Five things I learned about short stories this week.

1.Simplicity. Most short stories only have one overarching theme or story, I think this is important because a short story is so short that it is important not to confuse the reader by making it too complicated.

2.The time period is often short. Many short stories happen over a time period of a few days or a week, even stories that include longer time periods will often focus in on a certain day or two.

3. Characters, and setting. Both can vary greatly, but a common theme is to be in a world that's similar to ours so that it doesn't take a long time to explain, and the characters are often pretty simple too, with maybe one main problem that they have to overcome.

4. The Hero's Journey. A lot of books and longer writings follow this format, but not short stories they almost always completely ignore the steps, the writing is more about the emotions and a snap shot rather than a story of events.

5.Purpose. I think the purpose of short stories is to allow for someone to write a story without having to plan a more complicated theme, motives, develop characters, ect. A short story allows the writer to focus in improving their writing skills like imagery, metaphors, ect.

Welcome Post

Hello and welcome to my blog!
            My name is Adrianne Holland and I am a sophomore here at FHS. I love school and am in the IB diploma track which can be pretty stressful sometimes so I like to do other things outside of school like horse riding, violin, and tennis to balance all the homework out. My favorite thing to do however is travel, so far I've been lucky and have gotten to go to nine different countries on three different continents. Because of my dad's job as a CU physicist he gets to go on a sabbatical every six years which involves moving to a different country and sharing his work. So when I was six we lived in Trento, Italy for a year, and more recently we went to New Zealand for my with grade year, sadly I did not pick up the accent though, :( My parents really wanted to go back to New Zealand since that's were they're from and I got to live in the same house my dad grew up in. Our family has a big love of sailing, which is ironic living in the desert state of Colorado, so we like to go back to NZ to sail our big Davidson boat there and also visit the relatives! However I don't think I could move there because it never snows, and I love to ski and ice skate a lot too, even though I'm not very good at either. A few other strange things about me are that I can ride a unicycle, I can make paper cranes, and I love to put mint chocolate chip ice cream in smoothies! Here is a descriptive moment that I wrote a while ago.

         The waves crash against the rocks sending up a spray shimmering like a thousand diamonds. Up above the seagulls squawk and circle the bright sun, fighting their way to its warmth with beady eyes. The sand below filled with shards of shells, bottles and pebbles worn out, small and smooth ground down to uniformity by the endless swirling waters. The waves rush in and out of the tidal pools creating eddies of swirling water that spiral and foam, the starfish clinging on for dear life in order not to get swept away, over and over in the relentless certainty that is the great Pacific Ocean.