Vital Vocab 17

Hi, all.
This has quickly become mainly just a Vital Vocab blog.  I still love Anthony and will probably post about him (among other things), but I recently kinda just fell in love with Isaac as well, so that kid may take priority for a bit.
One more thing.  Do not try and relate this Eliza to the Eliza of months ago.  Her character's preet-ty dynamic at this point.
Gosh, I really shouldn't be posting this scene yet.

Prompt: --
Vocab: jubilant, lucid, latent, kudos, laconic
Commonly Confused Words: accept/except
Grammar Focus: use a semicolon to separate two independent clauses

Isaac Bade-
     I leaned against the counter, looking through the various bookmarks and flyers that sat in stacks around the library's ancient computer.  Behind me, the girls - who I'd determined were mostly Freshmen (hence my not knowing them) - gradually started to chatter again, being many things, but not laconic.  One of them mumbled something and the others all squeaked, suddenly jubilant, exchanging kudos.  I smiled to myself; it was quite lucid that were the library not empty, Ava never would have accepted them in.
     Empty, right.  That is, except...
     Someone came and stood next to me.  I looked up.  She was tall - taller than me, maybe - and had wavy auburn hair, shoulder-length.  She held a stack of tiny chapter books, The Spiderwick Chronicles.
     "Do you work here?" she asked, I guess because I was still flipping through the papers.  I just smiled and shook my head.
     "Oh hey, Eliza!" one of the girls behind me hissed, looking over at us.  "Eliza, c'mere."  She looked up but waved them off, holding up her books for them to see.
     "I wonder if they know they're in a library."  She - Eliza - laughed quietly.  "Usually they'll quiet down, but they're not even trying today."
     "Eliza."
     "Shush!  Okay anyways, I actually wanted to ask you something.  I mean, I think I've seen you before, like, around town, so I was just wondering, like.  Like.  What's your name?"  
     I looked up and smiled at her.
     "Eliza, hey!"
     I opened my mouth, then closed it, rubbing my neck apologetically.
     "What is it?" she asked.  
     "Elizaaaaaa."
     "What?  Is there, like, something behind me?"  She turned in a circle, then looked back at me, confused.  I laughed a little, quietly, and looked over my shoulder as she stood on her toes and craned her neck.  Clearly, her friends now thought she had some latent quality for reading lips.
     "Seriously, wh-what is it?"  She looked back at me and I looked down at the counter, rubbing my nose and still laughing slightly.  Finally one of her friends, a girl I'd seen before but never really interacted with, came and pulled her a few feet away to whisper something in her ear.  
     She stood up straighter, and slowly turned to look at me.  "Oh..." she murmured.
     I turned around, hearing the door to the back room open again.  Ava stepped out and shrugged at me.  I gave Eliza one last smile before heading over to her.

UPDATE: I'm recently getting back on Tumblr!  I might not get into it immediately, but considering how addicting it can be, I'm sure I will soon.  For anyone who's curious, you can find me here.  I'm thinking of posting any art I do on there, particularly if it has to do with one of my stories or characters.

UPDATE 2: I was going to draw Isaac, but then I started reading this beautiful webcomic called Ava's Demon and those characters are just so fabulous and Isaac is just so constantly modified in my head that my brain kind of meddled them together.  (Unfortunately, it does this a lot.)  Which is why I can't draw people.  Sorry guys, I'll try again later.  But so I did draw you something.  Here.  :3

Vital Vocab 16 | Vital Vocab 18

Vital Vocab Dictionary

Vital Vocab 6

Prompt: --
Vocab (underlined): compelling, criteria, coherent, concede, contradict
Grammar Focus: to/too/two, properly use a colon

Eliza Benjamin-
     A few days later, I caught myself staring out the window again.  This was a habit of mine, and I mean, no big deal, right?  Just staring, no harm there.  The problem was, I didn't always realize I was doing it, and often enough, it happened just when I had something else to do.  Like, my mom would call me to dinner, and I'd be just about to go when I noticed something interesting out the window.  Next thing I knew, two or fifteen or twenty minutes had passed, I had no idea where they'd gone to, and my meal was cold.  And I couldn't even remember any coherent thoughts I'd had while zoned out.  They were all little fragments of things that seemed to contradict each other, then later concede.  It was confusing, like a dream that got fainter and fainter the longer you stayed awake.
     So, when I caught myself this time, I wanted to know what was so compelling to my subconscious to make everything in my head just stop like that.  I looked out my bedroom window to see what was there.  Criteria for my bedroom view:

1. a long-ish, slightly windy driveway
2. a thin, too-gravelly street
3. a lot of old trees
4. a tall kid with white-blond hair, looking out the neighbor's window (optional)

     I looked at the kid, wondering who he was.  I'd seen him a couple other times, but never really.  He wasn't in any of my classes at school.  I didn't know why I cared really, I just...wanted to know his name.  Just a name.

Vital Vocab 5 | Vital Vocab 7

Vital Vocab Dictionary

Vital Vocab 3

Hi people.  Here's my Vital Vocab 3.  It's not great, so I promise I'll work harder on the next one.

Prompt: What in your life would you make sacrifices to protect?
Vocab Words (underlined): acumen, advocate (v), ambiguity, ascertain, alleged
Grammar Focus: its/it's, semicolon

Eliza Benjamin-

     That night, I sat on my bed and stared around my new room.  Gosh, this was weird.  Nothing felt real yet; it was like we were on vacation or something.  I wondered how long it would take for the move to sink in.  And as I looked around the house, I'd seen maybe four spiders in it today.  I flopped back on the bed as my mom came in.

     "I see a giant, hairy monster," she said slowly.  I glanced at the wall next to my head.

     Make that five spiders.

     Without hesitation, I grabbed my shoe off the floor and clapped it over the creature, leaving its tiny legs twitching.  I had a certain acumen for bug-killing in my household, particularly because nobody else around could get up the guts to do it.  Actually, my family generally advocated to not kill the giant, bed-infesting spiders, but I just had no tolerance for that.

     "A giant hairy monster," I said to my mom.  "Really.  You couldn't just call it a spider?"

     She smiled.  "I was hoping you'd catch the ambiguity," she said.

     "Oh.  Oho!  Thaaaaanks."  I disposed of the spider and flopped back on my bed.  "It's nice to see you care, mom.  Especially after all the sacrifices I make to save the world from these eight-legged beasts!"

     She just laughed.  "It's difficult to ascertain whether we really need saving," she said.  "Besides, what if that spider had a family?"

     "What if everyone hated that spider and I've done their buggy little world a huge favor just by killing it?" I asked.

     "What do you think it was, a warlord?"

     I paused.  "Yes," I said slowly.  "Yes, I just took out one of the most feared warlords of the arachnid world."

     "Without the lead of this alleged warlord, their world shall descend into an anarchy of power grabs," she said.

     "Yes."  Solemnly, I looked over at the trash can I'd dropped the spider in.  "So it shall."

Vital Vocab 2 | Vital Vocab 4

Vital Vocab Dictionary

Vital Vocab 2

So, last post I introduced my Vital Vocab assignment.  Here's the second entry of that, which I think is ever more all-over the place than the first, so please excuse me.  But here it is.

Prompt: --
Vocab Words (underlined): archaic, amiable, anecdotal, audacious, abhorred
Grammar Focus: your/you're, semicolon

A/N: I’m actually changing her name from Emilia Keye (my default character name) to Eliza Benjamin - I found some old prewriting docs from a writing camp I did this summer and decided I’d model this after them.  This is the same character, however, as in last week’s Vital Vocab installment.  Also, next week’s entry will be longer.  ((EDIT: ha, I tried.))

Eliza Benjamin-

I finished my assignments and looked at the cat that had settled next to me.  Good Lord, the thing was archaic.  Grey streaks permeated its fur.  I scratched it behind a delicate ear and it opened a pair of yellow eyes, purring immediately.  

“Well aren’t you an amiable little thing,” I murmured.  That was when my mom came out.  

“Well hello!” she said.  I laughed a little, the tone of her voice making it apparent that she was talking to the cat.  “You know Eliza, once as a kid, I broke my ankle from tripping over a cat on my stoop.”  She proceeded to go off on an anecdotal tangent.  Her stories always involved audacious brothers and unlikely accidents, and every time she made me wonder if I’d ever have that kind of story to tell.  So far, well, my seventeenth year and I hardly had any stories at all.  I abhorred the thought that maybe, I never would....

Vital Vocab 1 | Vital Vocab 3

Vital Vocab Dictionary

Vital Vocab Intro

My blog is pretty and I like it, so I'm gonna post some more today.

     Alright, so there's a thing we do in my English class called Vital Vocab.  It's a weekly assignment, due Mondays at midnight (alliteration!), in which we have to write at least a paragraph, using five given vocabulary words.  Sometimes, we have a prompt to follow (if Mr. Parker's feeling the vibe, I guess).
     But since there isn't always a prompt, I decided I'd take an idea I'd half-worked out over the summer and write an ongoing story with my Vital Vocab.
     Unfortunately, I'm kind of procrastinate-y and tend to cut it close on writing these, meaning...well, meaning my first three submissions kind of suck.  They're all over the place, seriously.  It's awful.  So I've decided to start posting them here, to prompt myself to procrastinate less, suck less, and to pre-write a little more.  So...Vital Vocab 1.  Here it is.

Now, don't judge me.  It was sort of the middle of the night.

Prompt: What are your goals and expectations for English this year?
Vocab Words (underlined): vernacular, context, figurative, literal, subtext
Grammar Focus (we have those, too): your/you're, and properly use a semicolon to connect clauses

Emilia Keye-

     The old house towered over me.  I stared up, eyes transfixed upon its sage green, shuttered windows, the old paint peeling slightly, the siding not quite straight.  It looked like something I’d draw up in a notebook, sort of quaintly ramshackle (if that was even possible).  We’d moved in almost a month ago, and the utter character of the place - not just of the house itself, but of the old willow in the front yard, the still pond in the back, the stray cat we kept finding on our doorstep - it still shocked me every time I came home.  I didn’t think I’d ever get used to it.

     I closed the car door behind me and helped my mom bring in the groceries before going back outside and settling on the stoop.  School here had started only a week ago and the work load was just beginning to build.  So, I pulled out my laptop so I could start on my English homework.  What are your goals and expectations for English this year?  

     How dry, I thought.  That was always the worst part of the beginning of the year: boring intro assignments.  My goals for most classes were just to get good grades, but for a select few courses, like English and art, I actually aimed to learn.  But how does one put that into a paragraph?  I sighed, thinking.  Maybe if I just started writing...

     One sentence completed.  You’re boring, I thought, and deleted it.  

     Another, more interesting sentence.  Where’s your vocab?  Deleted.

     That was the problem: I had to follow a prompt and use the fancy writing vernacular.  Those two things didn’t balance easily.  So, I did what I usually did in times of doubt, and took the instructions as far out of context as possible.  Oh context, I thought.  You leave your prompt friends no room to breathe!

     Personification was my favorite figurative language.

     I started thinking about poetry, and if I could write my assignment like that.  I could do an acrostic poem, or maybe concrete.  (Was that what those were called?  I hoped we did a good poetry unit this year.)  But poetry was tricky and I was running out of time.  Besides, if I wrote a poem, I’d want to make it good, fancy.  Literal or subtext?  You decide!  I wasn’t sure I had the energy for that.  

     In the end, I just started writing a nonfiction story kinda thing, sort of obnoxiously mirroring myself in the main character.  (Was that cheating?)  It was sort of long and unedited, but I had to finish soon, so I did my best to wrap it up and hoped for the best.  

     Besides, I could always come back to it later.

Vital Vocab 2

Vital Vocab Dictionary