A Piece of Writing Motivation for the Procrastinating Writer: WriMo Edition
Life gets in the way of things. It’s a fact of life, accepted by all, loathed by many. Life gets in the way of watching that Doctor Who marathon you’ve […]
Author Archives: booksandbark
Welcome to Camp
NaNoWriMo has always been something I loved. Writing non-stop for one crazy month of the year? Who could resist? I definitely can’t. I’ve come back year after year, pushed to write […]
Doctor Who Review | “Blink” 4 Stars
The Doctor and Martha are stuck in 1969. In present-day London, the Weeping Angels, strange creatures whose touch has the power to send people back in time, are on the […]
Book Review | Great Expectations 4 Stars
It’s Victorian-era England. Pip is just a simple forge boy chosen to entertain rich Miss Havisham and her beautiful adopted daughter, Estella. Though he finds himself falling for Estella, Pip […]
Book Review | Divergent 3.5 Stars
In Beatrice Prior’s dystopian Chicago, life is split into five factions. When Beatrice is sixteen, she must choose a faction forever. Should she stay with her family, or should she […]
The Clarinet Café | PART II: Clarinet Care
In my last post on clarinets, I talked about how to select a clarinet. Now, in my second part of this clarinet-post series, I have finally decided to address the age-old […]
And the Plot Begins…
Two years after the idea for my novel was born into a page-long seedling, I have reached the height of the plot at 56,000 words. And let me tell you. […]
March Madness
I haven’t worked on my novel in a while. Earnestly, I mean. Not just jotting down a sentence or two, but actually working on it, trying to see where it’s […]
The Art of Not Writing
The height of my blog’s popularity was in December and November, where I posted on this blog nearly every day… And more importantly wrote parts of my novel every day. […]
YA Plot: Getting Rid of Parents
Spoilers for plot of Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, I Am Number Four, and Divergent. Don’t read if you are planning on reading/are partway through reading one of these books […]
Paranoia: Posting Writing Online
I often make references to the fact that I love to write, but yet I’ve barely posted any of my work on this blog, or indeed nearly anywhere else online. […]
On Finishing Novels
PART ONE: HITTING 50K IN (APPROX.) 1,000 DAYS The goal of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is to write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days. I wrote […]
Spaying and Neutering Animals at the SPCA
Today, I visited the SPCA. That’s an animal rescue, if you didn’t know that already. They rescue animals somehow–either off of the streets or from owners who are surrendering their […]
Hitting 100 Pages
Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day. — A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh Wow… hitting 100 pages has been an amazing three-year journey for me and my […]
Hang On… Did You Just Say TOWEL DAY?!
TOWEL DAY It has recently come to my attention that there is a holiday called Towel Day. No, I’m not joking. It’s a real holiday. If you’ve ever read Douglas Adams’s […]
My Thoughts on the Fault in Our Stars
ALERT: SPOILERS!!! (for both Allegiant and The Fault in Our Stars) So, I’ll say it again, just in case you didn’t notice it in HUGE FONT right above this image: SPOILERS. AHEAD. WILL. RUIN. THE. BOOK. […]
NaNoWriMo, Day 24
National Novel Writing Month, Day 24. What a thrill ride. On Day 21, I had 31,762 words. Six minutes ago (it’s 12:06 AM right now) I hit the 38,298 word […]
The Clarinet Café | PART I: How to Select a Clarinet and Get a Good Tone Out of It
I’ve been a clarinetist for just four years, so I’m no expert. But every clarinet player knows that getting a good tone out of a clarinet depends upon two things: […]
“I Only Write it, I Don’t Have to Analyze It!”
I only write it, I don’t have to analyze it!” As a writer, I feel like I’ve had to say that a million times. Every time I write a poem, […]
Photography, Traveling, and Dogs
WARNING: This will be a long post. Before I start posting about my experiences, I thought I’d start by writing a blog post about each of my hobbies. These include […]
How I Write
Okay, so I know I said I’d only do ONE post on my writing, but I found this on my old blog and felt compelled to publish it here. A […]
What to Do With an Unpredictably Aggressive Dog
If your dog, like mine, is overly aggressive or unpredictable with other dogs, it can be hard to socialize them, take them to parks, concerts, or even take them for […]
The Bindi Biographies, Part II: Barks and Boredom
It’s road tripping season in our family, and, of course, for our dog! This year, it’s a five-hour-trip—and just to the first stop—and our Bindi is not happy about […]
The Bindi Biographies, Part I: Of Sleep and Squirrels
Every so often, our dog will go outside, bark at some neighborhood squirrels for a while, and then settle down on the mahogany-colored deck, whining in sadness. She seems to […]
Books and Bark 