Quarantine

I saw my first horror movie.

On a scale of scary in the spectrum of horror, the movie Quarantine, thankfully, is quite low respectively under some like Paranormal Activity, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the like.

You must understand that I get scared very easily. Examples of this include: jumping with surprise at random noises in the house, quite convinced that sometime in my life on a foggy night a hitchhiker will stand in the middle of the road and force me to stop... well, you can just imagine the rest.

With my jumpiness in mind, I see this zombie-like, thriller/horror, intense, documentary style film with my close guy friends at 1:00am at my friend's house in the middle of nowhere surrounded by feilds, corn, and scarecrows.

After the movie, I am terrified out of my wits. With luck against me, my dad needed his car early the next morning, so I had to drive home alone at 2:45am. Let's just say that the drive on abandoned backroads in the middle of nowhere back to my house was less than pleasant.

Plan of attack: if I see someone walking by the side of the road in the mist, then I speed up to 100mph and don't bother swerving if they step out in the road.

I checked my windows five times, triple checked the locks on my car doors, and of course, cranked some music to get my mind from the impending and inevitable hitchhiker.

I arrived home with no hitchiking incident, hence this blog post.

I slept with my nun-chucks.

I am better now. In hind-sight, the movie isn't all that scary. It had a lot of jump scenes, but mainly just jolted me, escpecially so late at night. I am proud to announce I am back to myself.


On a different note... would you like to read a list of what I will be reading for the rest of the summer?
After my graduation open house party, which produced quite a bit of cash, thankfully. (But, tomorrow it will all be gone as I pay my parents for the first of many payments for my college education).
But, back to the story, I purchased a few books from Borders Bookstore. I took an afternoon, and scouted the bookstore, sat down with a Vanilla White Chocolate Mocha and scanned through about 20 books until I settled on five books to buy. I walked out with my summer's reading list of: The Idiot's Guide to Private Investigating (thanks to Helena for the suggestion, it looks like a good book), Sin and Syntax - how to craft wickedly effective prose, Dialogue - techniques and exercises for crafting effective dialogue, and Plot and Structure - Techniques and exercises for crafting a plot that grips readers start to finish, and the most difficult read yet, Computer Hacking for Dummies.
Also, a few weeks ago, I purchased from Borders: Forensics - a guide for writers, and the Writer's Idea Book.

Yeah, I have my work cut out for me that will seep into the school year, because I have 7 books that i'd like to get through, and probably more.

My intent is to cut down on the work on my book, which an early title is: Breakthrough. I'm not sure if I like it, but that is the one we have so far. So, for Breakthrough, I would like to have all the proper techniques completed in the first and second drafts of the book, so I don't have to spend a year editing my work. Although I have taken about 10 writing classes and write in my spare time, I have very specific areas in which I know I need improving, dialogue for example. So, I would like to read these books and do the exercises in them so I will my "hot" for when I complete Breakthrough.