I'm so bad at this

Well, guys, it's that time of year again.

IT'S ANOTHER RETURN FROM MONTHS OF A HIATUS, YAY.

Don't get too excited, I'll be gone in maybe three weeks. I'm here for myself more than anything else at the moment. And for anyone who's reading this I guess. And it's basically to tell you that actually, I won't be gone after three weeks, because...I'm going, now.

I've denied this blog a proper goodbye for far too long. I have never admitted that I actually haven't played Wizard101 or even attempted to write fanfic in months. So this is probably going to be the last post here, unless something particularly exciting happens.

BUT (and oh yes, there is a big but)

This is not the end! Oh no, fellow wizards, who have seen TDD through its sequence of hiatuses spanning the past two/three years. I'm abandoning this blog, but not the Internet itself!

You can find me... here:

thatonestormkid.tumblr.com

I KNOW. I KNOW I SAID I WOULDN'T MOVE TO TUMBLR, but I figure that since I spend so much time on tumblr anyway nowadays... I'll probably be more inclined to update, and therefore play!

And, since it's christmas, I will be posting there every day during the Christmas holidays, which, for me, start on Friday. So you can look forward to that if you care!! :) I'll be blogging about my progress of my new character, who I'll be aiming to get to lvl 50 over the course of the holiday. Which is crazy, I know. But I do love a challenge.

Wait, new character?

Now, you see, there's one more thing. I think one of the main reasons I haven't been able to advance much in W101 is because of time differences. Whenever I was on, there was never anyone around, which kinda sucked, and made it boring. I never made any in-game friends, or at least not for very long, because I was never on at the same time, yadda yadda yadda. Anyway, point is... you know there are versions out for different countries, and have been for a while?

Well, let's just say those gift cards in Sainsbury's will be a forbidden temptation no more.

(I'm starting afresh on a uk account with a new character. But not to worry american friends who may or may not want to meet up in game some time ever. I'm never deleting my original Alex account.)




Anyway, I think that's it. You know where to find me. Email's still up.


See ya in the spiral, guys. It's been a heckhound of a ride. ;)


for the last time, here:
Diviner OUT!

"and then I went away for a week."

I wrote like three lines of a post explaining that I was going to be kind of absent during this week and then I forgot to post it. Sorry guys. I went away for a week to go stay in a different city for work experience. (I know, possibly a bit unnecessary, but there aren't very many physics/chemistry/engineering places near where I live, and my placement was absolutely perfect, so I can't complain.)

So any of you here at the suggestion of the wonderful Emma, I apologise.

So yeah, I was going to write something before but Wimbledon happened and because I am a person in Britain this is a BIG DEAL™

Here are some of my summer plans:

I considered doing Camp NaNoWriMo this month. (I lost last year in case you didn't guess, and didn't try again in November because I am a lazy muppet.) However, I eventually decided against it because:
a) work experience
b) a ton of summer projects
c) I'm maybe going away on this camp thing for three weeks on the 14th of July and I won't have a laptop how am I going to live

And those things may have made it very difficult.

However, I am going to try to aim to write around 1000 words a day in new stories (when I'm at home. I'm no superhuman), as requested by the three wonderful people who did a little bit of voting on my poll (if you're reading this and you haven't voted yet... go do it!!). I'm probably going to start with W101 short stories featuring various characters and then later on in the summer move into a probably decent-length IRL AU with the characters we know and love (or mildly dislike in some cases) from TTOAS.

Anyway, for those of you who are interested, and to encourage me to actually follow through with these on the grounds that if I'm being observed I'm more likely to feel bad if I don't do them, these are some of the things I want to do this summer:

• Write a lot!
• Practice piano and saxophone a lot!
• Do extra maths work!
• Do extra history work!
• Become more politically aware!
• Plan sessions for the club I'm running next year!
• Read all the books on my summer reading list!
• Finish building the TARDIS I started last year!
• Index all the books I own!
• Clear out my bedroom!
• Keep a summer scrapbook!
• Draw and do art more!
• Use lots of exclamation marks!
• (Clearly!)

....annnnd I think I've bored you enough. More posts - and more importantly, more writing (and more noticeably more use of the word 'more') - are to come, but for now,

Diviner OUT!

HOLY HECKHOUNDS!!

So there I was a few days ago, preparing to dig out my old, somewhat dysfunctional blue Dell laptop that needs to be plugged in the whole time it's turned on...

And then this morning, I'm just checking the year's worth of 101 news I've missed, when I see this:

"So... that probably means Crossover doesn't it? I can't really afford a subscription to that..." I thought.

"But... Crossover was available ages ago! Surely they can't have two press releases about that..."

I clicked through.

Not long later...

AHFDGHKJYDGSGKHHFLSINIK NDIYBFKYWDUOXYUIOBWDW IOBGOIWAYDUIOB

I'm just so happy ^_____^

And now... And now...

Well, now I wait for all the game data to download...

-___-

BUT IT'S GOING TO BE WORTH IT OHMYGOSH I AM JUST SO HAPPY ABOUT THIS

I HAVE A FUNCTIONAL COMPUTER WITH W101 ON IT

MY HAPPINESS KNOWS NO BOUNDS RIGHT NOW

Okay, so. I'm going to go play. YAY. This may be my last month or so with a subscription... but I'm going to make the most of it!

Diviner OUT!

I think the majority of my posts are just comebacks from lengthy hiatuses.

(A quick warning before you start reading: this is probably going to be a bit of a personal ramble... it explains the hiatuses and looks at what might be happening in the future. If you want a brief summary of what's going down on The Divination Diaries, click through and scroll to the end of the post.)

Hey. My name is (sometimes) Alexandra Stormrider, and I, quite clearly, have commitment issues.

[Here is a masterlist of all my "I'm so sorry I haven't posted! :(" posts: one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen... and have a guest appearance from little bro Nat]

Good morning!

Right here, it's before 9am, which seems insanely early for the summer holidays in my opinion. However, I have allowed myself to fall drastically behind with my word count on Camp NaNo, and so, because I have no idea how to rectify this without going slightly insane, I will talk to my fellow blogging friends about it. :)

The problem: my word count is less than a third of what it should be.

The reason: I can attribute this to four things:

• The Olympics. It's kind of addictive. I didn't know I'd feel this involved! And yet I find myself following the athletics like... like... I can't even think of a good enough simile.
• My old laptop got fixed, and now I can play Wizard101 whenever I want!
• Writing fanfiction with some fairly important characters during the middle of a novel is actually quite difficult. Having to make sure all the conversations with the main characters are agreeing with what's actually in the book and that the characters aren't out of character... it's tough, man!
• I've been quite lazy.

The solution: write more, and quickly.

SO, I have decided that this weekend is going to be what is known in the NaNo business as a '10k weekend' which means word sprints, no social life, little sleep, and lots of insanity. That won't even bring my word count up to what it needs to be, so I'll still be writing at a furious pace after that. I'm really not focusing on quality any more, because it's not particularly good, or even accuracy - I can edit it later if I think it's good enough to grace the Internet. (probably not)

I may be keeping you updated with my progress, or I may be being sensible and using that time to write more. (...who am I kidding? Me? Sensible?)

Wish me luck!

Diviner OUT!

P.S. The good news, however, is that what I have done so far, upon being pasted into the 'I write like' text analyser...

I write like
J. K. Rowling

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

This post is in three parts:

Decision = made


I'm staying, guys.

YAY FOR DEMOCRACY.

So, this blog will (hopefully) remain active, and as of yet I have no plans to move to tumblr. To the five people who voted: thank you - I wasn't sure about it and staying here seems like a smarter move now I think of it.

Some things you might want to know


If anyone reading teh blog doesn't know yet - or doesn't regularly check the Ravenwood news section of the website - or keeps being redirected to the UK version which, for the record, is really annoying - here are two things:

1) You can get a free Brave hound because of the good work on sharing the Forbes article, by either heading through the July Ravenwood news or going straight to wizard101.com/promo/brave (which is likely to expire at some point soon so go go go).

2) Some of the hoard packs are now reduced by 50%! Spend your crowns wisely, wizards, and know a good bargain when you see one! NOTE: I'm pretty sure this ends today, so get a wriggle on, folks!

Wait hold on that's probably not going to happen now


Hold up. I just said this blog will remain active, didn't I?

Ah.

Well.

I might have... possibly... maybe... managed to... consider...

Camp NaNoWriMo.

I'm sure you can all remember the craziness I went through in November as I somehow pulled through to write 50,000 words in under a month, while still somehow managing a merit in my sax exam and full marks in a maths module.

But now a month lies ahead of me. A month of free time, british summer weather, Olympic-mania (seriously - if you don't live in the UK you have no idea how worked up everyone's getting about it. Every town I've visited in the past few days - and I went to chemistry camp 200 miles away - has had banners up. Mental.) and, now I've decided to do this, near insanity.

I know, I know. "But Alex! What about that story you started writing three years ago and still haven't finished?!" Well... It will be finished. I will finish it at some point. However... maybe not this month. I have been bubbling over with ideas recently, and I have been sitting on a ridiculous HP fanfiction idea for a long while... (No, really. There are wads of paper fluttering through my copy of Order of the Phoenix as we speak...) so Camp NaNoWriMo it is, for me!

If anyone else is interested in going completely insane next month (unlikely), leave a comment or email or something then we can be writing buddies and help each other a) write and b) become even more insane. Sounds like fun, no?

Nevertheless, I will try to keep this blog updated pretty frequently. I mean, I'm sure you'll want to see what I'm doing with the opportunity of half-price packs in the Crown store in front of me, right?

For now,
Diviner OUT!

So I was questing with Autumn...

(Autumn Willowbreeze is my life alt, an initiate, and a fairly important character in TTOAS).

...and trying to do the Library Dues quest, you know, where you have to practically redo every boss in wizard city to get all the books. (It's annoying.)

And I was just about to collect my "History of the School of Myth" book after defeating Akilles again, when I saw this.

Seriously? I go all that way and then it doesn't even tick off on my quest task list because it's the WRONG SCHOOL?! Seriously. Just... why?!

But while I was browsing that I found some other pictures I thought would be nice to look at so have these while I calm myself down after that infuriating experience.

Aw, I remember my krok days...

This was what I saw the other day when I finally tried to log in again. Ugh.

This is one of the first screencaps I ever took, when I was still with my original character, the infamous Blaze Thundershard. Well, perhaps infamous was the wrong word. How about... unfamous. That works.

That's all for now. I'm out tomorrow with a friend (gonna go see Spiderman oh yeah) and I'm going on a chemistry course from Monday to Wednesday, so I probably won't see you for a couple days. But keep on wizarding, or blogging, or anything, and I'll see ya in the Spiral! :D

Diviner OUT!

Random anecdote: I just tried to persuade an Archmage to take me to Avalon. He refused. I am now in a strop. Hmph.