Flying

Is it just me or has anybody else not been getting status update notifications since the website updated? I can't tell if people are just unusually silent right now or if I'm just not getting notifications 

Well. My first ever D&D session had to be postponed because of a crazy person running around with a knife. At least, I think that's what happened. It's a long story. 

I wrote some updates as this whole thing was happening. It was intended to be like a diary entry, I guess. But what I wrote feels very sarcastic, and it's kind of entertaining now that the situation is over. (The situation itself wasn't entertaining, though.) But here's everything I wrote while trapped in a classroom: 

Then everything sort of ended at 1:20. The police were still outside, though. And then, because it's Spirit Week, we came out of the classrooms and just went to our event/rally as if nothing had happened. Like, how are we supposed to be enthusiastic for a school event after being nervous for over an hour? School is weird.

The whole day feels like a weird dream, to be honest. 

I'm still not even sure what happened. I think people were saying that the suspect had a knife? They had a weapon of some sort, at least. No one was hurt but it was still such a strange few hours.

Anyway, that was my day. How are all of you doing?

Thanks for following me, Facepalm 

It is midnight and I just changed my profile picture to a flying fish.

I will come back in the morning and see if I regret this decision. (Also please tell me if this was a good idea. I'm so tired I can barely think right now)

Basically I should have gone to sleep fifteen minutes ago but instead I looked at pictures of fish

School starts in two days. It hasn't started yet. 

AND I'M ALREADY GETTING EMAILS ABOUT ASSIGNMENTS. WHAT THE STORMS. 

Anyways, my English class made me read 1984 over the summer. I'm probably going to have to write a bunch of essays on it. But it was really good. I liked it a lot.

It also gave me nightmares

Ironically, the nightmares were all about writing essays. I've had multiple dreams where I was forced to write essays for the Party, and if I wrote something wrong, they arrested me. This might be a metaphor for my dread about the approaching English assignments, but that's just a guess. It's definitely not a sign of me going insane. Nope. 

WAIT. I JUST REMEMBERED. Since I'm already mentioning weird dreams, I had the weirdest dream a while ago. Basically, I went to a taco restaurant, and the main character of my fantasy novel (Vashkril) was over there too. He and his group of friends were eating at a table. Then they invited me to eat with them. Well, umm, the entire dream was just Vashkril becoming increasingly suspicious that I was the writer who wrote his tragic backstory. Every other character was oblivious. It was terrifying, though. He sat there eating a taco and glaring at me the whole time. He was trying to interrogate me like, "Are you sure I've never met you? You seem really familiar."

So, yes. Treat your characters nicely. Otherwise they show up in your dreams and threaten you. 

Okay. That's it. This was all over the place. It was supposed to be only the first two lines about assignments, but then I got carried away. 

Here's a bunch of life updates because I haven't posted here in forever.

1st:

For my final project I had to interview a professional scientist. It was in a Zoom meeting and was with a marine biologist. This normally would be something fun and exciting. The problem is...I'M STORMING AWKWARD. I ran out of questions within five minutes and had no idea how to carry on the conversation. He was really nice about it though, but I'm looking over the video recordings and there's multiple parts that make me facepalm. I can already tell this is going to be something that haunts me for the next few weeks.

2nd:

A few days ago I posted a draft of a prologue I wrote to a writing feedback subreddit. I was kind of dared to do it by my friend, but I was like "Eh, whatever. Most posts don't get read unless they blow up; I'll just do this and see what happens." Anyways, it kind of became one of the top posts on the subreddit for a few days. That still meant that only 150 people read it, but... that seems like a lot. Especially because most posts only get 10 to 30 upvotes.

I wasn't expecting anything, but somehow I ended up with private messages from people telling me they enjoyed it and wanted more. I feel slightly bad because it was a random decision and I know I could've put more work into it, but I didn't actually think anyone would read it in the first place. So now I learned that there's an audience of people out there who want the rest of the story. I'm excited but also slightly terrified because most of my writing is just me being a weirdo and having absolutely no idea what I'm doing.

3rd: 

Uhh. My AP Lang test is tomorrow. I'm going to have to hand write three essays in two hours. Pray for my poor left hand because during the mock exam it was in PAIN 

I'm doing my science homework right now and...

I learned a very valuable lesson this week. You should never use something from SpongeBob Squarepants as evidence in an essay for AP English.

I almost always write in third person, but I also have this one story that requires first person. Today I found a few pages of the story from 2017, and it kind of inspired me to rewrite part of it. I sent the rewritten version to my friend while I was writing it, so it didn't yet have the last few paragraphs where it says the main character's name. I failed to mention to her that this was the opening to a story, and for the first few paragraphs she thought the narrator of this was me. My friend stopped reading about halfway through and texted me, "Are you okay? You sound really strange in this." She thought I wrote this for one of those "About Me" projects at school... I'm not sure whether to be flattered that someone thought I could pass as Thomas Current, or really embarrassed because I could pass as Thomas Current. 

Anyways, here's the "author's note" to Thomas Current Writes the Universe. I have no idea if I'll ever write the other parts of this, but my friend's confused/concerned reaction was amazing. And just because of that I need to show it to people. (Also, I wrote this in like twenty minutes. It probably needs some editing, but I hope it's still funny. If you're curious, the original version of this was Thomas monologuing about his love of magic systems for two whole pages, and I'll have you know that I'm saving those hilarious paragraphs for later chapters. They don't fit here, and they need to be shortened a lot, but I'll find a way to use them somehow.)

So my teacher told us we could leave the online class once we finished our assignment, but apparently we had to message him saying we were done before we could leave. He wanted to check our work so he could give us approval to exit the class, but I just left the class without asking because I didn't know... And then he personally sent me an email being like, "Please never do that again", and I can't decide between being terrified and laughing.

This was like ten minutes ago and I'm laughing so hard, but I can also imagine the anger/annoyance on his face when he saw I left the class. What makes it even funnier is that I was writing a fantasy story while I didn't know I was supposed to still be in class, and I was just writing and saw this random message pop up that was like: "Next time, please ask me before leaving the call." 

Anyways, that's been my last few minutes. I almost panicked, but it's honestly kind of hilarious that he messaged me about it and I was completely clueless. 

Wow.. umm, that's a lot of birthdays. It took me a second to realize that I was looking at the birthday list instead of the "who's online" list. A lot of them are probably bots or fake birthdays, but I was so confused at first and I love how chaotic this looks. 

I don't try to make these long on purpose. I just get really excited about writing and end up writing the longest status updates ever. It was actually longer but then I accidentally deleted all of it halfway through writing it... Sorry again though  (I put it in spoilers because it's pretty long, but it also explains why my display name changed, in case you're wondering.) 

I haven't been as active on the Shard because it's Christmas break and I'm using this opportunity to read and write as much as I can. I have a few things I need to talk about because I'm excited and have no one else to share these things with  (Also this might be really long, so you don't have to read all of it. I'm mostly rambling)

First, I am finally conquering my fear of Wheel of Time and have started reading Eye of the World. I'm like 50 pages in and I'm already daunted by the fact that there's so many books. This series is probably the one series that intimidates me more than any other... so this should be an interesting experience. 

I'm also trying to write more fantasy and I've been attempting to focus more on the characters I haven't written about as much, and it's also been a very interesting experience. The character I've been developing the most is named Deceit and he's probably the most chaotic character I've ever created. He's immortal but got banished to the mortal realm literally because he's too witty and somehow managed to insult all of the other gods. He's so fun to write, but he's also incredibly distracting and thinking about him makes me burst out laughing at the worst times. I'll be with family or something, sitting on the couch doing nothing, and then start randomly laughing because I'm imagining Deceit doing something stupid.

Here is a list of some of the "stupid" in question:

I'm sorry. This was very long and random. Please don't hurt me. But seriously, Deceit is the best character and I'm having the time of my life just imagining all the dumb scenarios that I could write him getting into. 

Quick question. If one of the main characters in my fantasy story is named Calevar, would you pronounce it like Cal-uh-var (var sounds like far) or Kale-var. Or maybe something else?

This has been bothering me for basically 5 years because I've asked my friends multiple times how they'd say it and have written his name on a piece of paper for them, but they've heard me say his name so much that they automatically respond with what they're used to. I need an outside opinion because I've been getting tripped up over words like calendar and Caleb sounding completely different. 

Sincerely, someone who is up at 12:30 AM, trying to fall asleep, but instead is staring at the ceiling and having a crisis over the name of an imaginary swordsman/field medic/superhero.. thing. Honestly, he's also having a crisis right now so this is pretty fitting. 

So I'm a pretty slow reader and today I finally got to Part 4 of RoW... Normally I'd be happy that I'm making progress and getting closer to the Sanderlanche, but by my estimation I'll probably be reading Part 5 during finals week. That is not good. That is very not good. Help 

 I don't use Snapchat, but earlier today my sister was on her phone using the potato filter and it made me think of that one Reckoners quote about the potato in a minefield. Literally all day long I've been thinking about this. Please help me. I've been trying to finish my homework but I keep getting distracted because my brain keeps imagining Megan looking at David like: