Monthly Summary: January 2017

January was an okay month. Nothing super exciting happened and a good part of it was the continuation of my blog hiatus, but it was super nice to see some Southern snow!

So Your Character is From The Netherlands ... Featuring Arlette @ Arlette Writes

It's time for this month's So Your Character is From Another Country! This is a monthly or bimonthly segment where I interview lovely volunteers from around the world to give you a firsthand account of being a citizen of their respective country. I'm hoping to encourage international diversity, break stereotypes, and give writers a crash course on how to write a character from these different places on our planet. If you haven't checked out last week's So Your Character is From Germany ... be sure to hop on over there and give it a read!

My extent of knowledge about The Netherlands is that there are a lot of tulips and dikes, pedestrians don't have the right of way, it's very flat, and Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates is set there. I'm so happy to have come across Arlette who has far expanded my knowledge of this country. 

Let's welcome her!

Disclaimer: The content below may be culturally shocking to some. Each of these posts are as uncensored as possible to preserve the authenticity of the cultures of each of the interviewees.

(None of the Images are Mine)

You Deserve to Be Inspired Contest Entry: A Different Journey

Positive Writer is hosting a new contest called You Deserve to Be Inspired where the participants write a blog post with their inspirational story. For more details you can check out the post since the deadline isn't until March 1st! 

So Your Character has Depression ...

Usually I have a "featuring" in that blog title but today I'm not because the person who's being interview is well ... me. This is a really hard post for me to write, because it's a very personal issue and one I really struggled with last year in particular, but I'm hoping talking about it will be therapeutic.

Writing Lessons from Video Games: Skyrim on Worldbuilding

The Elderscrolls: Skyrim is one of my favorite video games. It has nearly limitless gameplay with hundreds of quests, beautiful landscape, a moving score, and even the power to change the fate of your character. For those of you who don't know the game is set in the fictional world of Tamriel specifically in the country of Skyrim. Your character is the dragonborn destined to stop dragons from once again ruling the earth. The most impressive part of this game has to be the worldbuilding. It's extremely intricate, rivaling Tolkien even. Many of the details aren't even scratched in many novels I've read. There's a lot to cover in this post, but I'll try to be as concise, but thorough as I can.

Beautiful Books: 2017 Writing Goals

It's the first post of 2017! I'm back, guys! I hoped to do this post in December, but since the link-up didn't happen I'm doing it now. XD You can check out Beautiful Books #1 and Book Beautiful Books #2 and this post will have way more context. If you'd like to participate hop on over to Paper Fury and Further Up and Further In!