A new story

So an idea for a short novel has been floating around in my head.

It's a conversion/transformation story about a girl with a past and no contact to God. Her path crosses with a witch who wants to use her soul to pay off the devil. The witch causes an accident and because one righteous man involved wasn't affected by the spell and had tried to save her the original spell goes awry (I think that's the word I want) and she doesn't die. If she had died, her soul would have been the witch's.

A "spell world" or "coma world" is created where the people in the accident are the main characters. And she learns about God from this righteous man who is a member of the LDS church (but he doesn't specifically tell her that.) There's a bunch of other elements too, but I don't want to put it online because there are lame people who steal other authors ideas.

Anyway, I already have the end planed out which says something for the life of this story. In other words, it might actually come to pass. Maybe I'll use the idea for my creative writing class.

RUN RUN RUN as fast and I CAN!!

OK, so I'm feeling either completely awesome or completely insane.

Why?

Well let's see, I'm planning on doing a triathlon Dec 4th that consists of a 300 yd swim, an 8 mile bike ride, and a 2 mile run. That doesn't sound too bad now does it? Even if I am completely out of shape (which, admittedly, I kinda am) and have never run 2 miles straight in my life. I have a whole month to train for that.

But wait, there's more!

During the month of November I will be participating in the Lazyman Ironman competition. I have one month to complete a 2.7 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride, and a 26 mile run. (and...I get a t-shirt!) But that's still not too bad is it? A Lazyman Ironman would be good for training for a triathlon.

Oh, but it get's better.

On November 13th I will also compete in an outdoor 5k turkey trot. If I manage to complete the run close enough to my predicted time I win a free turkey for my families annual all American turkey dinner!

Ok, two triathlons and a 5k may seem a little much, but that's still not too bad if I stay focused. However, I'm also competing with personal health history. My athletic experience includes: one year of soccer, one year of swim team, about eight years soft ball, and nine years of Jujitsu. That's it.

In High School I was the dorky fluffy book girl who wanted to be one of the tall funny wire muscle bound girls on the basketball team. If you had asked me to run I would have said, "cha, dream on! Coordination I have, but speed? I poop out after running the length of one block!"

Still, being fit is one of my life long goals. I just hadn't felt motivated to do anything about it until college. I've tried a couple of programs, (Weight Watchers, Jillian Micheal's website) but I find that if I have a program it just gives me an excuse to blame the program and not my eating habits or lack of exercise. "I'm paying money, the weight should just magically come off!"

Uh, no.

Every program has told me that it's all up to me. And I'm a firm believer that if you want something to happen for your body you've got to love your body enough and want it bad enough to motivate yourself to do it. Don't count on a workout buddy, don't count on a programs motivational speeches, that's all just nudge work. If you want to be fit, the only person you can count on to get you out that door is you. Don't expect someone else to drag you by the hand to where you want to be. Just get up and walk!

With that attitude I've toned up a bit, but I haven't really lost any weight. I blame my lack of self-control when loving roommates offer everything from fresh brownies to 5 buck pizza! And the fact that I love free weights and find cardio workouts to be a bit boring.

But these races have lit a fire under me. I want to compete and I want to finish something that I've never done before. I don't have to win, I just have to finish. And we'll see what a whole month of heavy cardio and a little weight training will do for my plateau problem.

I haven't been under 180 lbs since I was 12. My whole adult life I've bounced between 188 and 195. The last time I took a skin-fold test I was 33% body fat. It's time to break the cycle! I'll have another test at the end of November to see it there's been any progress.

Wish me luck!

Life as usual and then some

So, even though this is now supposed to be a personal blog I have mixed feelings putting my life online. For one, I'm a very private kind of person. For another I know some people have the gift of making their lives funny and entertaining like my sister in her "idahobecky" blog and others don't.

Guess there's nothing left to do but take the plunge.

I'm 20, a college student, single, and a bit overweight....about 30% body fat over weight. I'm 5'6" and weigh about 190. (I need another skin-fold test to see how much of that is muscle.) I am an aspiring creative writer and Physical Therapy Assistant. I know those two things normally don't go together, but trust me, this time they do....I think.

I've been through so many career changes in the last three months alone I'm starting to get sick of it. The only thing that could match in current drama in my life is academics. I've switched classes this semester about as many times as I've changed careers.

On a brighter note, I'm training to compete in my first triathlon in Dec. 300yd swim, 8 mile bike ride, and 2 mile run. This is part of my goal to become a healthy and fit specimen that can compete in the Physical Therapy world. I'm also competing in a LAZYMAN Iron man as part of training for the triathlon that lasts the whole month of November.

Also on a bright note, I've gotten more English career experience this semester than ever before by virtue of knowing one special man. He has a blog called "dearbrojo." It's an advice column for young LDS teens and Young Single Adults about dating. I started reading it about two months after he started and have been hooked ever since. I wrote him a few times and he wrote back and we've chatted on facebook and soon became net friends. I did some PR work for his latest books "Bro Jo's Guide to Relationships" and another one for teens. And now he wants me to review his book for his publisher. Can we say "resume material?"

I love my job tutoring writing students on campus. They're all bright-eyed bushy tailed freshmen with great ideas and each have fairly good skills at writing already. As for my job off-track, I'm going to try to land a job as a Physical Therapy Aide, aides don't need any more education than High School, and it would get me the hours I need to eventually complete an associates. I just need to find someone who wouldn't mind having me around only three months out of the year at home, or someone who wouldn't mind having me around school hours at school.

Like I said life is good, it's just complicated. I guess this is what they mean when they say you have to take the bitter with the sweet.

Memoirs of a Creative Writer

It has recently occurred to me that my blog doesn't necessarily need to be about all things creative writing. It's called "MEMOIRS OF A CREATIVE WRITER," for a reason. They're my memories, and as I have a hard time keeping up in my written journal it makes sense to make this my journal blog.

(The lack of activity in my hand written journal is partially due to the fact that I want to keep it for a special purpose and not run out of room before then. As this event hasn't happened yet it's better to just do an electronic journal since I enjoy typing more than hand-writing anyway.)

What's new?

Well, college is fun. Tutoring writing students is even more fun and boys are hardly scarce. That's my little update for now. Gotta go to work.

The essay of the drowned

This is an assignment I had in English. Hope you like it!

There’s Death in the Water

I think it’s funny how something so innocent can in an instant become deadly, even something as harmless as a pool of water. We think we control it. Trapping it inside concrete or plastic and then splashing it around as if we somehow own it. I know better. Water can be submissive but if given the chance it could kill a grown man in minutes.

It was a hard lesson I learned long ago when I was little. The sky was a beautiful blue and warm and my sisters and my cousins and I found escape from the heat in my best friend’s pool. It was the biggest pool I’d ever seen in a backyard, over 12 feet in a diameter with a slick plastic bottom that slopped sharply down to six feet deep. Katie and I couldn’t swim yet, but that didn’t matter because half of the pool was less than four feet deep. The water was cool and soft and we would dive under it to catch up the bright plastic pieces of buried treasure. Seeing my family laugh and play in the deep end my friend and I decided to explore and see how far out we could really go. Looking back it was a stupid plan, but reason seems to fail when bravery is called for to stretch our mortal limitations.

We found out that if you gripped the sides of the pool you could go all the way around it and if we stretched our toes way far down we could stand on the inch of slick plastic ledge that stood out from the wall. We felt like fearless explorers climbing the icy heights of Mt. Everest as we circled the pool several times.

My friend grew tired of the game long before I did and she went back to diving for treasure in what I now considered the “kiddy-end.” I wanted to be out there in the deeper end with my family, but the closest I could get to them was the wall. The water soared and called to me like a siren’s song to come and play and bask in its glittering cascade. I wanted to join their splashing games. After all I couldn’t be hurt. Such was my thinking as I made my way out to the deeper end. I stopped and gripped the pool bottom hard with my toes, letting go of the wall I stretched my arms out to splash my sister. My toes slipped suddenly out from under me and I was down, down in the sparkling depths of the pool water.

I shut my eyes and mouth tight. It was quiet. I couldn’t breathe. I knew I was floating somewhere between the air and the bottom unable to touch either. I wanted to panic, I wanted to scream! There was a fire in my chest that was growing bigger by the second. Suddenly something inside me stirred; some sort of quiet calm that raised its head and said logically, “Well, you’re going to have to breathe sometime. Now how are you going to do it? There is air above you how will you get there?” I opened my eyes and I saw the legs of my family kicking around in the water. I remembered the diving for treasure game. Sometimes Katie and I would brace our feet on the bottom before pushing up hard to see how high we could jump into the air. Sometime as graceful dolphins, other times as beautiful mermaids, the creatures that ruled the waters and the sea as humans never could. In order to survive, I’d have to become a dolphin.

I moved my arms above my head and I sunk down until I could feel the slick rubber bottom with my feet then I kicked up hard. My head broke the surface and I was able to grab a big swallow before sinking back down. I could feel that stirring calm growing even stronger. It pushed against my rising panic, forcing me to keep my mouth shut and to think. “You know how get air.” It said, “Now you have all the time in the world. Think. How are you going to get out of the pool?”

“I’ll yell for help!” I thought. I pushed hard against the pool floor trying to make this the biggest jump of my life, but I was back down in the water without having had time to make so much as a squeak. I tried at least three more times before realizing I wasn’t going to get any help from my noisy inattentive family. I tried walking up the steep slope of the pool to safety. Bouncing up and down through the water like some strange slow moving sea rabbit. But the slick floor would just slip me back down into the deep end. I began to pray at that point. I was getting tired and it was getting harder and harder to push myself up and out of the water. If there was any time for God to rescue me it would have to be soon. I remembered my mother, quietly but very firmly always saying, “Now, don’t go to the deep end or you’ll drown.” “Honey, don’t go far without a grownup or you’ll drown.” Well, I was already in the deep end and I was beginning to wish that moms were more forthcoming with how to get out of trouble instead of just how to avoid it.

I was beginning to think water had won. That I would just lie on the bottom of Katie’s pool until someone would notice my cold corpse and finally pulled it out. The fire that had fueled my determination to survive was dimming; the voice that had kept me calm was silent. I broke out of the water for what I thought was one of the last times. Through my bleary water stained eyes I could see an angel coming towards me. It was my sister, Diantha, she was swimming in my direction. “Oh please let her see me!” I started jumping higher and higher and watched hoping that she would just notice me drowning in this stupidly designed pool. Finally, she swam close to where I was and I grabbed her, pulling myself up onto her back and gasping for blessed sweet air taken in slow deep breaths. As soon as I could talk I had her take me to the side where I could tumble out and continue to breathe the wonderful muggy air of that summer day, just grateful to be alive!

No one had even notice my battle with death that day. My sisters tried to deny it when I told my mom that I had nearly drowned. They claimed that I had been playing safely with Katie the whole time. Diantha thought that I had somehow jumped from the shallow end to grab her. I think my tears and descriptions convinced my mother. It didn’t matter. Nothing could change the fact that I’d nearly drowned and not one of them had even noticed. Years later when I asked Diantha about it she didn’t even remember the incident, though she remembered many other fond memories of our childhood. It’s hard to be mad at an angel who forgets saving you from drowning. Still, water had left its scar. I know that death waits in the water. One moment of panic, one second where your guard is down then the cooling embrace that saves us from the burning sun will become a cage of icy of choking silence. The water will hold you in a state of limbo with no way to escape its massive power. I had been lucky.

A bit long for a blog post, but that's still only part of the essay. I thought it was good, and my class certainly enjoyed the tension as much as they enjoyed ripping it to pieces in the discussion panel. I think that's the most fun I've had talking about writing in my life.

Comic, Stress, and Future grumpypants

Alright. So I was going to upload my comics. Keyword "was" should tell you that after trying every format and document under the sun blogspot.com doesn't like my comic. I guess it just doesn't have a sense of humor.

In other news I'm now taking a Creative Writing class and loving every minute of that. I'm also taking a Chemistry class which I am failing...sigh..I guess you really can't beat nature. I never was really good a science and math. What on earth possessed me into thinking I could actually become a highly paid, respected, and fully professional PT? (For those not familiar PT=Physical Therapist) To add insult to injury my mother decides to just now inform me that I had always been too happy to learn how to sit down and seriously study. Thank you mom.

So the question now is, do I push through years of torturous school full of subjects I have no talent for or do I go to my plans B,C,D, etc?

Ideally with my life I'd like to get married, write from home as a stay-at-home mom and also work part time as a PTA, personal trainer, or some other fitness related position.

To achieve this I could switch back to an English major, finish my degree, then go to a two year vocational college and get certified as either a PTA or a personal trainer and live close to the poverty line until I add another income to my family. Or I could cut my losses here and go to a PT school NOW while at the same time losing all my chances at the wonderful men at BYU-I and the clean English classes provided....sigh.

My gut says to do the above because I am a firm believer that whatever your career is, you should be passionate about it,and I for one am not passionate about chemistry. But I am passionate about personal health and wellness and the creative writing field.

I don't think old people remember or appreciate how difficult being twenty is anymore. It's a slow, painful morphing process from childhood to serious adulthood that can either churn out respectable young men and women or worn out basement living slugs who can't bring themselves to the realization that high school will never happen again.

Oh, what to do!