This day has become a special one for me. Despite all the chaos I had endured, I finished creating my midterms for my eighth graders, measuring the English Room, editing my students’ research paper projects, and decorating the board for the school’s Reading Month. Most of all, I finished typing out the first installment of my LGBTQ+ Crimeverse, and my chest is swollen with pride now!
For three years, I had been building a world and creating characters that reminded me of my beloved Gayborhood. I have been plotting, planning, postponing, prioritizing and any other “P’s” I can think of. I wanted to challenge myself in creating a crime story and I ended up creating a crimeverse. This is going to be so much fun as I have everything plotted while still letting the worldbuilding around me.
Now! About the book itself…I just learned something new and it’s called the Flesch-Kincaid. I didn’t even know that this even existed and now that I know, it makes perfect sense on what I need to work on. I knew my writing style would make my stories easy to read through pacing, but I didn’t think it was because of my word choices. I don’t like the idea of a program telling me that my story is at a fourth-grade reading level. Luckily, I have an easy-ish fix to this new resolution and it’s something I was already doing.
I have a word journal – the same one I make my student use. In this journal I write words from various choices:
- Words of the Day – dictionary.com
- Words I found interesting
- Words I found cool
- Words I didn’t know; heard for the first time
From there, I write the part of the speech along with one synonym and one antonym so I will know how to use the word correctly in a sentence. Now that I’m writing this out, I would like to bring my story to, at least, a high school audience. That is with the combination of words, themes, and diction. This will also help me evolve my writing style; this is going to be so much fun.
Please don’t forget to follow me on my social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Goodreads) on my web page’s right side. Also, I love hearing suggestions of what books to read outside of my norm (Science fiction and fantasy) as I am a part of the Goodreads’ reading challenge for 2023. I aim to read 200 books this year and I am already at 60. I’m almost done with the Colin McCool series; I’m on the last book of the main series.
