Facebook Rehab

I have a bit of a problem. I am addicted to Facebook. The problem is that I am on Facebook for literally 16 hours a day. I can’t stop looking at Facebook on my phone, my Nook HD+ and my computer, and sometimes all 3 at the same time. If that is not an addiction, I don’t know what is.

The problem is that I have an addictive personality. When I start something, I have a hard time quitting. When I got my first Windows computer in 1997, I would wake up in the morning and go straight to the living room and sit down and get on AOL and read email and sit in chat rooms all day long.

When I played EverQuest from 2002 to 2007, I was literally on my computer from the minute I woke up until the minute I went to bed.  Of course I had a few shows on each week, so I would watch my shows. When Facebook came out, I was on it from time to time, but not as much time because I started playing Lord of the Rings Online and EverQuest 2 and I had my PSP games.

The Facebook addiction came gradually. When I started writing my book in 2010,  I was on Twitter more than I was on Facebook, but by the time I finished writing and editing and after I published my book I started paying more attention to Facebook.

When I created the Facebook page for my book and my blog, they were both supposed to be a platform for both advertising my book and for posting articles with child abuse stories, but the more research I did, the more depressed I became about my childhood. The book was supposed to help me release all that pain, so that’s why I didn’t post or blog about child abuse issues and instead started posting and writing about LGBT issues. It just so happened that a lot of the issues was about equality.

At any rate, my Facebook addiction has taken a bad turn for me. On my personal Facebook profile, I like to post funny stories that friends post. I also crack jokes in the comments on other people’s posts. Unfortunately I started saying things that didn’t make sense and I started saying things that were off topic and many times people have yelled at me.

One person in particular recently told me that she disagreed with me. Ok, that’s fine, we’re all individuals with our own opinions, but you don’t see me telling you how much I disagree with you because I’m not that kind of person. If I see that someone has their own opinion about something, I respect it and move on. I don’t call them on it. I mean, who does that? I got really upset, not that she disagreed with me, but because she made it a point to tell me she disagreed with me. Lady, I don’t know you and I honestly don’t care if you agree with me or not.  Aren’t I allowed to have my own opinions?

Anyway, this whole thing has just taught me that I have been spending way too much time on Facebook. I stopped playing video games and I stopped reading. I was trying to learn to write fiction because that has been my dream since I was a child, but I stopped reading the books that I bought called Write Great Fiction because of Facebook. I bought all this D&D stuff to learn to play, but instead I kept looking at Facebook.

Of course I don’t blame Facebook. I don’t blame video games or computers or my cell phone for my addictions, I blame myself. So it’s not you Facebook, it’s me.

So this is what I have decided. I switched to a role playing character that I have on Facebook, which happens to be a character I played in EverQuest and will be the star in my fiction books if I ever start writing them. That way I can still post things on my book page, which I will spend 1 hour a day doing. If I can’t access my regular Facebook page then I won’t be tempted to sit on it all day. I will turn on my computer once a day to check for messages on my regular Facebook page, but I won’t read anyone’s posts or respond to any comments. I’ll look, but don’t touch. The rest of my free time will consist of me reading books and playing video games. It’s a vacation that I have needed for several years.

So as of right now, I am in Facebook rehab. Chat with you when I feel that I can space my time between reading, writing, playing video games and using Facebook and Twitter and whatever other social media outlets there are.

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Writing Notebook

I feel like I’m in school all over again, but instead of actually sitting in a classroom, I’m sitting in my bedroom. I joke around that I’m home schooling myself. Well, technically I am.

The book that I am writing is a fantasy fiction novel based on my Gnome Wizard character in EverQuest. Although, it will not be based in that world, instead I will be creating a brand new world.

In order for me to write this with a solid foundation, I have to read 5 books in the “Write Great Fiction” series. I bought these ebooks on my Nook to help me learn to write fiction. But it’s not just reading books, I have to also create my characters. I mean, I could just say here is Joe Schmo and this is Tom Jones, but they are not regular people. The characters that I am creating are all fantastic creatures like gnomes, halflings, elves and centaurs etc. They all have specific talents that only certain races and certain classes can have. Each race and class can also only equip certain armor, weapons and spells and they have to cast the right spells on the mobs in the story. It has to be right, otherwise people will know and put the book down and say this is BS. You can’t put a Warrior in cloth, or silk, or you can’t put armor on a wizard. You can’t make your wizard throw fire balls at a fire creature, it will absorb the fire and won’t do any harm, you have to throw ice at him. I literally have to go by the book.

The character sheet you see is for a game called Challenger RPG. I downloaded 2 ebooks for that free game last night, so I will read those books and see if it will teach me to play that game. If that game doesn’t work for me then I will try the Dungeons & Dragons. I have many D&D books that I will need to read to create my characters from. And no, this is not going to be a Dungeons & Dragons story, but I can use that game to create my characters and to teach me what I need to know. I printed 12 of these character sheets to put in the notebook so I can make notes on each of my characters. I am sure I will make some mistakes, which is why I printed so many. I will print more as needed.

I played EverQuest from 2002 to around 2008 or 2009. I have played a wizard, shaman, warrior, enchanter, necromancer, druid and shadow knight. I have played a gnome, vah shir, barbarian, half-elf, human, high elf, drakkin and halfling. I don’t know what I am doing with many of the classes and races though. Just because I have played the game for nearly a decade, doesn’t mean I know what I’m doing. And it has been many years since I’ve played, so I am a little rusty, so that’s why I have the character sheets and why I plan on using another RPG game to create my characters.

I also intend on using the RPG games to create my fighting scenes. I’m not going to use it to create my plot or my story or dialog, I just need a little help with the battles. I do have a good imagination, but it’s not that good.

You can see a Trapper Keeper in the image at the top, but unfortunately I do not own one. If they sold them in the store then I would buy one, but I haven’t seen them so far. I still have lots of notebook paper from many years ago. I kept a notebook for my crochet patterns, so I have some school supplies. I don’t need to buy new notebook paper because my printer can print that out for me, it can also print graph paper which I also intend on printing so I can draw my maps, houses, cities, castles etc. I will need those to help me decide where my characters are going so it doesn’t seem like I’m going just anywhere in the world.

I never knew how much work went into writing a book. This project has opened my eyes to everything that a writer must go through when they are creating a fictional world like I am. Never take for granted what other people go through so you can have even a tiny bit of entertainment.

Writing Fiction Is Not As Easy As It Seems

My first book was easy to write because it was all stuff that I had lived through, so it was all from memory. I didn’t study writing a memoir, I just started writing it on my own. I wrote and wrote and wrote until it was finished, then edited. It was a breeze. Fiction is one hundred times harder to write.

The fiction novel that I have wanted to write since 2002 about my gnome wizard character from EverQuest is easy in regards to creating characters and bios. The characters are mostly people I have actually played the game with and most of the people are really excited to be put in a book. A few others are real people, but they don’t exactly know they will be written about and I won’t be using their names. Since they never played the game, they won’t have character names so I will have to use a name generator. Creating the world isn’t going to be that difficult because I can create names for everything using a generator. I plan on creating maps from actual places; not states, but counties.

The hard part is the plot. I am reading this book Plot & Structure which is in the “Write Great Fiction” series. I had already written out my plot but have changed it several times while reading this book. I’m learning more and more as I go, but I’m also learning that the ideas that I had weren’t going to work. I created a new plot, then that one got deleted because it also didn’t work. I started to write another one, but what’s the point?

I’m not very far in this book, but what I have learned has stuck with me, which is a good thing considering I have a learning disability. That’s the one thing that has screwed me up my entire life. If I’m not interested in something, it will be more difficult to remember what I’ve learned, but if it’s something that I am passionate about, it stays with me forever. If something has impacted my life for the good or the bad, then I have a very good memory, too good in fact. I can remember things from so long ago that most people would never remember. Do you remember running around in a diaper? I do. Do you remember learning to use the potty? I vaguely do, but only bits and pieces, pun not intended.

Today we went to see the movie Guardians of the Galaxy. Well, before we went to the movies I read about prologues and how some writers use them. During the first few minutes of the movie I saw exactly when the prologue ended and where chapter 1 began. I’m watching movies in terms of writing now. Perhaps that will make writing a bit easier, who knows.

I still have a long way to go to read this book. There are only 240 pages and I can normally read about 100 pages a day, but this book requires me to take my time. If I rush through it then I won’t remember anything. I also spend a lot of time highlighting and writing notes in the book, which is a very good thing to do. It’s a lot easier since it’s a Nook book and not a paperback book lol. The reason for the highlights is because those are very specific lessons I will want to go back to. When I’ve finished reading the series and I am ready to start writing, I may have forgotten certain things, so I can look up only my highlights and notes and skim them to find what I’m looking for.

I’ve changed my plot several times, and I’m thinking that I may end up changing my characters by the time I get to the character book, so perhaps I should wait on creating anything until I have read all 5 books. I don’t want to waste too much time creating, only to end up scraping everything again and again. Who knows, by the time I finish this series, I might not want to write about this story, I may decide to go in another direction.

Who knew writing fiction would be this difficult?

Never be bullied into silence

I’ve shared many images similar to this on my Facebook page and Twitter along with a 1 liner about how true the image is, but I’ve never written a blog post because I’ve never actually had something that hit as close to home as this particular image does.

When I began writing my book when I was 19 years old on my old Apple //e computer that my ex brother-in-law sold to me (for $750 that I made payments to every week until it was paid off), I wasn’t sure if 1 I could write it or 2 if I should write it. I lost the disk when I had to sell the computer to live. I could only get $75 for it after only a few short years of owning it.

I spent my entire adulthood wanting to write it, but afraid to because if I ever spoke my mind, my family would throw something back in my face, something that is not really that damning to me really. If I said that someone did or said something to me, they would always say that I ran away from home when I was 13 years old and went to studio city. Who cares! They never bring up the reason I decided to run away, that I was following in my own sister’s footsteps. She was gone for 3 days with her boyfriend. I was gone for maybe 2 hours at the most. Who cares about that, but apparently they seem to think that it is such a horrible thing, like they are comparing it to murder.

In 2010 my HIV doctor told me that I probably only had 10 more years to live, I decided that I really wanted to write it and who cares what anyone thinks. I finally published it in February 2012 knowing that if my family ever found out, they would bring up this horrible running away story as if I were this horrible person. My sister had her friend call me names like a drama queen in his “review” of my book. It wasn’t so much a review as much as it was an attack on my character. This coming from a man who has pictures of swastikas in his Facebook photo albums and calls himself a Anti-Zionist. Someone who doesn’t know me, has never met me, has only ever heard stories about me seems to think he knows everything there is to know about me. I’m an onion Baby Jane Hudson. I have so many layers that you don’t even know about. Don’t presume to think you know me.

Anyway, this guy says in his review that I should stop lying to people and change my book from memoir to fiction. You can bully me into silence all you want, but it’s not going to work because my book is my truth. It is how I saw life through my memories and no one can change that. He threatened that I could be sued for slander, which by the way you cannot sue me because you don’t know me and because I changed all the names for “their” protection. It was more for my protection.

I will never be bullied into silence. This is my life and I will speak my truth and there is nothing anyone can do to change that. I don’t care if it means never speaking with my sisters who don’t really speak with me anyway. And frankly, I could give a rats patooty if I never speak with my step father again for the rest of my life. If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have a need to write a book.

Oh, he mentions in his “review” that I used Writing Fiction for Dummies to write my book. Well, no I didn’t, but I did buy that book for another purpose. It was always my dream since I was a child to write a book, it just turns out that the book I chose to write about was my life story. I didn’t read that book to help me write my book. I wrote my book without any help, I did that on my own. I wrote it the same way I would tell someone in person. 4 years after I wrote my memoir, I am finally starting to read that book, but I found another series more helpful and I am reading those now. If I still have 6 years to go, I want to write this fiction that I have wanted to write since I was a child and I don’t care what anyone says about it. It’s my dream and I will make that dream come true, just you watch.

My WriteItNow 4 Plan

I have planned on buying this software called WriteItNow 4 on Amazon for $69.95 along with 2 books. One of the books was called Making The Most of WriteItNow 4 but the Demo of the program seems to be self explanatory, and I really can’t afford to spend $15 on a book with only 112 pages. I would much rather spend that money on books that will help me learn to write fiction instead.

One of the books I was going to buy from Amazon for $9.85 is called Plot & Structure: Techniques and Exercises for Crafting a Plot That Grips Readers from Start to Finish, but I found that on the Nook store for $10.49. It’s a bit more expensive, but I will get it instantly and not have to pay a shipping fee, so I don’t mind paying an extra .64 cents.

I found some other books that are also available on the Nook store that I will find useful. They are in the Write Great Fiction Series. I won’t be able to buy them all at once, but I will be able to buy them gradually. I can’t afford to go to school for this, but I can afford to buy a few books that will probably teach me everything I need to know in my own time. I am basically home schooling myself lol.

I have saved up $32.84 in my PayPal account with a $20 transfer in progress from my Etsy sales. I have an automatic $20 transfer every month which will bring my balance up to $72.84 which will be more than enough to buy the WriteItNow 4 software which is $69.95 with free shipping and no taxes. I was expecting to spend $100 with the 2 books so I’m going to focus that money on these Nook ebooks.

For now, I started reading Writing Fiction for Dummies which I bought a few years ago to help me learn to write, but I never got past Chapter 1 because it was too frustrating to keep reading about publishing. I don’t care about publishing because I am a self publisher, I just want to learn to write a book. I wrote my memoir without this book, but I need help to write fiction so I started reading it again today and Chapter 2 has actually started helping me. I’ve already made 22 highlights and written 2 notes. I’m going to continue reading that to teach me all that it can teach me before I buy the other 5 books.

I have waited so many years for this and it’s finally going to happen and I can’t be more excited. My dreams are finally coming true. I don’t expect to be popular or to have the best novel in the world, I don’t even expect anyone to buy or even like my books. All I want is the chance to write them to make my childhood dreams come true. Once I do that, then I will be happy.

My Childhood Wish Come True

I am very happy to announce that I am only $10 shy of my goal for buying this novel writing software WriteItNow on Amazon. I was going to only buy the software, but Amazon suggests I also buy 2 paperback books. One is called “Making the most of WriteItNow4” and that is $14.40 and considering I am new to that software, I should probably buy it. The other is called “Plot and Structure: Techniques and exercises for crafting a plot that grips readers from start to finish.” That one is $11.08. Then of course the actual software is $69.95 and the total will be $95.43. Free shipping, thank goodness lol. I’m not sure if there will be taxes added onto the total though.

I’ve been posting the link to my Etsy Shop with coupons and today I have received 3 orders. Of course, I still need maybe 1 or 2 orders depending on how much is spent and how much is taken away from Etsy fees. If it equals $10 then I will most certainly be able to buy this software and books by next Wednesday after all the PayPal transfers go through.

I have already started a transfer from my checking account to PayPal for $20, even though Etsy is only going to deposit $11.84 tomorrow. There is another deposit for next Monday for $14.85 and I have an automatic transfer of $20 to my PayPal account this weekend, so I should be good to go.

I’m really excited because I am finally making my childhood dream of writing fiction come true. I have a lot of reading to do this week. I have some ebooks on writing fiction that I bought and a Dungeons & Dragons handbook that I am going to study that will help me with not only character creation but also to learn more about all the races and classes. I want to make it clear that I am not writing a D&D book, but I will use the D&D rules and I may possibly play my own game of D&D to help me write, which means I will also need some D&D dice. Hey, I want it to be as authentic as I can lol. I have found some for $3.64 and added them to my Amazon wish list.

I have already begun the process of creating characters. I have 2 trolls and 1 ogre as the bad guys and I have 6 good guys who are all going to be members of my quest party. There is so much work to be done. I will need to create an entire world, which means names of places and perhaps even mapping out the entire world I will be creating. Of course, I will start with  specific locations and then go from there.

There is so much to do and I will have so much fun doing it and I want to thank all the people who have bought keychains, earrings and bracelets from my Etsy shop to help me reach my goal. This is such an awesome dream come true and I cannot wait to begin.

Writing Fiction/Fantasy

When I was a kid, I saw a typewriter in the dumpster. I believe I was 9 years old at the time. I wanted that typewriter really bad, and I didn’t know why. My mother wouldn’t let me have it because it was in the garbage for a reason. She bought me a toy typewriter which I played with all the time. I had this dream from then on that I would write a book. I spent so many years trying to think of a beginning, and there were times when I wrote the beginning to my story on paper, but it either sounded cliché, or it just didn’t sound right. I did eventually write a book, but it wasn’t fiction. It counts, but not really because that wasn’t my dream.

I have been reading science fiction and fantasy novels for many years, and that is the genre I want to write. I actually have a story in my mind that I want to write, I just need help writing it because I have no clue what I’m doing. I can write what has happened in my life easily, because it already happened, but if it has never happened, then that is where I have trouble. I have a good imagination, but not as good as I would like it to be.

I’ve been looking for software to help me write this book. I went to Google and looked for help and found some good ideas. One website had a list of software titles that ranked them and compared each one to the other. WriteItNow4 seemed to be at the very top of the list with a rating of 9.9. Another program I was going to use was Storyweaver, but it didn’t seem to be that helpful. I was told about yWriter and that looks okay, better than Storyweaver, but it’s free. The problem that I have with yWriter is that it doesn’t have anywhere near the bells and whistles that WriteItNow has. I know, I’m spoiled, but if I want to write this book, I want to use the best software that I can.

WriteItNow has a random character generator which gives you way more information than just a name and sex. It can also generate ideas and gives you prompts. It has Chapters and scenes, events graph, relationships graph and a story conflict graph. It even tells you if your story is readable for each chapter and scene. You can create events, locations, write notes, you can move the scenes and events around so you can keep everything in order. Oh boy, I honestly wish I had this 4 years ago.

Anyway, I am GOING to buy this program because I really think it will help me write my book. I don’t think, I know it will help me. The program on their website is $60 for the download, but $70 for the CD. I plan on buying the CD because a download can be deleted accidentally, or can be lost if your hard drive crashes. I would much rather buy the CD, and I would rather buy it from Amazon because I can save money by putting money into my Amazon account. I don’t have the money now, but next check I can put $35 in there and then buy it in September.

I would love to have the program sooner than that, but in order for me to do that, I need people to buy my stuff on Etsy. I have lots of keychains, stud earrings, dangle earrings and friendship bracelets. They aren’t too expensive and they are great quality, so please help me out so I can start writing my fantasy novel.

I don’t expect to be able to buy this program until September, so in the meantime I have bought some eBooks about writing fiction that I think might help me. I did buy Fiction for Dummies years ago to help me write a short fiction story before I published my first book, but that book did not help me at all. It kept talking about publishing, which I don’t care about, I just want to know how to write fiction. So I’m hoping I can get past all that so it will help me learn to write fiction. I can highlight and make notes with my Nook, and I plan on making a LOT of notes lol. I can use all the help I can get if I am going to be successful with this new project.

Wish me luck and please buy some of my things on Etsy. Anything helps.

Update: I have a little less than half of what I need thanks to someone ordering 6 keychains. I am hoping for a couple more orders so I can buy it, Otherwise I will be able to buy it when I get my next check. I’m hoping to get it sooner than that though. In the meantime, I will start using yWriter to get the ball rolling.
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