I always found the stories of a chld who had to take care of other children because a parent was absent. I understood alcholics, druggies and occasionally, the death of another spouse.

What I couldn't understand was workaholics.

Why couldn't they let things go from their job so that they could spend time with their kids? When did it become more important to have a job than to love and cherish your children?

In recent experiences, I have learned not only what it truly means to be a workaholic, but also how it affects the kids. They are forced to grow up way too soon. They are the ones picking up perscriptions, dropping off the library books, making dinner and school. And those are the ones who are only children or have older siblings away.

It's even worse for those with younger siblings. They not only have the responsibilities dropped of errands and dinner but the actual job of parenting. It's a huge task to ask of anyone - and its ginormous for a teenager who doesn't have the choice or the option to say no.

It all makes sense - and I may now be able to write about it. But that doesn't mean I wanted those experiences for anyone.

What experiences have made it easier for you to write about but you never wish on anyone?

I am working on making my novel ready for querying sometime this summer. It needs about 10-30K more added to it which brings me to a curious question.

What's the difference between editing and rewriting? Opinions? Go ahead, post them. I'm curious as to your answer.

I think editing is the final tweaking - grammatical errors, spelling errors and realizing that your character changes eye color five times in the course of a 75,000 word novel. It's definitely an important step but it is not the first one.

I made that mistake with my first novel, Her Testament to Life, (which I'm currently rewriting). I edited first and then decided to rewrite. Basically I wasted a revision on my own stupidity. I suppose that's how it goes with writing. You learn after the fact.

Rewriting, I believe, is more substance. It's retooling scenes, characters, places. Fleshing out the novel if it needs it and then, when all the actual substance is there, then you can go and do the actual editing process.

It's suppose to be fifty on Monday. That's bikini weather in Iowa right now. And while I've probably all got people imagining pasty white Iowans running around in skimpy swimsuits, I am going to try and divert attention to my completed goals for the month.

My goal was to write 27,083 words. I wrote 27,093. And the last about 900 words of that was at 8:30 at night when I really should have been getting ready for school the next day.

What did my February writing include? This is a list - though not very detailed.

-Additions to Her Testament to Life
- The SOS scene
- Typing journal entries - both in the Keep Life Simple journal and the Pink Bird one.
- Portfolio work (Almost 10K total for the year.)
- 4 blog posts
- 2 co-written subplots
- The very beginning of a West Wing fanfiction
- 2 scholarship essays
- Annotated Bibliography and History Day paper (on Jane Austen)
- Public Address and Oratory for IHSSA Competition
- Sociology research and the beginnings of a paper
- 2 school pen pal letters
- 5 poems

Now that's a lot of writing. But it is also a lot of not writing. All but about 1600 words was not on novels. Granted, my school words have to be written no matter what happens. And WriYe counts them as words, so I count them too.

My portfolio needs things to show how I've improved and the journals are so I don't have to carry five pounds of journals with me wherever I move. Both of these last two things are part of my goals for the 2010 year.

But I also have a bigger goal. I want to start querying my first novel, Her Testament to Life before the end of the year. But first I have to get it to length and then go back and re-edit it. At the pace I'm going, it's going to take me over 407 days just to get the novel to length. Then there's editing.

So, this month, my goal is editing and I want the majority of my words (51% or higher) to be on either Her Testament to Life or Ruined Emotions, both of which are novels.

Here's to hoping this works because my novel desparately needs more meat to it.

According to my handy-dandy calculator, I am 11% done with the scenes I need to add to my novel, Her Testament to Life, to make it the 65,000 words I have been told Young Adult novels should be.

I'm having fun making these new scenes - so far I've written 3 new scenes and one extended, rewritten scene.

New Scenes:
- "The SOS Scene"
Amy and Claudia argue about school - Nate picks Claudia up after an SOS text, promising her a night to let everything fade away. Movies, breakfast food, bowling and lots of dialogue to ensue. (This one isn't completely finished.)

- "The New Death Scene"
Claudia with Nate just before she dies - making him promise to continue working at the clinic in her place.

- "The Confrontation Scene"
Former best friend, turned slight back-stabber, Anna, comes to visit Claudia to apologize. Mostly Claudia argues while Anna feels guilty.

Extended Scenes

- "The Telling the Friends Scene"
Claudia tells her two best friends, Anna and Cira, that she has leukemia - at a football game. Retaliation by Anna happens shortly after.

At first I was unsure of what I needed to add to my novel, but now I'm realizing just how much backstory and *real* story I need to add. I'm not sure how long it's going to take me to finish all the scenes and then put them in their places (right now they're in a file titled "Additions") but I think I like taking it slow. I think it'll turn out a better end product.

In my college Humanities class we decided to get away from non-fiction and spend a week on poetry. In came the poetry bug.

However, I didn't want to kill the bug with just any old free-verse poetry (what I used to write as a sixth grader with very little knowledge of poetry.) So, I visited Shadow Poetry to see what types of poems were out there. I wanted to stay away from types I knew - so cinquain, free-verse, monorhyme and a few others were out. Haiku was briefly considered before given up.

I chose five different types since that seemed like a good number at the time. I chose, Ethereee, Naani, Ghazal, Laturne, and Quinzaine. Most were syllabic (lines based on the number of syllables in the words) but one - my favorite, I've decided - Ghazal, uses a specific reptition pattern.

So to make this a little less complex...

Ethereee: A poem consisting of ten lines where the lines go 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 syllables. There are inverses of these which go 10,9,8 etc, but I stuck with the original. My version was on friendship.

Nanni: A quartet (four line stanza) generally consisting of 20-25 lines total. This one I wrote on courage.

Ghazal: A poem with the rhyming scheme: AA bA cA dA eA

(Ex: La de da de do
He he ha ha do

Le loo mee ma me
to le te do)

I wrote this one on writing - using the repeating word shh!

Lanturne: A five-line verse with the syllables like this:
One
Two
Three
Four
One

This one was on lying.

Quinzaine: A poem where the first line is 7 syllables and makes a statement, the second line is 5 syllables, the third line is 3 syllables and both the second and third line ask questions about the first.
This one was on a gorgeous morning.

I might post them later - we'll see how it goes.

On a writing site I am on, Stringing Words, a friend recommended creating something I'm going to call a platform. It is using social networking and blogging sites to get information out there about your writing, your newest project. Because when you're active in the blogging/Tweeting/Facebook-ing world, then people notice you. And when people start to notice you, then, at least in my opinion, there will be good things to come from that.

So, having very little experience in publishing but quite a bit of experience in Social Networking (I am a teenager after all!), I decided to start my own platform. Nothing spectacular, just something that might attract someone who wants to be a beta reader, or crossing my fingers I ever get published, a buying reader.

So my Twitter account Ann_Abney, now has been devoted to writing and reading related posts. And I'm making a commitment to post on it at least once a day (provided I have internet access). My blog will become more writing centered as I go on and again, I'm making a commitment to post on it once a week.

Now, am I putting the cart before the horse? Probably. But I think that getting people interested in your writing should come before publishing. Because if you have people interested in that next chapter, you're more likely to write it, and write it well. And sometimes, as I've found, the beauty of writing and its complements comes not from an offer from a publisher, but from the normal person who says, "Keep up the good work. I like how you wrote this."

I have been occasionally re-examining my 2008 NaNoWriMo novel, Her Testament to Life, in hopes of getting it to the standard young adult novel length. Of course, that means I need to double it since it stands at a measly 32,000 words and I should be somewhere around 65,000. I've been at a loss for how to add depth and breadth to it...

Until now.

Sitting and working on my sociology project, I thought of a curious question, "What if Anna [my female main character's best friend] was furious at Claudia [my main character]? What would happen? And what if Claudia didn't tell her friends at a quiet coffee shop and instead told them at a football game where the entire school could find out. What happens if Anna can't deal with the cancer and so she spreads the truth about Claudia's condition? What would happen?

And enter in, my first ever sub-plot.

The sub-plot gives Anna, a previously very background character some depth and some nastiness to her. It allows her to take her own place in a cast that focuses almost exclusively on two people.

Knowing that I couldn't make a sub-plot last for 33,000 words, I got thinking about other characters. What about Mom? Katie, Cira (the other best friend), what about what Cira thinks of Anna's behavior? What about Claudia's sister, Amy? What about....

And so, knowing that I want more people to play a part in the novel, I feel I'll have a better chance of making the additions stronger and more meaningful than 33,000 words of descriptions, which, I believe, even Jane Austen couldn't do.