Catie Macauley's Senior Project: How Novel!

 Treasured associates,  We're already on Week 3 - how crazy! This week was probably my most productive so far. I made progress on the two goals I'm currently working towards: developing routine and editing the book. This week my dad and my schedules aligned pretty beautifully, and I've found my productive writing spot: my dad's office! We're writing for about 7 hours a day, which is awesome but tiring. In terms of fun stories, I've got a couple! One is I felt my age this week - I wrote some of this book when I was 13, and at that age I was very good at writing in a 13 year old's voice. Now I find myself wondering - am I writing convincingly from that perspective, five years later? And my dad, a 53 year old man, cannot really provide the counsel I seek. So, we brought in a professional - my eighth grade sister, Lucy. She told us in no uncertain terms our slang is outdated - which, to her, is true, since the novel is set in 2014! But she also provided great in...

 Esteemed colleagues, We are at the end of Week 2! To be honest, this project is absolutely flying by. Whenever I think I have nothing planned in a day, it whizzes by!  This past week had a lot of different things packed into it, but at the center of it all was trying to find routine and self care to best help my writing process. Something interesting I'm discovering is that I have to figure out where I write best - I'm kind of burnt out from being at my desk, and find it hard to focus there. So, this week saw me grappling with my routine, and trying to cement it. I prioritized lots of time with my family and friends, since some exciting things were happening this week - two close friends' birthday, some end of year celebrations. I particularly enjoyed an empassioned debate I had with a friend in debate club on esteemed lyricist Taylor Swift, who endlessly inspires me. I also am scheduling in writing meetings with my dad, which look like they're going to be Monday, Wedn...

 Hi friends! If you don't know me, my name is Catie Macauley and I'm a senior best known for speaking too enthusiastically at assemblies and picking fights in my C&C (#problemchild). For my senior project, though, I'm focusing on something I usually keep to my journal or to submissions to literary magazines - I'm writing! More specifically, I'm working on my novel that I wrote with my dad (hence the extremely witty title of this blog). To give a bit more background, my dad and I have been working on this book for 6 years. We came up with the concept after I spent part of my 4th grade year in Cambridge, England, and thought it would be a perfect place to set a story. So when I was 12, we spent a memorable afternoon filled with much tea and many cookies outlining what would become our novel - Test of Time. Though many things have changed since that initial brainstorming session, the essentials stayed - this is a fantasy novel centered around Catie Matthews, a 13 y...