The English Inquisitor

Jacqueline moved from Argentina when she was 9. She has enjoyed living in the U.S. but is looking forward to returning to Argentina for college.

1. What is your favorite book, poem, author, magazine, etc?
My favorite author is Meg Cabot. My favorite book is Amethyst Dreams by Phyllis A. Whitney. My favorite magazine is Seventeen. My favorite poem is Sonnet 43, Shakespeare.
2. What do you hope to accomplish within the next 5 years?
In the next five years, I hope to get my high school and college degree, as well as move to Argentina safely with my family.
3. Where in the world have you lived? What differences between the places strike you?
I have lived in Cordoba, Argentina; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Orlando, Florida; and Fort Myers, Florida. The differences I noted in these places were many. From the culture, to the language, to the places and the people.
4. What do you enjoy most? Hobbies, activities, etc.
I enjoy greatly to read and to travel. I also love shopping, anywhere! I like to read everything except fantasy. I like to travel anywhere. I have already visited over 10 countries and would love to visit many, many more. I also like to swim and go to the beach.
5. What is the last movie you saw?
The last movie I saw was Made of Honor, it was on the flight on the way to Argentina. It was a really good movie.
6. What was your favorite TV show when you were five years old?
When I was five years old, I think there was a show called Bananas in Pajamas, I loved that show! The other show I loved was Tom and Jerry.
7. If you could be any animal, what would it be?
If I could be any animal I would probably be a bird or a dog. A bird because I can fly and see the world. A dog because they have a pretty easy life, especially if it is like mine!
8. What are you looking forward to most when you move back to Argentina?
When I move to Argentina what I am most looking forward is going to college. I am really excited! As well as hanging out with all my friends whom I miss soooooo much!

When I moved to the United States for the first time I was nine years old. I did not speak any English, and hated it there for the first couple of months. Later on, in a few months, I learned English and made many friends. I do not regret ever moving to the United States. I believe people should never give up. That was really hard for me but I did not give up and I learned English, even though no one understood me, I got through it.

So what is NaNoWriMo?

The Young Writers Program of National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your- pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a novel by midnight, November 30. The word-count goal for our adult program is 50,000 words, but our Young Writers Program allows participants who are 17 years old and younger to set reasonable, yet challenging, word-count goals.

I will be working in the challenge, and am very excited! Please join me for a month full of writing fun!

The only thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: you will be writing a lot of strange stuff, and some of it will be just plain bad. But that’s a good thing! For 30 days, you get to lock that inner editor in the basement, let your imagination take over, and just create!

As you spend November writing, you can draw comfort from the fact that, all around the world, other National Novel Writing Month participants of all ages are going through the same joys and sorrows of producing the Great Frantic Novel.

In 2007, over 100,000 adults participated through our main site, and 14,000 young writers participated through our Young Writers Program.

Click on the image below to go to the website

Grammar Girl offers some great suggestions on how to tell when to use “who” and when to use “whom”.

Listen to the five minutes podcast HERE!

Sounds odd, right? That you can listen to read. But you can! Remember there’s a wealth of books on tape out there! With iTunes and other services, you can download books to your computer, put them on your mp3 player, or listen in the car.

It’s often a great experience to be able to listen to the book.

Check out these resources for Books on Tape. (These are not free services.)

• iTunes
• Audible.com
• Simply Audiobooks
• Amazon.com
• Any Bookstore

Happy Listening!

From AlanGratz.com: “Alan is the author of one of the ALA’s 2007 Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults, Samurai Shortstop (Dial 2006), and a 2008 ALA Quick Pick for Young Adult Readers, Something Rotten (Dial 2007). A sequel, Something Wicked (Dial 2008), is on shelves now. His first book for middle grade readers, The Brooklyn Nine (Dial 2009) debuts in March 2009, just in time for the baseball season.”

Riffing off of Hamlet, Something Rotten is a great read! “A stinking-rich family. A reeking paper plant. A murder most foul. Something is definitely rotten in Denmark, Tennessee, and only 17-year-old etective Horatio Wilkes can sniff out the killer.”

And you can read it for FREE! But only until November 30. Click here, here, here, or even here to read this great book!

Grammar Girl has some great tips about prepostions and where to put them.

“Just as Harry Potter was unfairly labeled “undesirable number one” in the latest J.K. Rowling book, ending a sentence with a preposition is often unfairly labeled “undesirable grammar construction number one” by people who were taught that prepositions have a proper place in the world, and it’s not at the end of a sentence.

I’m going to start calling this “grammar myth number one” because nearly all grammarians agree that it’s fine to end sentences with prepositions, at least in some cases (1, 2, 3, 4).

So before I lose you, let’s back up. What is a preposition? . . .”

To read more or listen to the podcast, click HERE.

“Sovay, Sovay all on a day
She dressed herself in man’s array
With a brace of pistols all by her side
To meet her true love, to meet her true love, away she’d ride.

This is the first verse of a traditional ballad that served as Celia Rees’s inspiration for her new novel. Set at the close of the 18th century, when revolutionary activities in America and France incited a similar fervor in England, SOVAY introduces another of Rees’s captivating, independent, postmodern heroines, interacting with the events of history with a mind of her own.”

This is an excerpt from Teenreads.com. Check it out!!!

Infinite Jest is a book I’m reading for fun. I don’t have a deadline or timeline that I need to have it finished by, I can read it and finish it whenever I want. On average I’ve been reading 2 or 3 times a week. However, since this book is so monstrous, it will take me forever to finish it that way. Plus, because of the way the plot is, I find that long times in between readings is leaving me disjointed and not following it as easily as I would if I were reading it more consistently. So I’ve decided to put myself on a schedule.

I decided that a month to read the rest of it would be a good time frame. I’ve already taken a month to read 100ish pages. So I decided I wanted to read a little each day. 1200, divided by 30 is 40. So my goal is to read 40 pages a day. Not bad, very manageable.

Reading schedules are great things to set up for yourself, particularly with school. Whether it’s a book for English or a textbook for History, if you set up a reading schedule you can finish the book in the amount of time you need to. Schedules can look very different, they don’t have to look anything like mine. For example, if you know you can read Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays because of your schedule, and you have 2 weeks to read a 300 page book, you should read about 50 pages each day, and you’ll have the book done in no time!

After reading this, reading anything else is going to seem so fast and easy!

Editing can get in the way. More often than not you just need to get your thoughts on the page. You’re not going to write a final draft the first time without any changes or edits. Many times you need to start in the middle, or at the end, or with fragments and phrases. Then you can make it sound all pretty.

Read more by Audrey Owen at Writer’s Helper.

Look out onto the world…
Do you see the water so blue?
Trees so green?
Animals roaming free?
-Well, that’s all from a distance

Look up into the sky…
Do you see the air so clear?
Clouds passing by?
Birds soaring high?
-Well that’s all from a distance

Look down onto my life…
Do you see the smile on my face?
Can you hear my roaring laughter?
The innocent conversation going on between friends,
So close and so caring?
Mother and daughter sweetly chatting?
-Well that’s all from a distance

Zoom in and see the pollution,
Oxygen escaping us with each breath.
Creatures in such unsheltered captivity.
Ozone layer diminishing.
Clouds floating to the ground, disappearing.
Birds one by one dropping from the sky.

My smile turning upside down,
It was never really there.
The laughter silencing…
Unimportant conversations,
No meaning behind it.
-No longer at a distance.