My Experience Reading The Odyssey 

    The Odyssey was an action packed, adventure filled journey that always kept me interested and intrigued — for the most part. The book started in the town of Ithaca, home of Odysseus, but Odysseus was not home. Instead we started by getting familiar with Telemachus, the son of Odysseus. Telemachus is who we as readers journey with for most of the beginning of the book. We discover more about Telemachus as the beginning of the story progresses, and we learn his background and purpose. Telemachus decides he has had enough of not being able to be with his father Odysseus. With the guidance of Athena, Telemachus makes the journey to find Odysseus, and we are with him throughout the journey. The book kept me interested most of the time. There was always something unexpected that could happen, and usually something did happen. To me, The Odyssey seemed as if it was a two sided story for the majority of the middle of the book. By that I mean it switches between Odysseus trying to survive on his epic and dangerous journey and Telemachus venturing to find his father. Sometimes there was a lot of anticipation and anxiousness involved in the book because they can never quite seem to find each other. It was almost like a sign of relief when they did and when Odysseus returned home. Some aspects of the story got somewhat left in its tracks, and only picked up even once and a while. To me that is the suitors. They were introduced as evil and nasty men who are trying to get Penelope to fall in love with them, but towards the middle of the book they are quieted a little bit and do not get fully back into the story until towards the end when the whole finale goes down. It kind of bothered me a little that Odysseus stayed disguised as a beggar for so long, not revealing himself to his wife, son, or killing the suitors. It was a sigh of relief when he did though. Although I found that a little bit annoying, it is what made me want to keep reading to discover what happens. Overall I enjoyed reading The Odyssey, it was interesting, eventful, adventurous, and meaningful. A lot of the meaning from the book has to be dug out from  the reader though, it was our job to really find out what this is trying to say about our lives.

Words Of Advice

5 things to help you while writing a story

Recently our class split off into groups of one or two in order to make our own Heroic Cycle Stories. I wrote a story along with my classmate Finley. It is called Stranded. After writing this story which ended up being about 7000 words long, I learned a lot about what tools I need to use and what I should be doing to make the writing experience easier and more efficient. Here are five things, from my experience, that help while writing a story.

1. Plan it out: When writing a story I have discovered that it is smart and effective if you write out somewhat of a plan of what your writing will be like in each chapter or paragraph. In the recent project I did in my class we had 10 different chapters. On each chapter heading, my partner and I wrote out a few words on what the main idea of the story was. This was really helpful for us. As we would progress in the story and eventually come to the end of a chapter, sometimes we would forget what we planned to write about in the next chapter. That is why it was really helpful when we decided to write out the main point we were trying to get across in each chapter, above the writing. 
2. Try not to jump around in the plot too much: While writing my story sometimes I found myself jumping too quickly between ideas in the story. Sometimes the writing seems fine because it makes sense what it happening in the story to you, but to be safe go back and read it, and read it from the perspective of someone who has never heard anything about to book so far. I say this because sometimes I found myself going too quick from idea to idea, so that I do not expand enough on what I am saying, making it unclear to the reader what is happening.
3. Try not to get behind: This is something I could have done much better. Right when I was assigned the Heroic story project we had something like two weeks to complete it, so at the time it felt like forever to me. The first few days, and throughout the first week I took it very slow on the story. After a couple days of having the opportunity to write I had only just finished writing the 1st chapter. As we got towards the end of the project I had multiple chapters to write and limited time to do it. That is why you should always carve some time out of your days to do it, it is important that you have enough time to work on it that you do not have to cram it all for the ending, making your writing sloppier.
4. If you are writing with a partner, make sure you are not he same page as them: By this I do not mean literally same page in the writing. What is mean is that it is important that you talk to them a lot about what is going on in the story, how it will begin, how the middle will go, and how it all will end. It is important that both of you are writing towards the same ending, because otherwise it might make everything a mess. Make sure you both know what is going to happen in your book, enough so that you can both write at separate times and have the story still be in order and good.
5. Finally, have fun with your writing: Be creative. All of this writing is coming  straight from your imagination, meaning there are endless possibilities. Make your story exciting and always throw in some twists and turns in there. Personally, I think a story with twists and a very imaginative plot would keep me more interested than a bland story always staying in line... If that makes any sense.

Those 5 things, from my experience, are very important to creating a good, interesting story. Always have fun with your writing. Writing is not supposed to be boring and something to just get on with in your day, it is your story, so make it interesting to you.