Star Date: January 20, 2014 Disappointment

My parents always taught me that if I don't succeed at something the first time I need to get up, brush the dirt off my knees and try again. That being said I've been working on a book trailer for something I'm not going to talk about (oh the suspense) and needed a blonde. I don't have many friends so originally I was going to lighten my hair to blonde. Three weeks of lemon juice, chamomile tea and cinnamon bark essential oil later my hair is still the same color as it was last month. So I decided to resort to hydrogen peroxide, which is supposed to work great. (If you try to bleach your hair with peroxide, only use a 3% mix. So 3 ounces of peroxide in ten ounces of water) My hair is still the same color. I realized that a few months ago (September/Octoberish) I dyed my hair with a mixture of henna and beet juice. The purplish color that the beet juice added has mostly faded/washed out/bleached away, and I used some grocery store bulk henna that wasn't very high quality but nonetheless it has at least protected my natural color through this journey.
SO, a wig is going to be used instead. I'm super disappointed that it didn't work, but thrilled to report this new finding: don't try to bleach your hair four/five months after using henna because it probably won't work (especially if your hair is already reddish).

End Transmission.

Star Date: January 11, 2014 Surgery

As I get closer and closer to being done with my current project, I thought that I should share with everybody how important it is to be able to hold a piece of paper in your hands and mark it up as you read. I thought I was done with my story and I was ready to be done with it. Then I realized that there was still a lot of editing to be done, the first half of the novel was written when I was ages 16-18 so it

wasn't bad, but it definitely wasn't ready to be printed. So
I used up 65 pages of printer paper and borrowed my dad's red pen and went at it. The changes in the story have been incredible. It's fluent and reads the way I think it should instead of sounding like a 16 year old venting pent up angst. These were a couple of my most marked up pages. i just wanted to remind any reader who is also a writer that the process is never done, and it is always a good idea to step back, put your editor hat on, and tear the piece up so you can sew it back together as a 2.0 instead of a beta. I use red pen because it is incredibly symbolic. I love making my work "bleed".