Hi, everyone!

This week, I am going to talk to you today about two of my main characters from Rockybado: David and Brody Ingram.

Everything is in bullet point, so I can get my ideas across more easily.

Here are only a few things about David. Eventually, I will talk about even more characteristics. But right now, I am sticking to the basic characteristics.

• David Ingram is a fourteen-year-boy from Crown Point, Indiana.

• His best friends are Adam Levistad and John Garfield.

• He has brown hair, like the rest of his siblings.

• He associates himself around gamers, since he is also an avid gamer.

• His friends are also avid gamers, so most of what they talk about is games.

• He is a tennis player, and so are Adam, John, and Brody.

• When he was ten years old, he fell off his bike and escaped a broken arm.

• David broke his finger from the same accident.

• When he was ten, he was very sick with strep throat and pneumonia, at the same time.

• When he was only four years old, he had to have his tonsils taken out.

• David has asthma and was diagnosed with it when he was eight years old.

• David’s middle name is Baker.

• David has three biological brothers: Dawson, 20, Brett, 16, and Brody, 13.

• He has an adopted brother, Toby, who is 10.

• He and his family lived in downtown Valparaiso until David was three, and then they lived on the south side of Valparaiso until he was eight.

• David is a total chatterbox.

• David is brilliant.

• David likes a girl named Cera Berringer, and they eventually go steady.

• He has a very high metabolism rate, so he eats a lot.

• He was born on September 30th, 1991 in Valparaiso, Indiana.

• David is very curious and wants to know how everything works.

• David really wants to be a biomedical engineer.

• David taught Toby how to read, with the help of the rest of the family.

• David is not a morning person.

• David likes to go out for a run, normally at night, when the weather is cooler.

• David is obsessed with cats.

• He really does not like dogs.

Again, this is only a brief character sketch of David. Below are the characteristics of Brody, his younger brother.

• Brody Ingram is a thirteen-year-boy from Crown Point, Indiana.

• His best friend is Andrew McCalsky.

• He has brown hair, like the rest of his siblings.

• He associates himself around gamers, since he is also an avid gamer.

• His friends are also avid gamers, so most of what they talk about is games.

• Brody plays tennis and baseball.

• He is very accident prone.

• When he was only six years old, he fell out of a tree and broke his wrist.

• Brody broke his arm at the age of eight, due to the fact that he fell off his bike.

• When he was ten, he was very sick with the flu, passed out, and had to go to the hospital.

• In the summer of seventh grade, he had to have his tonsils taken out.

• He has asthma and was diagnosed with it when he was six.

• Brody’s middle name is Andrew.

• Brody has three biological brothers: Dawson, 20, Brett, 16, and David, 14.

• He has an adopted brother, Toby, who is 10.

• He and his family lived in downtown Valparaiso until Brody was two, and then they lived on the south side of Valparaiso until he was seven.

• Brody is a total chatterbox.

• Brody is brilliant.

• There is a blonde girl named Kelly Withrow who has a crush on him, but he likes another girl, whose name is Olivia Paragnotti.

•  He also has a very high metabolism rate, so he eats a lot.

• He was born on September 23rd, 1992 in Valparaiso, Indiana.

• Brody is very curious and wants to know how everything works.

• Brody, like David, wants to go into biomedical engineering.

• Brody taught Toby how to read, with the help of the rest of the family.

• Brody is not a morning person.

• Brody likes to go out for a run, but he always has something happen to him, such as tripping on nothing.

• Brody is obsessed with cats.

• Brody is the one who persuaded all of his friends that the moon was made out of a melon when he was only four years old.

Here is my brief character sketch of Brody. Next week, I will give a character sketch of Dawson, Brett, and Toby Ingram.       

Have a great rest of the day!

B. Levi

Hello!

Hope everyone's day went well. I know mine did!

So, last week, I explained The Jazzy Island of Dinosaurs and how the novel came to be. So, now, I will explain The Magic Video Game and how it has evolved over the past nine years.

I was about to finish sixth grade, and, until then, I didn't have any ideas that I wanted to write down on paper (I wrote in notebooks back then). And then, it occurred to me. I thought it would be cool to write a story about a polar bear and his friends living on an island, and some kids would go over to visit them and help them fend off the "bad guys."

Again, similar plot to my other three novels. But very different.

I wrote (what was) The Magic Button from June 2005 until June 2006, so right at a year. And the story lines for each version are pretty similar. I believe that this novel is the one that I changed the fewest things in. With the exception to the place, the people, and how old they are.

In my original version, Andrew and Taci Grzedek are eleven-year-old twins who live in Plymouth, Indiana. They have an annoying older sister, Rachelle. And a married sister, Marie. Andrew's best friends are Stephen Levi, Sam Elczek, Ben Morquist, Henry Worth, and Nicholas Hughes. I cannot remember the names of Taci's best friends offhand.

In my published version, however, Levi Cranston is a fourteen (almost fifteen) year-old who lives in downtown Valparaiso with his two older sisters, Victoria and Olivia, and his younger adopted sister, Evelyn Maeve. Levi's best friends are Jack Andrews, Asad Prejesh, David Savino, and Kevin and Caleb Boca.

In my published version, Marty is the polar bear; Sporto is the walrus; Cosmo is the penguin; Jack McFrost is the snowman; and Jefferson is the Eskimo pig.

In my original version, the only difference with the creature is that Haskiki was an Eskimo.

And, in both versions, they try to take back part of Winderplassic Estate that Darveda, Nelson, and Hilda want.

Since I have basically made very few changes to this particular novel, I don't really have much else to say about it.

But, starting next week, I will be explaining my character developments. I will basically explain the distinct characteristics of each main character in each series. I will start off with Rockybado and go from there.

Have a great remainder of the day!

B. Levi

Good morning!

It is about 9:30 a.m. CDT, and it's a nice and sunny day. Hopefully, this is promising. While I am on my laptop, I am working on my marketing research project for school. I only have a week and a hlaf left of my junior year of college, and I am very sad about that!

This has been an amazing year for me! 

Anyway, to go on a note about my novels, I told you about the life of Rockybado yesterday morning. And now, I will explain how The Jazzy Island of Dinosaurs came to be. Both plots are very similar, but they are both so different. It's kind of hard to explain.

I started writing since I can remember. So, probably about six or seven years old. And I will be 22 in about three months, so I have been writing for about sixteen years. And, from what I remember, The Land of Dinosaurs (what it was called back then) was one of the first books I had written. Back then, my dad supplied me with a lot of 11 x 17 paper so I could write short stories as much as I basically wanted to.

The Land of Dinosaurs has gone through so many phases and changes; even I can't remember all of them! I think I started my first version when I was eight years old (that is just an estimate). At first, from what I can remember, the first version was exclusively about dinosaurs. They lived on an island, and they had to defend themselves from the "bad guys." Very, very simple plot.

And then, I remember adding four siblings who lived in Kenya, and they went on an adventure to visit the dinosaurs. Similar to Peter Pan (one of my characters' names was Wendy), but in a much different setting. I think I wrote that version when I was nine years old.

I put (what was) The Land of Dinosaurs aside for a little over ten years, and then I briefly returned to it in late June 2012. I was thinking about having my characters living in Evanston (a place just north of Chicago), but I never gave them any names. I put the idea aside again until a little after my sophomore year in college started.

September or October of 2012 was when I started getting serious about re-writing (what is now) The Jazzy Island of Dinosaurs. But I did not actually start writing until a year and four months ago.

The Jazzy Island of Dinosaurs is the title of my novel (not that I really wanted to change my title in the first place) because I thought that The Land of Dinosaurs might have sounded a little too much like some titles that I already know exist. So, I decided to go with The Jazzy Island of Dinosaurs. It would make sense anyway because the dinosaurs play some musical instrument, and so does everyone else.

Dacston is a T-Rex, and he plays a saxophone. Valpatic is a velociraptor. Jokie is a brachiosaurus. And Sammy is a stegosaurus. They are all in a band called The Fiesta.

Andrew, Caleb, Adam, Cameron, and Alyssa Grzedek are all siblings, and Andrew and Caleb play guitars. However, Andrew primarily plays acoustic guitar while Caleb plays electric bass. And, on a side note, these kids live in St. John, Indiana. Not Kenya.

Caleb is in a band with his friends, Alessandra Marbanks, Kathryn Ashley, Mark Davis, and Tad Beruve. They are struggling with a good enough name for their band.

While those kids are trying to come up with a name for the band, Dacston needs help in returning the saxophones to everyone who actually lives in Galavanti Island; as his cousin, Selfish Arnie, and Selfish Arnie's henchmen, Spike, Bronco, and Steve, have taken all of them and put them in a case.

Still, a relatively simplistic idea turned into a story full of interesting adventures.

I explained how The Jazzy Island of Dinosaurs came to be this morning. Next Saturday, I will explain how The Magic Video Game evolved.

And I hope everyone has a splendid day!

B. Levi

Hey, everyone!

Hope yesterday was a great day for you all. It certainly was for me. I was initiated into Delta Mu Delta, the business honor society, and my family came to my college to visit me. It was a great day, but I will not be happy until school is out for the summer, and I will be able to write. And continue on my first sci-fi compilation novel.

Now, where was I? Oh yes.

Some time in early 2004, I'd say either February or March, I was supposed to do an advertising assignment for my fifth grade class. I was grouped up with two boys (I was the only girl in the group), and we all had a hard time coming up with ideas on what our "product" should be.

And then it occurred to me.

I thought I had the perfect idea! I have always been good at coming up with weird names, but Rockybado? That had to be at the top of the list. After several persuasions to get the rest of my group to like my idea, we went with it.

At first, it was just Rockybado Video Games, our "product." I basically took an old video game console and taped a picture of Rockybado, a robot, to it. I eventually took the picture off and continued to play the video game. And then, a few weeks later, Rockybado was going to turn out to be much more than what we had made it out to be in the assignment.

The idea of Rockybado grew on me from that point on. However, there are a lot of differences in both versions. When I first started writing Rockybado, it took place in a fictitious town called Nesterville, Michigan. And the boys had different names. Adam, Alec, and Alex Levistad were brothers. And then their best friends, Matthew Wickenden and Michael Malakins, came with them to visit Texamilio. And Jacob Gemenz and Kevin Maxwell make brief appearances in the original novels. Also, the original Texamilio took place on Mars. In the published version, Texamilio is an island by Hawaii. In keeping with the similarities of all three novels.

I wrote Rockybado from March 2004 until November 2004, around the time that my grandpa had his third heart attack. From November of that year until early July of 2012, I walked away from writing Rockybado. Well, actually, I briefly returned to writing an excerpt or two in 2009 and then again in early 2012, but even the excerpts were nothing like my published version.

Now, the story takes place in Crown Point, which is actually an existing city not too far away from my house. I could basically get to Crown Point in about thirty minutes. But that's unimportant. In the published novel, David, Brody, and Toby Ingram are brothers. Andrew McCalsky is Brody's best friend, and Adam Levistad is David's best friend. And John Garfield makes a brief appearance.

In the published version, I also have a "comic strip," if you will, as a chapter. And, as a matter of fact, I wrote that comic strip for a 4-H exhibit at the fair in 2004. I wanted to put a comic strip in anyway, but I didn't know what I wanted to do in terms of that. And then, a few weeks ago, I found my 4-H writing project, with the actual comic strip in it!

That was going into my novel.

I believe that I have learned a lot by writing the same novel over the years and then building on it. If I had published my original Rockybado book, I highly doubt that I would even have 100 pages. Let alone 50. But I let myself build on my original work, change a few things (names, settings, etc.), get rid of parts of the story that I didn't think were all that necessary, and I realized that I could basically build a bigger sand castle (if you will) than I would have, had I done nothing to what I had written nine years ago.

And ten years later, I am here, and I am happy for that.

I have also gained some influence on my other works: The Jazzy Island of Dinosaurs and The Magic Video Game.

Tomorrow, I will explain the same idea, but only with The Jazzy Island of Dinosaurs.

Have a great day, everyone.

B. Levi