2017: Unregrettable #CGforever

I look back on 2016 with many regrets.

I regret that I didn't brush and floss my teeth every day, I regret that I didn't go to the gym (like, ever), I regret staying up late. The list could go on for a painfully long time.

Needless to say, there are hundreds upon hundreds of things I would love to change and improve upon and alter in this new year. 2017 sounds weird in my mouth, it sounds unfamiliar and a bit fuzzy and vague. 2016, I felt excited about 2016, but I've been humbled a lot and now I look at the future with numb apprehension. What if this is another year of mistakes and regrets? What if 2017 is going to be even more painful?

I am entirely inexperienced when it comes to dealing with losing a loved one. Both of my grandparents are alive, as are all of my aunts and uncles. Death is a bit of an obscurity to me. I'm not saying I haven't dealt with the sadness of losing someone, but I have not been felt the true grief that accompanies the loss of a loved one.

But on June 10th of 2016, I've never felt more grief in my entire life, all completely for someone I have never even met.

Christina Grimmie was born in New Jersey in March of 1994. She is the second of two children. I know nothing about her childhood, only that she loved her family, her two best friends, Jesus, video games, and music. She was incredibly talented with music and it's what some would call a gift. On July 19th, 2009, Christina Grimmie posted her first YouTube video under the channel name of zeldaxlove64. She sang "Don't Wanna Be Torn" by Hannah Montana with a Sonic the Hedgehog poster in the background. This gives a small idea of the kind of person Christina was. Fast Forward a few years, and Christina Grimmie had formed a faithfully loyal following, christened Team Grimmie. I discovered her in 2011, with the release of her EP "Find Me," and like how every fan will begin their tale, "I was drawn to her instantly."

Christina currently has 227 videos and 3,829,606 subscribers. She competed in the sixth season of The Voice and placed in third. She has toured with Selena Gomez, collaborated with multiple artists, released two EPS and one album, and debuted in 2016's film, The Matchbreaker. She made a name for herself and become an inspiration to young adults and teenagers across the globe.

Christina Grimmie became somewhat of an obsession for me. I religiously watched her videos from then on and supported her in her endeavors. There was no other artist out there that I had related to so deeply. She was a devout Christian, and a firm believer in Christ, but she was also a total nerd. Her favourite video game  was Zelda and her favourite movie was Lord of the Rings. How could I not love this girl? Being only a few years older than me, I clung onto her like an online older sister. I styled her hair like her, I bought bright neon green headphones just like hers (I'm on my third pair right now) and I memorized every word to her Above All That Is Random songs.

She treated her fans like family, we had a hand sign (\l/ Rawwk fingers \I/), and Christina never called us fans, but frands. We were her fan friends. She never seemed to be down and her music, whether it was original or a cover, filled my soul with something so joyous and uplifting. I felt like I knew her even when I knew nothing about her. I had made a goal to meet her one day, to see her sing live on stage and sing her songs with her and I had dreamed to tell her just how much she inspired me to be the person I am.

You can already tell this story is not going to end well.

On June 10th of 2016, Christina Grimmie was shot and killed after a live show. She was meeting her fans when the shooter faced her and shot her. The shooter was seized by her brother, Mark, before anyone else was hurt, but for Christina, it was too late.

For a moment, my life crumbled when I heard the news. How could someone who was so pure, so inspiring, so good be given this destiny? Why, after all of the hard work she has done, after all of the good and wonderful accomplishments did it have to end like this? How was this fair, when she was so young? How was it okay to say goodbye to someone who was such an example to me.

Her death has haunted me for the past seven months. I still am seized with an incomprehensible sense of sadness that I can't control whenever I see her or hear her voice. She never met me and I never met her, but somehow her life was branded onto my soul and I won't ever forget her. Her songs are her legacy, and they sound so different to me, they mean something different now that she is gone.

A lot of terrible things happened in 2016 following and preceding Christina's death; many tragic things. Most did not happen to me directly, but it does not mean it did not affect me, or the world for that matter. I think we can all say that looking at 2016, we won't miss it too much. We won't miss all of the death, the tragedies, the lack of empathy, the politics, the contention and war. There is so much more to come, I know, but I hope that it comes a bit more gracefully from now on.

With Christina's passing, the concept of time and just how short our lives can be has plagued my nightmares. How much time do I have left on this world? And am I spending it wisely?

It's possible that Christina may have had some regrets, but I believe that it is more likely that she would say that her life was unregrettable. She fulfilled a dream of inspiring people while never lowering her standards or defacing her Christ and Savior. She created music and with that came her virtual inernet family. She even fell in love. She touched millions of lives, traveled the world, and had an amazing family. For someone so young, she still did so much, and had so little to be regretful of.

 For 2017, and possibly for my life I've made it a goal to make every day unregrettable. It's sort of like making every day unforgettable, but just with a bit more heart behind it, at least for me. I don't want my life to be cut short and realize that I didn't do anything to make a difference for myself or for others. I don't want my life story to be Kenra: the girl who started, but never finished. I want it to be Kenra: the girl with no regrets because she didn't stop trying.

2017 is going to be less about goals (although I do have them) and more about action, more about just going out and doing. Rather than thinking positively, act positively. It's turning dreams into reality. It's conquering the barricades that are in my way. It's living fearlessly and courageously. If Christina Grimmie could die with no regrets, I can certainly live with no regrets.

I dedicate 2017 to Christina and her legacy and I hold onto her values and her music to step towards the future. To her family and closely loved ones, I pray for you every day, and I love you for helping Christina to be the person she is, especially all of the Grimmie family. I know that Christina is in a much greater place now and where she is there is no pain, no tragedy or sorrow. She is ascended to a much more loving place, a paradise where her music can shake the heavenly rafters. I'm pretty sure that she is doing much better than everyone here on this world combined. She is with her Savior, where her heart has always been. You Rawwk Christina, I may not have met you in this life, but I know I will in the next.

And 2017, I'm ready for you, whatever may come, I don't plan to regret it.

Photo: christinagrimmie.com

To learn more about Christina check out her website and her channel.

I Want to Be a Writer

I want to be a writer.

I love the silence that writing has. When all you hear is the scraping of pen on paper or the clicking of the keyboard. And nothing else. Nothing but that.

But writing is also one of the loudest things I do.

My mind is a giant cacophny of noise and thoughts that I literally cannot control. My mind is chaotic and a giant labyrinth that I am constantly lost in and trying to make sense of. I know it sounds, unpleasant, but if you compare it to Jim Henson's Labyrinth, it's actually quite breathtaking.

Until you do become hopelessly lost in the strings that you've tangled yourself up in.

I can't say that I'm actually very good at writing. In fact, I'm a rather rubbish writer.

Somebody else could write this a whole lot better than I could. Somebody else could make my characters become three dimensional better than me. I'm not gifted to write, it doesn't come as naturally as it does for others. My writing takes work.

I hope that one day I can open up one of my stories and look at my words and realize their worth. I wish I could spot the diamonds in the rough, the phrases that sparkle and make me feel something.

There are times where I avoid writing because I believe the story is too good to be tainted by my inadequate skills. These characters too good, the world too exquisite. If I place my fingers on that keyboard and begin, it will never be as good as I hope it will be.

Somebody can do it so much better.

It drives me insane to feel this way because I need to write to survive. My soul, my heart, and my mind live off of words, the creating of phrases and thoughts that pierce the mind and make you pause for thought. My mind yearns for the beautiful word, the carefully crafted tale.

I wish I knew how others do it. How did Dickinson, Dickens, and Austen write the foundation of classical literature? How did Tolkien, Lewis and Burroughs create the forge the begining of fantastical literature? How does Rowling, Martin and Riordan sustain that expectation? How do they do it? I want to make my words fly off of the page and become real inside someone's head. I want to make someone feel something. I want a phrase of my story to be written on a scratch piece of paper when they need those words for strength. I want my words to inspire and lift, to restore hope in a younger reader's mind. I want to create something that makes people feel, makes people think.

I could be doing it now, but I don't know. I don't know where my value is when it comes to writing.

I feel frustrated, I feel incompetent. I wish I could be better. I wish I could feel like my words are crisp, strong, powerful and emphatic rather than under-cooked and soft, without any flavor or vibrancy.

I want to be a writer. I want people to see my worlds and see them like they are home. Because to me, my stories are home. I have created a haven I can escape to when I write. In that world, there are characters and creatures who know me better than I and are waiting to be crafted and molded under my direction. They wait so patiently for me to be ready. My world is far too good to me, far too patient.

I want to be writer, but do not know yet if I have earned such a title.

It's Worth It

Whenever I tell someone that I plan to write 50,000 words in 30 days, I always get the same sentiment, "Are you insane?"

Sometimes I wonder the same thing. This year especially.

It's odd to think that I've been doing this since 2011. I remember the first time that I ever did it. I was in ninth grade, still rather poor in my writing, and far too timid to share anything I wrote. I wrote a story based off of my imaginary friend when I was little. Her name is Stacey and she's a sage, a magic-user. She has a twin sister (then named Roxy) who's a total punk-runker and they embark on all sorts of dangerous missions together and save the galaxy. Because saving the the world was far too small  and humble for fifteen year old Kenra.

Looking back at those first 50,000 words I had ever dedicated for NaNoWriMo, I feel a mixture of pride and the urge to cringe at just how bad  it was. There was an entire 2,000 words dedicated to a princess slumber party that had nothing to do with the plot-line. But it was something to fill in the gaps while I waited for inspiration to come back from their lunch break.

Since then I have learned that no NaNoWriMo is the same. No writing experience will ever be the same and every story requires a different writing muscle to make the words mesh well. Writing an entire novel is never easy, and a rather thankless job, and slightly insane, but it is entirely worth it.

With the four and a half novels that I have written for NaNoWriMo I have written a total of 213,660 words. It's a bit surreal to think that each and every single one of those words was written and arranged by me. It wasn't procured by chance or magic. It comes about by practicing habitual writing, by staying up late nearly every night to reach the word goal for the day. It comes from writing about princess parties because you can think of nothing else to write about. It comes from true grit and dedication.

This year's NaNoWriMo has definitely been one of the hardest. As I get older I become more and more unsatisfied with the place that I am at in my writing. I create doubts and a poor judgement about what kind of writer and even what kind of person I am. This year, as you already knew, was difficult just to even convince myself to begin. I didn't think I could be good enough to write another 50,000 words. But with help from my best friend, I was able to get NaNoWriMo rolling.

A week into NaNoWriMo, that inspiration bit the dust pretty quick. I began to feel so exhausted of trying to do something that my heart just wasn't into. The prompts that my friend and I had planned were great and excellent prompts, but they did not inspire me to create a brand new story. At the end of the week, my friend and I traded ideas for the stories we had written. My friend was so enthusiastic about every story she had written, talking about how they would all make great novels someday. She shared excerpts and ideas with me and I was eager to be excited for her, but then reluctant to share my own stories. There was nothing good about them.

I was already sick of coming up with a brand new cast of characters each day only to write 2,000 words of their story. It's likely that I will never finish any of these character's stories, simply because I didn't care enough about them to begin with. At that point, I was ready to just delete the file and call it quits.

It took a very late night phone call with my brother for me to realize that I was doing this entirely wrong.

The quality and style of someone's writing should never be compared, competed or clashed with another's writing style. The motivation to write should never be to become as good as this person, to be at this reading level, to beat this person at the word goal. It should never be a tool that competes against another. And for the past week, that was exactly what I had done for the past two months. I had placed my writing next to that of  Tolkien, Rowling and countless other published and successful authors and found my works to be worth nothing. I even read through my friend's stories and found the faults in my stories next to hers. I had made it my goal to be better than them, all of them, and found that the order was too tall for me to ever manage in 30 days, or ever.

If you want to succeed in writing, you need to practice writing for yourself first. The story begins with you, the story is created by you. There is no one more important than you when you're story is involved. Write how you want to write, and don't try to make it better or as good as somebody else's. If you must compete, compete with yourself.

Once I figured that out, the prompts became a bit easier to manage. I still didn't think they were my favourite method of writing and I was still sick of writing new characters, and a new plot-line each day, but I was at least writing for the right reason. It wasn't about being the next Tolkien, it wasn't about being as good as my friend (who truly is an amazing and incredibly talented writer) and it wasn't about making a masterpiece on the first try.

Around November 25th, I finally chose to stop the prompts and just write something for myself. When I did that, the story I wrote was incredible. The characters were easy to write, the setting was so clear in my head and the story unfolded like a pop-up book. I had been writing in black and white for the past sixteen days and suddenly there was color. Vibrant unabashedly neon colors that weaved through my words and danced before my visionary eyes. It was the most exhilarating moment to realize that I was capable of writing something that made me feel good. It suddenly became much easier to reach my daily word goal, and even going beyond and finishing my 50,000 words before the end of the month.

This advice may not apply to everyone. Some people may need a little competition to get their words on the page, but that wasn't for me. I needed to write for myself and find the words that seemed to have been hiding in the shadows of my mind. I still and probably will continue to struggle finding where my stories stand when it comes to whether they're good enough to be read by others, but at this point in my life, that doesn't matter. What matters is that I am enjoying what I'm doing. Someday, if I practice hard enough and never stop the habit of daily writing, maybe I will be as good as Tolkien. But I'm not expecting that result to happen anytime in the near future. Today, I'm going to be as good as me, Kenra Cook.

Of the 50,000 words I wrote, I am only proud of around 8,000 words of it. Some could consider that a failure, but I see that as a victory. Writing has and never will be an easy thing for me to do. Time and self-doubts try to choke what little inspiration I have each day. It's a battle to commit to writing, especially when people are out doing normal sociable things that seem super fun. But it is so worth it. It's worth it to me for those 8,000 words I wrote. It's worth it because I love it.

I hope for those that read this, that they can find something that they love to do. God has given each of us a talent. I am so grateful for the gifts that I have been given, and I intend to show that gratitude by writing as much as I can in this lifetime.

Thank you for your support and all of you're kind words that encourage me through every chapter of my life and through the chapters of my character's life. Your kindness does not go unnoticed.

If you'd like a preview of some of this year's NaNoWriMo, click here. I hope some day Naomi Scott can rock the world.

NaNoWriMo Day 2

Words Written: 4,071
Feeling: Depressed

This is the first time ever in my NaNoWriMo experience that I have ever felt this defeated before; and never have I felt the urge so strongly to delete what I wrote and just give up. I had a lot of goals and dream, a lot of optimism and hope, but not anymore. What I have written is worse than I could imagine, and I'm disappointed and downtrodden.

Is this even worth it? Is it worth it to put forth so much effort to get nothing in return? Is it worth it to know that in the end you'll just be embarrassed and ashamed by what you write?

I don't feel like a writer right now. I feel like a failure and I want to give up.

Even when I have been on the last week of NaNoWriMo with 6,000 words behind schedule, I still had the confidence and the willpower to keep writing. It's day two and I don't have either. I feel like I'm wasting my time. I'm not going to get better and I'm not going to impress anyone. It doesn't help that when I try to share a piece of my work, I get no response. Did you know I'm still waiting for that critique I mentioned in my blog post late September?

I won't give up yet. It's too early to stop when I've only just begun. I just hope tomorrow is a better day.

50,000...maybe coming soon...

NaNoWriMo 2016: Change is Scary

I hate how quickly inspiration fizzles out. I had so many plans this October for my blog and only completed one of them. On the bright side, November is here, it's a brand new month and a brand new day.

With November comes exciting times. For anyone that has known me for the past five years, you know that November is one of my favourite months of the year for one very big reason: NaNoWriMo!

Every year I dedicate myself to one story and write until ridiculous hours of the night to complete my goal. It's been nearly successful every year (except one) and I have so much fun juggling life and writing in such a squashed amount of time. It really keeps my on my toes.

The unfortunate thing about the past four years is this: none of the novels I have began are finished. After I reach 50,000 words I come to a stand-still and my creative juices run off the edge of a cliff. I reached the dead end and could go no further.

Upon discovering this I decided to study those four stories and then became crushingly depressed when I noticed that not one of my stories were different. They all fell under this trope of a high school/college girl getting swept up in a fantastical/mystical adventure. There was the quirky best friend, the sickeningly handsome love interest, and some sort of magical force directing my main character to her destiny.

When I found this connection I lost all hope in my skills as a writer. I would become that author they talk about where, "When you've read one, you've read them all." As an aspiring author, the worst insult I think I can get is hearing that my stories are too similar to read. To make it worse, I delved into all of my scribbled writings - the ones that aren't novels, but just loose ideas and concepts - and saw the same pattern. Magical girl, magical boy, touch of romance, not nearly enough peril or reality in it.

I was debating not doing NaNoWriMo this year because this realization had hit me rather hard. After a late night conversation with one of my friends, she had convinced me not to give up. We discussed the next day and decided to change this year's NaNoWriMo a bit. Neither of us were quite ready to commit to a full length novel with a brand new cast of characters and a plot line; so we created an alternative.

For NaNoWriMo 2016, we've given ourselves 27 story prompts of various genres. Each day, we pick a prompt and we write at least 2,000 based off of that prompt. We gave ourselves three cheat days where we can write whatever we want, so if I wanted to, I can work on a previous novel and get a few things tweaked and ironed out. Picking out the prompts was a journey and really hard because I naturally would pick the magical themed prompts and my friend would try to pick something outside my comfort zone. I felt like a rotten child whining about how I didn't like the prompts but in the end, she won and I have a lot of interesting prompts that I am honestly so frightened of.

So National Novel Writing Month is going to be an interesting year. I hope that this year is as successful as I hope it is. I have a big goal and a dream to improve my skills. October was one of the hardest and worst months of this year because I wasn't able to write anything and I had suddenly lost all confidence in my work which led me to lose hope in myself and in my dreams. My hope is that NaNoWriMo will help me get back up on my feet and regain that confidence and that I can become better.

50,000 words...coming soon...