Spring break?

So if you know me at all, you probably know that I did not have a real spring break this year. I went on Midwest choir tour instead! It was actually pretty fun. No matter what people say, I love the Midwest. My opinion is, if you don't like it, please move back to whatever warm place you come from. This might seem a little mean, but I am so tired of people complaining and/or bashing the Midwest. Sorry for the mini-rant. Clearly, Midwest bashing is a pet peeve of mine. But seriously, I love the Midwest. We get the most glorious autumns (my favorite season!) complete with apple orchards, crisp cool weather, and the most amazing colors everywhere! It also gets a sentence all to itself because I love it so much. We get fantastic winters with fluffy snow, and (usually) cool pleasant flowery springs. I can't say I like the summers. Summer and I don't get along, unless I'm at Honey Rock. Honey Rock is on average the right temperature for summer and there are these novel things called TREES! Trees happen to keep the worst of the sun off of my very sensitive skin. I have gotten a tan once. It happened to be the summer I spent all my time outside working at Honey Rock. I digress. I went on a Midwest choir tour in exchange for a quiet relaxing spring break. I did not have a choice in the matter. As my last choir tour was the stuff of nightmares, I was not excited for this one. There was only one thing that was the light at the end of the tunnel for me: The last stop. The last stop was home for me. My home church and a brief time with my family. This thought kept me going as I began preparations to depart. To explain, my previous experience with Wheaton College choir tour was out to Colorado and back. I was a freshman, still trying to get a handle on how college worked and where I fit in it. (Heck, I'm STILL trying to get a hang of it. And doing pretty badly.) Despite this I had been on choir tour in high school and it had mostly been pretty fun. (An introvert basically living on a bus full of people for a week never REALLY ends well, but there are various levels of coping.) That freshman year tour was the thing of nightmares for me. By the end I was sick in almost any way you could think up: physically, mentally, and emotionally. So you can imagine I was not absolutely thrilled with the idea of this one.
Long story short, it wasn't as bad as I was anticipating. It still was not and will never be my number one choice for a week off, but I survived. I made sure I was staying with girls I got along well with (when I could), I obtained a seatmate who has interests in common with me (this is hard for me to find in chorale), and I brought my iPod this time! (My iPod was stolen a week before we left and I had not had time to obtain a new one.) The girls in chorale I had previously been on less than fantastic terms with before tour didn't drive me up the wall as usual. I got a half decent amount of sleep (only half), struck up a friendship with our bus driver, and I did not get ill! However, tour has still left me more tired than before I had left, and left me to recover with school crashing down around me at the same time.
Today, I go home. For three whole days. Still not even close to a substantial amount of time, but more than anything since winter break. I get to sleep in my own bed, play with my dog, eat my mom's fantastic cooking, and maybe finally relax a little. Maybe. Have a very blessed Easter everyone!

I'm writing for fun!

So I haven't written anything in awhile. My schedule has reached overwhelming and I've had some as of yet unexplainable health problems. (For those interested, recently when performing anything that could be called physical activity, including singing in choir is leaving me light-headed, dizzy, overheated, and short of breathe. Three visits to the health center including blood work has yet to figure out what's going on.) However, I do still want to try and keep up this blog as writing has become my current mode of artistic expression for fun. I should be careful in saying that, because art was my previous mode of artistic expression just for fun, and it has since consumed my life, not necessarily in a way I am finding enjoyable. Such that it is at this moment however, I've gotten back into writing for fun. I haven't really written for fun since high school when I did an inordinate amount of text role-playing with my group of friends. This was a really great way for me to write, because I was not solely responsible for the plot, and with everyone playing a different character always kept things fresh and fun. Most of the writing I did by myself during this time still usually centered around these characters. This probably sounds pretty nerdy, and it really was, but it was nerdy in such a way to inspire our imaginations and fostered our little community of intelligent nerds. The one downside to this was I never really developed the ability to write without the heavy influence of others, the end result being most all of my writing for fun abruptly stopped when I got to high school.
All that changed when I decided to write a blog. I kind of resisted the idea of writing a blog for awhile for a variety of reasons. The biggest one being could I maintain this over a significant period of time. I've started a variety of diaries and journals over the course of my life and I'll start out going pretty strong, and then it kind of peters off. Usually pretty fast. I've managed to keep this going for a couple months, but obviously, I just had an entire month where I didn't post anything. So this is a work in progress for me. Despite this, it has been encouraging to see that at least as page views go, it looks like people are actually reading this blog, which is really affirming for me as a fledgling writer. Because of this, and because I do wish to become a better writer in more than just a school setting I'm going to persevere and keep trying to post something on a semi-regular basis.
Now, to the reason I began this particular entry. I have recently begun writing a story. Despite my friend Melody's urgings, I have not yet started writing a story in my imaginary library I blogged about in the past. I created it as a perfect place in my mind, and am therefore having a hard time coming up with a conflict that would be appropriate to write a story around. Instead my story's origins are a bit more complicated. Also in a precious blog I mentioned that I had played Dungeons and Dragons for the first time with a group of my friends from high school. I created a ranger and my friend Shannon created a rogue. We decided they were to be sisters. I created the character, we played a game, and unfortunately I haven't been able to do anything  with Dungeons and Dragons since. Despite this one night I had a dream that was based in a science fiction sort of universe prominently featuring two sisters. It wasn't a coherent story, just a couple of scenes, but I woke up wanting to know more about this world and these sisters. Future reflection on this dream showed a close similarity between these sisters and Shannon and my characters (the ranger and the rogue). I wrote all this down and went on with life.
Then my friend Rachael told me this idea she had for a world, a floating city. She had all the science figured out, she just wanted me to draw a picture of it. I took some notes, doodled a little, then also set it aside for later. However, all these ideas would come crashing into each other soon enough.
Cue class I'm having problems focusing in. I decide to do something with this idea I have put by the wayside. I scribbled the beginnings of a story in my notebook, and got excited about it. Despite the fact my friends were not directly effecting the process, they're influence was huge. One had created the entire basis for the world I was using. The other supplied half of my main characters (at least so far).
This weekend I managed to make it home for a day, and Shannon was home as well (this is a minor miracle really). Well, we got on my laptop and decided to Skype Rachael. Turns out, all three of us are writing stories and we all exchanged stories and read the others. It was so much fun! You could tell that all three of us have been reading the same fantasy books for a very long time. While all three of our stories might be very different content wise, all of them sounded pretty similar in writing style. The best part was we could exchange ideas and give advice on what was already written. It definitely inspired me to keep writing my story, and I hope these women can keep me accountable to keep me writing.