Fraility

How fragile humans are.

I woke up Wednesday morning with a vague pain that steadily increased throughout the day until I could barely breathe through my chest by 3am.
On Friday I went back to the hospital for a second time, to find out that at some point in my sleep Tuesday night I must have twisted wrong in order to have strained my chest wall, explaining the debilitating pain and inability to inhale...It's Monday and I'm still having dim pain.

It made me think about all the things you can do as a human to injure or kill yourself without ever meaning to. How fragile a species to be capable of giving itself great pain by moving the wrong way unconsciously; you can sprain your wrist by sleeping the wrong way, if you sneeze, hiccup, and burp at the same time there's word you can make your heart explode, if for any reason at all your heart loses its pace you can hemorrhage.
A little bit of air injected into the veins can kill you, being cut with a rusted instrument can also kill you, and so many other accidents can befall a human being and take them out.

It's just a little worrisome to think about; that I could walk out the door right now, trip over the curb, and if I hit right there just might be a chance of killing me, if not doing severe damage.

How sobering.

Critique: I Am Legend

It took some time to finish, but I did, and it definitely wasn't what I was expecting, especially the ending. I won't give that away though, that'd be wrong.

As a reader:
It was a little too slow at times for me, I found it hard to keep reading; there were a lot of times when I had to read in short bursts. But it was mildly interesting; I'm curious to see the movie to see what differences there are between them.

As a writer:
I'm slowly starting to recognize and understand the importance of variety in sentence structure, it makes for a better read all around. I have yet to get better at it though.
The variety in this story gave it a more formal read, made it feel more developed and whole. Detail, which I'm learning to use more of, also helped it feel whole; when I think of it, I see the comparison between lack of detail and a complete work as a skeleton vs. the human body complete with flesh muscle, etc. It helps.
I'm also starting to recognize pacing. I've read in many different places that alternating between slow pacing and quick is a good idea to keep the action parts moving, and the downtime between as a place for readers to catch their breath and take in what they've learned. The use of shorter sentences and less detail helps speed up the pace of a scene, while more detail and longer sentences slows it down.

I don't know when then next critique will be, I have to find another book I'm interested in reading, and that could take awhile.

Come In Character

Through Nathan Bransford's blog I found another interesting resource called Come In Character. It's a place where you can answer posts as a character from your work. It's helping me develop my characters and at the same time its interesting to read responses from other characters.

That's pretty much what I've been doing lately; while I can't find the motivation to write or do much else (a personal issue I'm still working on), I've been keeping up with this blog to the best of my ability.

Nothing New...

As the title says, nothing new has really happened to me these past few days, save for figuring out what I want to do for my birthday; a first for me in many years.
I've been sick these past few days - and still are - so I haven't done much reading or writing thanks to the terrible migraines; I did learn that jogging or power-walking while sick isn't such a good idea, and multivitamins come in chewy for people over the age of ten which is a relief.
Hopefully I'll be well again by Monday so I can do my reading and maybe, just maybe, get some writing done on something. The other two WIP are feeling lonely.