During the creation of my 120 paged literature piece, I stumbled across an important question.

Is there a website out there that lends a hand to all of us leap-year impaired souls out there who can’t for the life of themselves remember when it is a leap year?

Why yes!

http://isitaleapyear.com/

We actually have real news here. *Gasps*

It’s a dangerous world out there, and sometimes the most important survival skills you need may not be widely known. But, thanks to some people willing to devote some time and effort to help you people out, there are some great websites out there created for the benefit of the people.

I mean, where would we be if we couldn’t tell the subtle difference between cheese and a post box? (Click here) And our favorite vampire film, Twilight, has reeled in 70.6 MILLION dollars in from opening weekend alone. (Take that, Bolt!) If you haven’t seen it already, you should consider going. It’s amazing. Same with the soundtrack. Buy the soundtrack.

But what’s inspiring about the Twilight story is how that even though the movie had no widely known stars, not very much violence, was created by a small film company with a not very well known director on a tight budget, it was a hit. I think that the story of the movie breaking records even though critics didn’t expect it- at first- to do well, it did. A true underdog story!

To give you an idea of where Twilight stands on the opening-weekend box office list of recent movies, here’s a nifty chart from Yahoo! News:

1. “Twilight,” $70.5 million.

2. “Quantum of Solace,” $27.4 million.

3. “Bolt,” $27 million.

4. ” Madagascar 2: Escape 2 Africa,” $16 million.

5. “Role Models.” $7.2 million.

6. “Changeling,” $2.6 million.

7. “High School Musical 3: Senior Year,” $2 million.

-Rika

Writing a novel in thirty days is harder than you think. Fifty thousand words don’t write themselves, apparently, and I spent forever trying to type out my novel as I tried to keep my ankle elevated and iced. It was very difficult to type.

So currently I have stranded my character in the middle of a deserted island, and she’s being followed. Right now I’m plotting to kill of this other character, but Jala wants him to survive, so I’m debating between him and this other guy, but really the original person that I was going to kill off is more melodramatic and actually has something to do with the plot.

Anyways, there’s my excuse for not writing as much, I have sixteen drafts waiting to be looked at for this site and an additional ten for Pinkymiranda, and I’m having serious trouble motivating myself to write anything besides my novel.

So, for today, I’ll just leave you with a very interesting documentary.

Oh, and did you know I reached 30k words? That’s sixty seven pages. I know, it’s amazing.

When I’m sitting here, attempting to type out a 50k word novel, the last thing I think about is peace while I’m trying to decide which character to kill off first. I rarely think about it as I terrorize anyone within a fifty feet radius of my writing space to give me a chapter title, and then go on and on about how “Vegetarians and Duck Tape” is not a usable chapter title.

I mostly think about ways to up my word count, like adding in the line “A deceptive reporter, an ambassador, and a yodeling personal fitness coach plot to kill a zombie in a Broadway musical” and making it make sense. Now that takes some skill.

Picture note: The wall of International Peace - Arbat Quarter - Moscow
The wall consists of scores of tiles painted by Soviet schoolchildren, expressing their hopes for peace and fears for war

 But since we’re coming up on the month about peace, I’d like to bring up that particular subject, and mention that I’ll be writing some pieces about peace later on in December.

One of the definitions of peace, from one of my favorite dictionaries (yes, I have favorite dictionaries, I’m a writer!) is; the normal, nonwarring condition of a nation, group of nations, or the world. I have a serious problem with this definition. Any country’s normality is still absolute chaos! We weren’t in war in the 1960s when civil rights still hadn’t been set in place for African Americans!

Another definition; a state of mutual harmony between people or groups, esp. in personal relations.

Do you see the similarity between the two definitions given? That our definition of peace is at a very low standard? Do you notice the words ‘mutual harmony’? And the word ‘normal’? We have been bred to know that peace is an uncommon factor, and there can never be peace. There will always be conflicts, always be problems, always be wars, unfairness, always be chaos with the exception of ‘mutual harmony’.

So if there can never be peace, why try?

Because we need to try, or our definition of peace will be withered down to something so pathetic, the original definition of peace will never be here.

Peace: the state of understanding and tranquility of un-normality of which can only be achieved by a nonwarring group/party of people, country, nation, or group of nation willing to put differences aside for the good of the nation. For peace.

-Rika

 November is here, and you can be sure that your very own Rika is spending many hours typing out her… interesting plot that includes segway chase scenes, herds of elephants, and a box. A square box.

Don’t know what I’m talking about? NaNoWriMo, of course! Read about it here.

Rika has put together a little toolbox for everyone trying to win National Novel Writing Month, aptly named, “The Nearby Future’s NaNoWriMo Toolbox”

Note: I still have to create pages and find the links for all of the stuff with a strikethrough.

• The desktop calendar. What better motivates you than a witty calendar reminding you that 50,000 words won’t write itself? [Click here for a ton]

• Random Generators Source. Don’t name your supporting characters Bill and Sally. Go to the random name generator and computer will name them for you! Click here for a full list of Rika’s favorite generators! (Plot, characters, conflicts, loglines… there is a generator for everything.)

• Creative search engines. Google is for the non-artistic types. Google Loco is such a great search engine, you don’t even have to know what your searching for! The Mood Swings search engine is great for everyone… convicts with severe emotional problems, people who feel like trespassing on government property, or writers.

• Dictionaries. We all know that writers love words, which means they love dictionaries. Rika has about 10 dictionaries, and is constantly looking through the library’s encyclopedias and other reference books. (Even the online ones!) I don’t give a flying fig newton for those, but I guess writers do. Here are a couple of Rika’s favorite online ones.

• The radio. Not just any radio, but www.pandora.com radio. It’s a free, customizable, no-annoying-DJ ranting about his wedding last weekend and it’s in high quality. And it’s Calister F. Wells approved. (Rika likes it because it’s a good source of ‘inspiration’.)

• Other websites. Rika has this strange love of Yahoo! Answers saying that “It’s the only website where I can put people and their problems into my novel without them knowing!” I think that being a writer is being a borderline stalker.

So there you have it, all of you people who are going to be writing for a whole month (or at least saying you are), now you’re one step closer to ‘winning’ NaNoWriMo.

-Calister F. Wells

With the exception of one issue, I believe Obama will be an intelligible president.

Unfortunately, that issue is about abortion, one of the most delicate arguments out there. And I happen to be pro-life, so I was a McCain supporter.

But really, Obama is voted in so all of the McCain supporters should put aside their ludicrous squabbling and respect the next elected president.

What do I have to say? I should have made an Obama election video.

-Rika

Edit: Ok. It’s true. I’m dependent on spell check.

The FDA is at it again, angering thousands of bloggers and people alike who believe in good health. Thanks to some pressure from the Corn Refiners Association, the wonderful little company that makes High Fructose Corn Syrup, (HFCS) apparently HFCS is considered natural.

This is probably the worst decision made by them yet.

Reasons why HFCS is NOT natural:

• The FDA said it wasn’t natural before they conveniently changed their minds.
• The process is more complicated than Dextrose, which isn’t considered natural.
• The complex process includes genetically altered ingredients.

Listen, I could go on and on, talking about things such as that HFCS is digested in the liver instead of the stomach, and preliminary research shows that yes, it could most definitely be the cause of the obesity epidemic, but instead I’m going to stop here.

The best health tip that could be given right now is don’t eat high fructose corn syrup. Don’t listen to the FDA.

So go ahead and give them a dramatic clap for doing what they do best- pleasing big companies.

-Rika

I’m a supporter of the McCain/Palin ticket because of one issue: life. I’m pro-life because I agree with the saying “It’s a child, not a choice.” I don’t give a flying fig newton about their other issues because at this point it’s becoming harder and harder for the government to fix the mess our world is in. I don’t believe any ideas will be able to change our current problem.

Even though I care about only one issue, I decided to do research on some of the other issues John McCain is supporting… in the form of a video!