Aurora Dimitre's Books and Rambling

I've been reading the first book in the Wheel of Time series lately--not entirely by choice, I happen to own the first three books (I don't know how--gift, maybe?) and my random number generator landed on it, and even though I don't really like fantasy and am not really extremely psyched about it, I'm not hating it as much as I thought I would. I thought that I'd be dragging my way through it, violently hating every page, violently hating the writing and the stupid clogged-up sentences. But it's like... it's fine? It's pretty much the same as every other fantasy series. And maybe this is just the perspective of someone who doesn't like fantasy, but to me, these books are no worse and no better than, say, a Brandon Sanderson book. I know Sanderson gets a lot of love (which I don't really agree with--sure, Mistborn was fun, I guess), and Robert Jordan gets a lot of hate, but they are exactly the same. My expectation going in was that I was going ...

Yesterday, I started off my senior year of college. I don't really have all that many classes left to take--mostly a couple of generals, plus a few French classes so that my minor can scrape through. I finished all of my major classes last semester. My history minor is done. I never actually declared a creative writing minor, but I'll graduate with one, so that's pretty cool. For my senior year, I'm living in a dorm that's full of mostly sophomores. This is because this dorm has single rooms, and that appealed to me, even though that does mean that I have to go back to communal bathrooms, which, let me tell you, a little bit to get used to after two years of not having to deal with it. But I don't mind. This is the first time I've had my own room since before my little sister was born, so like... twelve, thirteen years. And it is very nice, let me tell you. I've slept in it for three days and I really like having my own room. Mostly because I get up at...

Normally, my first drafts are glorified outlines. They're somewhere around twenty thousand words of fun scenes strung together with plot points in ALL CAPS BECAUSE I DONT HAVE TIME TO FIGURE THIS OUT NOW, normally with the end JUST  BUNCH OF ALL CAPS THINGS ENDING WITH THE END. This time around, with my current first draft, though, it's different. Granted, I'm only at about 22k right now. But I've still got like, two murders (okay, one attempted) thought up, and I have no real intention of skipping over the in-betweens. I know how it's going to end, but I don't know how it's going to get there. I don't know why it's happening yet. I know what's happening, but I went from my original idea of why to, as I put it in a tweet, 'slow-burn reverse children of the corn?' Is it religious? Is it cult-y? Oh shit, it might be cult-y. Just fixed it, it's a cult. Either way, though, this first draft is giving me ideas back to how I used to wr...