Wednesday, November 5, 2014

What's Up Wednesday: NaNo Energy Edition!







What’s Up Wednesday is a meme started by the awesome Jaime Morrow and Erin Funk as a way to keep up with your writer/reader/blogger pals in a quick, fun way. Link up with other participants at Jaime's blog and make sure to leave some comments along the way!


WHAT I'M READING
I recently re-read The Raven Boys and The Dream Thieves to prepare for reading Blue Lily, Lily Blue. I'm in the middle of BL,LB and I'm loving it (duh).  I forgot how much I loved being immersed in that world. I also picked up Empress of the World by Sara Ryan yesterday (we had all-day parent/teacher conferences and I didn't feel like driving home on our two-hour break but also was too burned out to work; Empress was in my classroom library but I hadn't gotten to read it yet. I am super loving it and by the time this post goes up I'll definitely be done flying through it.)



WHAT I'M WRITING
I'm nearly 7K words into my NaNoWriMo project, and it feels amazing. I forgot how much fun it is to write every day. I have a pretty distinct feeling that this draft is truly awful so far--and I also really, really don't care. I'm loving every minute of it.

So far, my WiP has:
  • cast list day 
  • Shakespeare 
  • the boy next door 
  • lousy gym classes 
  • anxiety 
  • big brown eyes 
  • major flirting 
  • backstage sofas 
  • "would you rather" 


WHAT WORKS FOR ME

Writing with my students! I've got a dedicated crew of student writers working on their own novels; collectively, students at my school have already written 57,455 words! I had a lunchtime write-in in my room on Monday, and I'm going to keep those going as often as possible. I'm also hosting a twelve-hour write-in (8-8) at school on Sunday, so students can come in and out or spend the whole day writing. I imagine I'll get a lot written that day!



WHAT ELSE IS NEW

I've started reading comic books (thanks to Mr. S) and I'm totally obsessed with the Hawkeye run that's currently in progress (by Matt Fraction, with a few different artists). You may know about Hawkeye from The Avengers (if you saw the movie, he's Jeremy Renner, aka that one guy who shot an arrow one time) but it turns out there are TWO Hawkeyes (superhero identity tends to be fluid, I guess?) and the second one is a lady. So for Halloween, Mr. S and I both went as Hawkeye; he was Clint Barton and I was Kate Bishop. (Bonus: we both own purple Converse now!) I'm also loving the beginning of Ms. Marvel--the new Ms. Marvel is a Pakistani-American Muslim teenage girl living in Jersey City. (Marvel seems to be figuring out this "diverse books" thing! And these titles are selling, so hopefully no dumb arguments about money will get in the way.)