather buy a T-shirt than learn about Greece's history and culture". Everything seems to go wrong, but eventually the tour guide gets a new outlook on life and starts having a lot more fun with her group. I really thought it was a good film, considering that it wasn't what we expected to see in the theater.
  
  
• Unfortunately, I haven't been working a lot in my story this week. Something I should work on rectifying. My book is certainly not going to write or publish itself. (Oh, if only that could happen.)
  
  
• Last night, instead of going to the beach like we usually do, my dad treated us and we went to my all-time favorite restaurant, Sweet Tomatoes. Over the years, this has grown to be the site of many a birthday celebration or other special occasion. It's fun when we go for no particular reason at all, though. After everyone was finished eating, we went to Barnes and Nobles, where I was finally able to find James Dashner's awesome book, Hunt for Dark Infinity! I haven't been able to read it since Annette and I came back from Boston. For some reason, I can never find it in Borders, which I go to much more often. So I definitely enjoyed reading a few extra chapters. I think on Wednesday I'll go with my mom so she can drop me off at B & N while she shops at our Farmer's Market. I hope to finish it soon!

Okay, I promise that after this I will be much more diligent about blogging. Writing these long, general posts is pretty tiring! ~_~

I'm on a roll

Lately I've been feeling a bit of guilt for not thinking more about my book, Imazia. (The title is still a work in progress, but Imazia is my fantasy country, where a majority of the story takes place. Just so those who didn't know, know now. ^,~)

Uh, maybe I should rephrase that. I think about my story almost all the time. When I'm not thinking about anything else, that is. Like, this story idea is the reason I became a writer. I never had any ideas or thoughts of becoming an author until this story popped itself into my head. I don't have any other pet projects to fall back on. This is my baby. (But wait, I do have plenty of ideas for other stories. Fragments of plots, funny characters. But nothing that makes me as passionate as Imazia does.)

I love my story, and my family does too. But I think I have a kind of love-hate relationship with writing. I love getting inspired and writing lots of new parts and material, but I hate the problems I can't solve at the moment and have to leave for later. I also hate going back and editing, which I put on myself because I'm such a perfectionist. I mean, I don't even have a whole manuscript, for goodness sakes! Why do I keep rewriting myself? Luckily I have most of the story planned out; I just have a problem with putting it into enjoyably expressive text.

Well anyway, it seems my hate relationship is kind of over, because I've recently gotten back to sitting and working for a good amount of time! I haven't done that for many weeks, even months! To keep track of the original stuff I write, I leave the old parts that don't need changing text in black and turn the new, fresh text I write just then into pink. Even sentences, or added or changed words. With the help of the wordcount tool, I found that I wrote just around a thousand words, just today! Like, I was working with an old chapter that I've definitely wanted to change for a while. I took out a whole chunk of paragraphs and replaced them with better ones.

Ooh, it feels so satisfying to cure a story like that, disecting it and padding it up again. And if I do say so myself, I think I did a good job of it. ^_^

I haven't shown it to anyone yet. Not even Annette, who always used to read everything new I wrote. Gee, I haven't let her read anything in such a long time... I guess I'm a little embarrassed of my story still. I want to impress her and not let her find anything wrong with it. Not because she does find things wrong with my writing, just because I'm a perfectionist. *_*

Yeah. I just wanted to share how well my writing was doing. I hope this streak continues. Cross your fingers for me!

Hmm...Now what?

*whistles random tune to self* Feeling pretty lonely here. Not much new happening on Blogger now. No posts from my friends, no comments. I guess everyone's on some sort of vacation or something, huh?

Now that I've finally seen Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (with sadly no one to discuss it with besides my sibs. We've already done plenty of that, though), what do I have to look forward to? How can I keep myself occupied? (Besides blogging, that is.)

Well, at least I've made a few more good edits to my book. Little by little, I just might make it. I think I've finally fixed my prologue. For those who've read it before (it was sooo many posts ago), it has changed quite dramatically. No longer is the prologue about a dark and stormy night, or the Warlock, or even "creeping creepers". I changed it to reference another part of my story, one that I think makes a lot more sense.

Hey, I haven't shown you guys anything Imazia related in the longest time. Maybe it's time I did. For those out there reading this now, here's my prologue. Say anything you want about it. I don't think I want to edit it anymore, because it's as close to perfect as I can get.

And btw, if you have seen Harry Potter 6 by now, please go back a post and comment me afterwards? I really want to talk HP with someone. It was so awesome!

~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-

In the beginning, there had been nothing. But then, something strange had happened. Something different. Why? Why now? And, perhaps more importantly, what for? Magenta Carmine Roberts had no way of answering these questions in her present predicament. All the same, these questions and more continued to buzz around in her head as frantically as they had the first moment she'd fallen into her bottomless pit of despair.

She was indeed, literally, free-falling and tumbling through a pit of total emptiness that never seemed to end. She had no clear perception of time, so she could have been falling for ten minutes, or an hour, or twenty-four hours. She couldn't be a hundred percent sure. Her eyes had been shut in fear for much of the time.

Presently, however, the young teenager realized that she didn't feel like she was falling anymore. Opening her eyes, all the girl could see was that she was surrounded by an infinite expanse of a pure, blank, glowing whiteness. Whether you looked up, down, or all around in any direction you chose, the view looked exactly the same. She could float as easily as if she were underwater. The space around her was so empty that she couldn't even be sure she was facing the right way up.

Magenta looked down at her feet. She was standing on empty air. There didn't seem to be any floor rushing up to meet her. She wondered what would happen if she ever did meet up with the ground. Then she decided she'd rather not think about that. So all she could do was float, and wonder, and wait... wait... wait...

The problem was that she didn't know what she was waiting for. Was she in heaven or something? Barring the absence of iconic angels or pearly gates, it seemed to fit, only she didn't distinctly remember dying at any point. Maybe she was dreaming? A hard slap on her arm told her no, she was not asleep. Like it or not, this was her reality. Her hands slowly clenched into fists.

"Is this what I get? Huh? Is this what I get for trying to help somebody?!" She cried as soon as the empty silence had become too much for her to bear. But she didn't receive an answer. Her words didn't even produce an echo in the emptiness. There were no walls for them to bounce off of. Not a single, solitary sound could be heard in this bottomless abyss. Of course there couldn't. There was nobody there but herself. She was completely alone.

"Okay. Calm down, Maggie. You've gotta pull yourself together now. You'll get through this," said Maggie, taking several deep breaths. Now that the silence had finally been broken, it didn't seem to matter that she was thinking out loud to herself. No one else was around to hear her. Besides, hearing her own, clear voice pierce the emptiness around her had comforted her a great deal. It was the only thing that felt... real to her.

Maggie cleared her throat. "Alright. Gotta think now. What am I doing here? There has got to be a reason why this is happening to me," she reasoned. No one confirmed or contradicted this. No matter. She kept on talking. "Maybe if I can figure out how I got here, I'll be able to find the way out."

So Maggie started to think. What else could she do in that place? She thought and thought very hard. When had been the exact point that everything had turned topsy-turvey? What had been the cause of all this? She started searching through her most recent memories, searching carefully for the event that had started it all...