Writing Update: Zach is Axed

2010 was the first year I took part in NaNoWriMo, and I had no idea what I was doing. I barely had a plot for the story I started, My Hero (it was never finished even though I reached 50k words). So a lot of random, weird things got thrown into the pot.

One of my characters was a seventeen year old boy named Zachery Green. He was supposed to be this tall, handsome Korean boy whom my protagonist was meant to fall madly in love with.

Well, that was pretty stupid. The way I wrote it, no one would have cared whether or not Zach and Peach ended up together. I DIDN'T CARE! I was going to have Zach move to another state at the end of the book, anyway. I broke his leg at one point. I said I loved him, but I think I hated him.

Part of it was that I was trying too hard not to make Zach like the guy I had a crush on. So he had no personality. He was just like this male blob who I figured I could mold into a believable character at some point.

I still don't have a handle on Zach as a character. I have no idea what makes this guy tick. And I made a promise to my boyfriend, and to myself, to finish my NaNo novels before moving on to something new. My Hero is the logical place to start, since the skeleton is 3 years old now.

So, in my efforts to rework My Hero and actually be able to write 'the end' with a smile instead of a grimace, I have officially cut the character Zach Green from the story completely.

Zach is axed.

Worse, Zach is REPLACED.

I am putting in a different male character who has yet to be given a name, but is actually based off of a guy I know. He is nothing like Zach was. His role in the story will be completely different.

And I admit I feel kind of bad about that. But Zach was never really a character...he was more of an anti-character. Because all I was doing with him was making him DIFFERENT from my crush. That made him boring and somehow very ADHD at the same time.

So, I press onward, WITHOUT Zach. Maybe I'll put him in a different story someday.

Maybe he'll actually have a personality then.

Photo Edits: September

Turns out, I love photo editing. I discovered the site PicMonkey last year, and I've occasionally played around with it. I even made my most recent NaNoWriMo cover using some of the editing tools on PicMonkey: 

Three years ago, I first heard the song September by Daughtry, and I combined some of the lyrics with this fun picture of myself I took one cold winter night when I first got a desk lamp. There is nothing more pathetic than a fifteen year old girl with a camera. Trust me; I think I have about 500k selfies. 

Edit #1

(Three years later, I still look pretty much the same. Different glasses. That's about it.)

Anyway, I made this edit with the ancient Microsoft Word program called Paint, so I didn't even change the lighting. I just picked a plain font and put the refrain to September on it. 

This week, when I should have been doing more important things, I dug the photo back up from the deep files of my computer and decided to re-edit it. I no longer had the original picture, so I had to keep the words as they were. But I still managed, with the help of PicMonkey, to whip up three edits, each more extravagant than the last. 

Edit #2 

Fairly simple; I changed the lighting, brightened the eyes, and added some texture.

Edit #3

Here's where I went insane. This one is actually my favorite, even though its kind of ridiculous. Way too much going on here. This was the only one in which I edited the text by adding a second layer. Amazingly, I think I even found the same font!

Edit #4

I don't know what exactly happened here. I saw spiderwebs. I went with it. There are five spiderwebs layered on this edit. But I think it's cool, in a creepy kind of way. 

That's it. I am leaving for a long vacation with my family tomorrow, so we'll see how much blogging I have time to do. I will be working on some story ideas while I have an enormous lake in front of me for a whole week, which should be good for inspiration. 

Have a lovely Independence Day!