February is Fantasy Month: Fandom VS. Fandom

 

So, today's post (and last week's post) was supposed to be about spoilers. Specifically, it was going to be about how spoilers affect how much someone enjoys a story. I did not finish writing that post. Instead, I started second-guessing myself, and in the end, I came to the conclusion that one analysis-type post in a month is enough and that the spoiler thoughts can wait until I have my thoughts in better order.

Instead, I'm tackling two of the Fantasy Month prompts at once and taking on some of the biggest battles in fandom — or, rather, between fandoms. We've probably all had to answer the Marvel or DC or Star Wars or Star Trek question or something similar at some point. And for this week's post, I'm taking on five such questions (three of which were helpfully supplied by my wonderful friends via text and Instagram), rapid-style. Which fandoms will prevail? Let's find out!

 

Fandom vs. Fandom

1. Marvel vs. DC? In most cases, I am an MCU girl through and through. I don't have time for unending angst and grittiness in books, much less movies, and Marvel gets that. Plus, they have Thor, Captain America, and Doctor Strange, who happen to be my three favorite superheroes. The exception? If you compare the two fandom-favorite "families" — which is to say, Irondad/Spiderson and the Batfam, the Batfam wins every single time by virtue of having a reasonable amount of canon backing and being delightfully chaotic and dramatic. (Granted, I've never actually picked up a Batman comic book or watched the animated series, so it's technically a secondhand fandom, but I've read enough of the actual comics reposted to various internet sites that I practically feel like it should count as a proper one of my fandoms at this point.)
2. Star Wars vs. Star Trek? Firefly. The answer is Firefly. Is this a cop-out? Maybe. But Firefly is my story, and I'm sticking to it. And it basically has the elements I like best from each of the other stories (the unpolished-ness and adventure and action and underdog/rebel narrative of Star Wars; the variety and exploration and some of the philosophicalness of Star Trek) wrapped up together with heists and found family — and, look, Han Solo is awesome, and I like Jean-Luc Picard, but Captain Mal Reynolds is where it's at.
3. The Lord of the Rings vs. Narnia? First off, I didn't think this was a competing fandom set, but it was suggested to me twice, so I'm going with it. Technically, I should probably say LOTR — when people ask me for my top three favorite series, LOTR is always in my answer, and Narnia is almost never. But I've also lived much more in Narnia than I have in Middle Earth, in that I've known it longer and read and listened to Narnia many more times. I suppose I'd have to say that LOTR is my favorite in terms of story and world — but Narnia is still, in many ways, home.
4. Disney/Pixar vs. Dreamworks? I wasn't going to do this one because I couldn't think of any Dreamworks movies I'd actually watched. And then I decided to double-check that and realized that wait a moment, Dreamworks did How to Train Your Dragon??? And that put enough weight on Dreamworks' side of the scale that the question was worth answering. Disney/Pixar still wins by virtue of Tangled, Beauty and the Beast (the original one, not the live-action one), and Big Hero Six. Also by virtue of not being responsible for a certain stupid movie about snails. But, if I actually watched all the animated movies I've been meaning to see for, oh, going on ten years now*, Dreamworks would have a very good chance.
5. Harry Potter vs. Percy Jackson? I'm pretty sure these aren't competing as much as they did similar things for consecutive generations, but I do know that both fandoms are still very active, so! I prefer Percy Jackson (specifically, Olympians and Heroes of Olympus; I didn't read anything after HoO ended) . . . mostly because Harry Potter uses a particular trope that just rubs me all the wrong ways, while Percy Jackson got an initial boost from my enduring love of mythology. Plus, I just like the PJO/HoO characters better than the Harry Potter characters. 

What's your position on any or each of these debates? Are there any big fandom vs. fandom questions that I missed? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!

*This is list is also known as "All the movies that my friends/the internet were obsessed with back in 2013 or so.

AUs I Wish Were Real: Movie & TV Edition

Hey'a, everyone! So, like many people, I really enjoy the concept of AUs. I think that a well-executed or well-conceived AU demonstrates how well people know particular characters (which is why I like to come up with AUs of my own stories as a character development exercise), and sometimes you can use AUs from a particular fandom as a jumping-off point for a completely new story. Plus, sometimes it's just fun to imagine how a story would be different if a particular thing changed. Today, I thought I'd talk about some of my favorite AU concepts, both ones I've come up with on my own and ones I've seen elsewhere.

AUs I Wish Were Real

1. A Merlin AU in which Merlin, Arthur, Morgana, and Gwen all have magic and are just running around trying increasingly desperate methods to hide it from one another, Uither, and everyone else. Eventually, Gwen finds out about everyone else because she's actually not completely oblivious (unlike the Pendragons), but she may or may not actually tell anyone. Gaius knows, probably, but everyone makes him swear not to tell anyone else. And at least one of the knights figure it out, but watching these four idiots run around trying to figure out how to solve Camelot's problem of the week without letting anyone figure out how they're doing these increasingly impossible things is amazing entertainment, so whoever knows just quietly helps hide it from Uither and has a good laugh over it.
   
   
2. An Avatar: The Last Airbender AU in which the elements are controlled via dance instead of martial arts-esque moves and so every time there's a fight, it's basically a dance battle with bonus element-throwing. This AU comes about entirely because 90% of Zuko's fighting moves look like breakdancing as it is, so they barely have to change anything there. And, let's face it, watching Zuko and Aang have a dance battle every couple episodes for two seasons would be hilarious.
3. A Marvel AU in which people actually communicate during Civil War, realize "Ok, many of us are overreacting" and proceed to work through their differences and not break up the team. Bonus points if this gives Tony enough energy to actually think about how he handles his sort-of-mentorship with Peter and gets his act enough together to be a proper mentor, thereby making all the IronDad headcanons more reasonable. (Seriously, though: I love IronDad headcanons and short fics on Tumblr, but there's so little grounding for them in the actual show that they feel more like AUs themselves.) Double bonus points if this leads to any variation on this post; triple bonus points if it leads to a variation on this one.
4. Another Merlin AU: Merlin, instead of being a peasant from some town I don't remember, is Arthur's half-brother. He still acts as some kind of attendant to Arthur, because he's more or less illegitimate and it's inconvenient to have a half-brother lounging around with no actual job, but it's less "servant" and more "advisor and future steward" or something similar. He still has magic, which he uses to get himself and Arthur in and out of trouble, but in this case Arthur figures it out early on and is thus much less hostile to magic in general. (Arthur still struggles with reconciling his father's attitude and his own knowlede, but yeah.) And, of course, the various villains try to pin stuff on Merlin, implicating that he's trying to clear his way to the throne, but Arthur, at least, knows better. 
   
   
5. I feel really bad for wanting this, but: an Avatar: The Last Airbender AU in which Aang doesn't survive the hundred years and, through a series of undefined events, Zuko ends up being the Avatar. I am a big fan of "the person you were looking for was you all along" plotlines, at least when done well. And Avatar!Zuko would be a goldmine for both really interesting internal conflict and comedy not based in secondhand embarrassment. I did actually find one fic that follows this premise, but it had Zuko figure it out too close to the start of the fic, and also the writing quality wasn't great, so I ended up not reading more than a chapter. Tragic. (That said, I may end up taking this AU concept and reworking it into an original story, so, yeah. We'll see what happens.)

Do you enjoy reading and imagining AU concepts? What are some of your favorites? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
-Sarah (Leilani Sunblade)

May 2019 Doings!

Ahhhh. Finally a quiet month. It's so nice to be back home, away from classes and constant stress — even if I do miss my friends. That said, a quiet month doesn't mean there are no Doings at all, so let's get started!

Writing!

• The last major round of edits on Mechanical Heart is done! Finally!
• Ok, technically, I haven't been working on it that long; only since February. But the fact that I've been working on only Mechanical Heart edits, and the fact that I didn't have much of a break between the different rounds of edits, makes it feel like much longer. Also, I've literally doubled the length of the story every time I edit it. I'm pretty sure this is the opposite of what most people do. Oh well.
• I still have another round or two of mid-level to minor adjustments to get through (the exact level depends on what Kendra has to say about it in her critique). But those won't be nearly as bad, and with luck, they won't take me more than a week or two.
• (Hopefully, those won't be famous last words . . .)

Reading!

• So, here's what happened: I got home from college. I went to the library. And then I devoured all the books because that's what happens when I have plenty of time and limited energy (which, naturally, I decrease further by staying up late to read . . . ).
• Most of these were new-to-me reads, but some were rereads. I revisited Illusionarium around the middle of the month because I was losing motivation for Mechanical Heart and hoped that reading some good steampunk would help. (It did, thankfully.) I'm also rereading the Auralia's Colors series because a friend mentioned them and I wanted to see if they were as good as I remembered. I think the first book suffers on the reread; the author leaves too much fuzziness in an effort to create the magic the book requires. The rest of the series, however, improves, especially Cyndere's Midnight. My appreciation for Jordam has significantly increased, a fact I attribute in no small part to The Wingfeather Saga and the Tales of Goldstone Wood.
• Moving on to the really good new books: the Strange the Dreamer duology was pretty amazing. I wasn't sure about it at the start, but once we moved on from Lazlo's horrible childhood and introduced Sairi and her family . . . yes. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone just because it is rather dark at times and involves some adult topics, but overall, I can see why people like these so much. Tess of the Road was another one covering difficult or mature topics, and I quite enjoyed it as well, even though I'd heard bad reviews from a lot of people. (My take: just go in expecting a slow plot, no dragons, and lots of emphasis on internal conflict and you'll be fine.) And, of course, the one Discworld book that I read, The Last Hero, was pretty fun. It wasn't my favorite in the series, but it's the best of the Rincewind books.
• I also read a few anthologies! One, To Hold the Bridge, is by Garth Nix; I mostly read it because it had an Abhorsen short story in it. That short story was decent; the rest was highly meh. A Blink of the Screen, an anthology of Terry Pratchett's short fiction, was better — though, oddly, I enjoyed a lot of the non-Discworld stories better than the Discworld ones. And Neil Gaiman's M is for Magic was the best of the three; his short fiction reminds me of Diana Wynne Jones's in a lot of ways.
• Most of the other books that I haven't mentioned yet were good, but not amazing, but I will mention the two really disappointing ones. Etiquette and Espionage was, like Illusionarium, supposed to motivate me to keep working on Mechanical Heart. Unfortunately, the trope it's founded on (the magical boarding school) is hit or miss for me, and this one missed more than it hit. I definitely will not be continuing the series. And I picked up An Abundance of Katherines because I liked Turtles All the Way Down and thought that I ought to read more than one John Green book in my lifetime . . . and then I put the book down again after the third chapter. Sorry, John Green, but Colin is a whiney child, and like the Katherines who dumped him, I have better things to do with my life than wait around for him to get a grip on his.

Watching!

• So, yes. I saw Avengers: Endgame, and it did not kill me and I was very impressed with it. Go read my post on the topic if you want to know more about how I feel. I don't feel like recapping everything I already said more than I just did. Also, if you've watched Endgame since I wrote that post, go comment on my spoiler post and let me know what you thought! (Or just tell me in the comments of this post, if you put a spoiler warning on there.)
• Also, going to movie theaters by yourself is highly underrated. I wish I'd realized this sooner; if I had, I would've been caught up on the MCU much faster, and I might've seen other recent movies as well. The only downside is that you don't have someone to talk to in-person right after you leave the movie . . . but I'd rather wait to discuss it until I've thought over my impressions more anyway.

• In addition to seeing Endgame, I watched Mary Poppins Returns with my family and very much enjoyed it. Is it the same as the original? Not at all. It's a different, slightly darker story in a different, slightly darker era. Is it better than the original? Probably not. But is it worse? I don't think so. Honestly, I like the one just as much as the other. And while I will acknowledge that some of Emily Blunt's mannerisms and phrases seemed just the slightest touch off or forced, she stayed true to Mary's overall personality, and I appreciate that.
• Other than that, I've mostly been watching a lot of Hogan's Heroes with my family, which I'm thoroughly enjoying. I really like that show, ok? I know it's not perfect, but it's fun, and I love a good guile hero — of which Hogan definitely is one. And it's one of the fairly rare humorous shows that produces next to no secondhand embarrassment, so that's a relief.

Life!

• Honestly, there's not a lot to record in this section that I haven't written about already. I'm getting back into the routine of work, writing, and reading. I've been able to do some design stuff, both for professional and personal reasons, and that's been pretty fun. I'm trying to figure out how to get myself to draw more. (Also, I bought watercolor pencils because they were on clearance for really cheap, but I then realized that you need watercolor paper in order to use watercolor pencils, so now I have to buy that . . . gah.)
• Oh! We went to the Memorial Day concert and fireworks at Wolftrap, which is a National Park/performing arts center about half an hour from my house. The concert was excellent, and I may look up a few of the pieces to see if there are good versions available online. And the fireworks were fabulous, even though our seat was partially under a tree that seemed like it might block our view. On that topic, fireworks are amazing and I forgot how gorgeous they could be, especially when they're arranged with music.
• Um . . . I made food! That's something! One dish was just pasta and sausage in the skillet, which turned out well. The other was enchiladas, which also turned out well, but I had to make enchilada sauce, which almost burned and smelled terrible, but it's fine. It tasted good in the end. I did intend to cook more than I have, but there's still quite a bit of summer left.

June Plans!

• I'm hoping that June will be more of the same as May: quiet and mostly occupied with writing, work, and reading. It may not be exciting, but it's pleasant.
• Obviously, I'll be working on the next few rounds of Mechanical Heart edits just as soon as I get the final critique back from Kendra and have time to think through them. I'll also start working on the interior design and formatting for the Kindle and paperback versions . . . yay. I should probably try to work out how to do the paperback formatting in InDesign; maybe that'll be less aggravating than Word.
• Also, there will be a cover reveal soon! Keep your eyes open for news about that.
• Before I go back to work on Mechanical Heart (and possibly in the midst of that), I'm going to work on the D&D campaign I hope to run next semester. I'm hoping to have enough weekly adventures planned to carry me through the first month or two at least, if not more. I do have several of those adventures semi-prepared already, but I need to solidify worldbuilding stuff and figure out how those episodes might fit into the larger plot. (And, yeah, I'm doing this a bit out of order, but it'll work.)
• And, of course, I need to start figuring out stuff in earnest for Camp NaNoWriMo in July . . . but that'll be more towards the end of the month. (Fingers crossed that I'll have all my Mechanical Heart edits done by then, 'cause that would be amazing.)
• Outside of writing, it'll mostly be business as usual: work, reading, and so on. I'm knitting a cloak, so that's fun, and I have one or two other craft projects I'd like to work on if I have time. (Fun fact: you can 3D print a sword. And one of my local libraries has a 3D printer that patrons can use. Do you see where I'm going with this?) I may see a movie or two, which is a little out of the ordinary, but hopefully won't be much longer.
• There's also a pretty good chance that my family will be going to at least one amusement park, so WHOO! Now that I know I actually like wooden roller coasters, I'm super excited. (We were supposed to go to Hershey Park yesterday, actually, but we got rained out. Here's hoping that doesn't happen again.)

How was your May? What are your plans for June? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
-Sarah (Leilani Sunblade)

My Thoughts on Avengers: Endgame (No Spoilers!)

Usually, I'm the last one to see any given MCU film — mostly because I insist on waiting until it comes out on DVD and I can get it at the library. But, having more or less caught up on the MCU for once in my life, and having found a theater with $5 tickets on Tuesdays, I decided to make an exception for once and go see Endgame in theaters. And oh stars was it worth it!

Endgame is best watched unspoiled (or at least minimally spoiled), so I'm going to do my best to keep this post spoiler-free. That said, I have a lot of thoughts which require giving spoilers, so I wrote up second post on my other blog, where I can keep the content behind a password. The password is yes_spoilers; have fun. Please keep any spoilery comments over there as well, or at least mark them if you post them in the comments of this post. Thanks!

My Non-Spoilery Endgame Thoughts

1. First up, that was way better than Infinity War. Anyone who read my Doings! post last week or who's friends with me on Facebook or Letterboxd knows that I was not crazy about Infinity War; it suffered from too many characters and too many characters making stupid decisions and also too much Thanos being melodramatic. Endgame suffered from none of these problems, and most of the people were actually, like . . . reasonably sensible? And communicated semi-well? And Thanos actually acted like an interesting villain? So that was nice. The beginning dragged a bit, but overall, it was good.
2. It did not murder my heart as badly as I thought it would. Not that most movies hurt that much; I tend to get over any case of movie-related feels much faster than most fangirls do. (I'm pretty sure it's because I then go and fill myself up with other stories that give me new feels . . . and also I'm an ISTP.) But I kind of thought Endgame was going to hurt a lot more than it did. That's not to say that it doesn't have sad or touching moments or that those moments aren't handled well; it does, and they are. But it does mean that the sadness was balanced out by other emotions.
3. It does a good job of wrapping up the character arcs for most of the original Avengers. I don't think this is actually a spoiler; the entire internet knows that this is the end of an era, that certain actors aren't signed on for more films, so on. And I think that it's a good ending or wrap-up point for most of the original Avengers — two in particular — but there were others who I'm not so happy about. I'll say outright that I don't think this movie treated Thor as well as it could have or should have. And there's another Avenger — I won't say who, because spoilers — whose arc I'm kind of happy with and kind of not happy with and I don't know what to do with it.
4. The ladies of Marvel sometimes got the short end of the stick here; I'll be honest. But Captain Marvel and Black Widow (the two females with the most screentime) are both pretty fabulous, and almost all the major Marvel women get their moments of awesome in the climax. There were two in particular that made me almost fistpump in the theater, but . . . those are spoilers. Surprise, surprise.
5. Speaking of which, the final battle? STORMING EPIC. Like, Lord of the Rings-level epic, and that's not something I typically say about superhero movies. I could probably make a whole post just out of my favorite parts of that battle. And the resolution to the battle was just . . . I don't even know the right word. It was really satisfying and fitting and it worked, ok? It made sense.

So, yeah. That's about as much as I can say without giving away spoilers (remember: check out my spoiler post for those!). All in all: definitely worth watching in theaters, even if you're not usually a theater person . . .  but don't go if you haven't seen at least a good chunk of the previous Marvel movies. It won't be as meaningful.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go write up that spoiler post I mentioned . . . and look up what other movies are releasing this summer that I might want to see in theaters now that I've realized that going by yourself can be pretty storming fun. (I'm almost certainly going to see Spider-Man: Far From Home, assuming I can get ahold of Homecoming before then. It'll be great.) But what about you? What did you think of Endgame (remember, mark spoilers or put them in the other post's comments!)? Do you have any recommendations for movies I should see this summer?

Thanks for reading!
-Sarah (Leilani Sunblade)

April 2019 Doings! (Plus the first third of May . . . oops)

Behold! I return!

So, yeah. April was super busy and I basically did all the things and then semi-collapsed. But I'm back now! And in case you think I was joking about "all the things", I have a Doings! post to show just how crazy this month was.

Writing!

• Obviously, the main writing thing of the month (and the reason I haven't posted but once since my last Doings!) was Camp NaNoWriMo. For those who missed it, I was continuing my rewrite/edit of Mechanical Heart: adding new scenes and reworking existing ones to be consistent with the changes I'm making based on beta comments.
• Because of the work I was doing and because of class projects, this was kind of a weird month. I'd bounce between way ahead of the game and barely keeping up depending on whether I was writing new words or just editing existing stuff. Plus, some days I couldn't get anything done at all. It was a mess.
• (I also learned that writing while other people are watching a TV show in the same room just doesn't work. Inevitably, I end up watching the show as well, no matter what it is. It's a problem.)
• In the end, I did win Camp NaNoWriMo, but it was the closest win I've ever had. I validated my final wordcount maybe twenty minutes before midnight on April 30. (It might've been closer to ten 'til, honestly.) Mechanical Heart isn't done with this round of edits either — but I've outlined the rest of the book and written short chapter summaries, so maybe it'll go faster?
• (At least once I get back my motivation . . . after Camp NaNoWriMo, I sort of switched over all my energy to finishing up final projects, and I've struggled to get back into writing ever since. So that's a problem.)

Reading!

• As you can see, April was a much lighter reading month than average — and technically, I only read three of these in April; the other two I read since getting home from college.
• Murder on the Orient Express was my first read of the month. It was a solid book, as one would expect given how famous it is. I don't think it's my favorite mystery novel I've ever read, but I'm certainly interested to read more by Christie. And I didn't guess the killer before the end of the book, so that's . . . probably good?
• A Darker Shade of Magic was, as the name suggests, super dark. C.G. Drews yells about this series semi-frequently, so I thought I'd give it a try. Ultimately, I'm not sure if I'll continue the series; the world is interesting, but I'm not super invested in the characters, and did I mention that the book was really, really dark and bloody? So, yeah. I'm glad I read it, but I don't think I'll repeat the experience.
• Between Jobs, on the other hand, is one I've been looking forward to for a while. It's part of W.R. Gingell's series of urban fantasy mysteries, and, unsurprisingly, I highly enjoyed it. I think I like her Two Monarchies books a bit better, but on the other hand, relatively clean urban fantasy is hard to find. I definitely intend to pick up the rest of the series quite soon!
• Moving on: A Branch of Silver, a Branch of Gold was a reread, obviously. I'm hoping to reread all of the Tales of Goldstone Wood sometime in the relatively near future, but didn't really intend to start here — it was just kind of a whim. I definitely like it better this time than I did the first time. The ending makes much more sense and is more powerful, and the whole book is just better when you know what's up and know what to look for.
• Finally, we have the Abhorsen Chronicles, which are technically three books, but I have them all together in one volume. I acquired the book ages ago, after a blogger friend recommended Lirael as one of her favorite books. That was years ago, though, around the time that Anne Elisabeth Stengl first started the Five Something Somethings anthologies, and it took me this long to read it. I enjoyed the trilogy, though I think Sabriel is my favorite of the books. They're a bit dark, but they're exciting and have a cool magic system and a nice interplay of fantasy and technology.

Watching!

• Oh stars. There's SO MUCH here compared to usual.
• For most of the month, I watched relatively little. Between Camp NaNoWriMo and college, I didn't have a lot of time for Netflix, YouTube, or so forth. The exception was one random evening on which my roommate and I both magically acquired some extra time and decided that I needed to be introduced to Leverage. So, we watched my roommate's favorite episode: a flashback episode about the crew all trying to steal the same thing before they were a crew. I think that format made it easier for me to keep up with what was going on (since I didn't really know the characters — other than Elliot, who I only know about because both my roommate and Deborah O'Carroll love him). I really enjoyed the characters and the show concept, though, so I'm hoping to watch more of the show sometime.
• Then Easter break hit, and suddenly I was watching ALL THE THINGS.
• For one thing, of course, I watched all the stuff that was distracting me from writing: specifically, four episodes of Love It Or List It (a househunting/remodeling show; fairly interesting but frustrating because the families literally never did what I thought they should do), a food truck cooking competition whose name I didn't catch (again, interesting, but I probably wouldn't watch it deliberately), and quite a lot of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. CSI, for the record, was pretty cool. Definitely for a more mature audience, but interesting nonetheless. (Also, the last episode I watched ended on a cliffhanger and it's not ok and I need the rest of the story, storm it all!)
• Finally, and most importantly: I'm almost caught up on the MCU because between Easter break and finals week, I watched three whole Marvel movies!

• The best of these movies was undoubtedly Captain Marvel, which my roommate, her family, and I saw in theaters on the Monday after Easter. I'm not going to claim that Captain Marvel is the best MCU movie ever, but it's still really good and highly satisfying. It hit all the right beats, had all the right elements, twisted some tropes and played others perfectly straight . . . and, ok, the final battle can't top the climax of Thor: Ragnarok, but it was still pretty awesome.
• The same day, we watched Ant-Man and the Wasp, which was great in terms of plot, cool tech, and awesome action, but not so great in terms of characters who I actually connected with, cared about, and wasn't annoyed with. (At some point, I need to compare my reaction to Ant-Man and the Wasp with my reaction to Guardians of the Galaxy 1 & 2. Technically, I should be annoyed with Guardians for the same reason I am with Ant-Man and the Wasp: the cast as a whole shows the fundamental selfishness of humanity very clearly, and a significant part of the main cast is populated by idiots. And yet I love Guardians and am just meh about Ant-Man and the Wasp, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's the music, or maybe it's the fact that I enjoy Peter Quill's brand of idiocy more than Scott Lang's.)

• Anyway. Getting back on track: since I was so close to being caught up, during finals week, I decided to bite the bullet and take out the MCU movie I was most dreading: Infinity War. So, Wednesday, my roommate and I had our end-of-semester movie night, and watched that . . . and, honestly, I'm not overwhelmed with either awe or sadness. The movie did the best it could with the number of characters it had to include, and it had some fairly cool action scenes, a few nice pieces of humor, and some pretty touching moments. But it was still kind of all over the place, I'm annoyed with several characters, and Thanos just is not an interesting villain in my opinion. So, yeah. On the upside, now I can go see Endgame in theaters and actually watch an MCU movie before I get all the spoilers for once.

Life!

• Oh stars. There's so much. I don't know how I had time for all the stuff I did, what with Camp NaNoWriMo, but somehow it all happened.
• The first weekend of April was, of course, my hall's D&D one-shot. (Storms, that feels like so long ago.) Overall, I think it was successful. Everyone seemed to have fun, people liked my storyline and concept reasonably well, and a lot of the girls said they'd be interested in playing again in a longer-term campaign sometime. We had a few hiccups at the beginning due to the fact that six players are definitely too many people, especially when you're a first-time GM. However, things calmed down after a while, people got the hang of what they were doing, and we had some pretty fun moments.
• (Also: you know the joke about how D&D players will make any encounter a combat encounter? My group was the exact opposite. At the very beginning, I had set up a mini-combat encounter with an angry bear to give everyone a feel for how combat works. Instead, it turned into a mini therapy section as our Ranger talked the bear down, asked why it was mad and who hurt it, and got information about the cave below. This was a trend through most of the game. Giant snake? Chat with it and ask if it knows anything about the treasure. Flying snakes? Try to befriend and/or tame them. It turned out well, though, because I'd set up a dragon at the end, and I wanted them to talk instead of attacking, and they did. It was lovely.)

• The next weekend was the PWID spring trip, in which a group of people from my major headed down to Nashville to explore, visit companies, and generally have a good time. Also, I spent most of the trip with most of my really good friends in the major, which was fabulous.
  • We left on Thursday morning. I was able to write a lot in the car on the way down, which was good. After we arrived at the hotel and got settled in, most of us decided to head to a coffee shop to eat and do homework. However, only one of the three cars actually ended up at the right coffee shop. One of the others ended up at a completely different homestyle-type restaurant. My group found ourselves at a different coffee shop by the same name — which, honestly, was fine. We worked on stuff, ate crepes, and chatted; it was a good time. (We also established what type of animal each person would be; apparently, I'm either a dragon or an armadillo. I mean, I'll take either one.)

 

• • Friday was our most structured day. We visited two different marketing companies, one really big but also really new, the other older but smaller. Both were pretty cool and informative. Then, eight of us headed to the big event of the day: a Grey Havens concert at Trevecca University! That was super fun! They played several of my favorites of their songs, and when I got their autographs afterward, I actually managed to ask an intelligent question instead of just rambling about how cool they are. So that was pretty awesome.
  • Saturday we got a late start and headed into Nashville for a day that was pretty much defined by food. We walked around part of downtown and visited a Soda Parlor owned by a YouTuber who I didn't recognize. We had coffee with a published author who graduated from Cedarville (pretty cool, though I don't read her books and probably won't change that) and visited a used/vintage bookstore that definitely had the vibe of a magical shop. Then we went to a board game cafe, which I loved. We played Apples to Apples and Codenames and drank hot apple, and I bought a new d20 (which has served me quite well since).
  • Finally, on Sunday, we headed home. We actually got back in time for me to video chat with my family and get to D&D on time, so that was awesome. Overall, it was a great trip.
• Moving on: the weekend after that was Easter break. My roommate and I were able to leave a day early and stay a day late, since neither of us had Tuesday/Thursday classes. We mostly just chilled at her house and then at her grandfather's farmhouse (other than the time we went to see Captain Marvel). I wrote, we ate lots of good food, and we played board and card games that I thoroughly enjoyed. (Mysterium is a very fun game that I would absolutely play again given the opportunity.) Overall, it was a nice chance to rest and recharge.

• Finally, the last weekend in April featured Elliv and the TDK Formal. This was my first year going to Elliv (which is basically Cedarville's big end-of-year music thing . . . other people are better at explaining it than me). It was pretty cool, but I would've enjoyed it more if I actually knew more of the songs. I don't know if I'll go next year or not; it depends on what my friends are doing.
• The TDK Formal, on the other hand, was awesome. Everyone pretty much agreed that this year's formal was the best one yet, which makes me happy. I was in charge of the decorations, which turned out really nice — though I can't take all the credit; I had ideas and other people helped execute them. But the food was great, the hosts did a great job running it, and everyone seemed to have fun.
• Outside of all that, of course, I had classwork. Two of my final projects hit significant snags in the last week of April and the first week of May, which was very frustrating. We managed to work most of it out in time to submit things, though. So that's a relief. Better yet, I think I'm done or almost done with classes involving group work. Thank goodness! (Don't get me wrong; I know group work is important, and I see the value in it. But being in a group project, even when I like my group members, can be exhausting.) On the upside, my Web Design final project, essay, and exam all went well, and I'm unreasonably happy with how my website turned out.
• That covers pretty much all the major stuff this past month. There were a few other small events — CU Lead Kickstart, a morning spent in Cedarville, a DTR show, and so forth — but this post is long enough as it is. And now I'm back home, and all is well. Or, as well as it can be, anyway.

May Plans!

• Obviously, May is almost half gone at this point, so I don't have a ton of stuff to put here. But there is some. A lot of this is whole-summer plans, but oh well.
• Most importantly, I need to finish up Mechanical Heart as soon as I possibly can. I plan to join in the Go Teen Writers 100 for 100 challenge, and I want enough space between finishing Mechanical Heart and starting the challenge that I can take a bit of a mental break. (That said, knowing my luck, I'll probably finish up on May 19th, then have to start something new on the 20th.)
• Second most importantly, I'm working again this summer. I'll be interning again with the same company as last summer, which means I get to work from home on design and writing stuff. But since I don't have a required number of hours I have to get this time around, things should be more chill. (That's not to say that I won't work as much as I can, only that I don't have to stress if I fail to get a certain number of hours of work in a day.)
• Outside of those two things, I want to take a sizable chunk out of both my TBR list and my to-watch list, though that's definitely a whole-summer aim. I'm planning to start Star Trek: The Next Generation to see if I like it more than the original series. (I am, of course, also going to watch from the original series; I'd like to get through most of the first season, at least.) I also want to watch Endgame in theaters — that will probably happen this coming week, if it happens at all — and finally see the last few MCU movies that I haven't watched, namely Homecoming and Iron Man 3.
• My last significant plan for the summer: cook more. I know how to cook, but I definitely need more practice, and there are certain things that I've never done and want to try at least once before I'm living on my own. I mean, yes, I have another year at least before I reach that point, but it's not like I can practice much at college, and right now the things I'm best at are enchiladas and chili. So, yeah. That's hopefully going to happen.

How was your April? What are your plans for May? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
-Sarah (Leilani Sunblade)

March 2019 Doings! (Is It Spring Yet?)

Hey'a, everyone! So, March has now been over for almost a week, but today's the scheduled day for Doings, and we're going with it. (Plus, the alternative is that I leave it until the end of April, and that'll just be a bad idea all 'round.) For those curious: Camp NaNoWriMo is going reasonably well. I started off the month with one chapter that I was excited to rewrite and another few that needed relatively few changes, so that helped a lot. Thus why I was able to get this post up at a reasonable time without dying.

Writing!

Mock cover created as an experiment in style. Not an official cover reveal. Don't get excited, please.

• Once again, I spent most of the month rewriting Mechanical Heart and not making a lot of progress. Part of the problem is that I was almost exclusively writing new material rather than rewriting old material, and I felt a lot of pressure to get it right the first time 'round.
• Also, politics. One significant beta request was to have more scenes with Josiah acting in his normal world (aka politics and asking a lot of people a lot of questions). Some of those scenes have been fun, but some have been . . . challenging. Hopefully, the results will be worth it.
• That said, I also wrote less because I was busy putting together the material for the one-shot I'm running tomorrow night. That was another interesting challenge, though of a very different sort. People have been creating their characters and telling me about them, and I'm super excited to see how this all goes down. (Also a little nervous, since I've never been on the other side of the screen before, but y'know.)
• I also have been assailed all month with a desire to write either books 3 through whatever-the-last-volume-is in my epic fairy tale retelling series or the first book in my fantasy murder mystery series, and it's intensely frustrating. I can't write either book any time soon; the first, I need to rewrite the other two books first, and the second will require a lot of delicate planning that I'm not ready for. Oh well. Such is life.

Reading!

• On the upside, March was another pretty solid month of reading. It looks more impressive than it is, though, for a few reasons.
• First of all, I only finished Second Son in March; I started reading it back in January for Jenelle Schmidt's read-along. It was, on the whole, a good book, though not my favorite.
• Second of all, roughly half the books on here are Oz books. And, surprisingly, Oz books are pretty short; I can read one in under two hours. I reread the first one mostly on a whim, then kept going because I wanted to see how the other books held up against my memories since they used to be some of my favorites. They were still thoroughly enjoyable (as evidenced by the fact that I read the whole series, save two). The plots are sometimes a little lacking, and the narration can be a bit didactic, but you have to appreciate the creativity and humor that goes into them. That said, they're pretty dark books if you put even a little bit of thought into them. I may end up writing a full Friday 5s post about my thoughts and analysis after rereading them; is that something anyone would be interested in?
• I read three other classics in addition to Oz. One, A Wrinkle In Time, is another old favorite that I read while I was home over spring break. (I mostly read it because I had expected to get it as one of my blind date books and that put me in the mood.) The others were both by Agatha Christie: Parker Pyne Investigates (a book of short stories) and Murder on the Orient Express (not pictured because I forgot to add it on Goodreads until the writing of this post). The short stories were fine; a bit of a mixed bag but on the whole enjoyable. Murder on the Orient Express was, naturally, much more impressive. I can see why it's so well known and why so many people love it so much. For my part, I enjoyed it fairly well, and I was impressed by how well Christie wove everything together and planted all the clues. Did I guess the culprit before the reveal? No, but I almost never do.
• And now we go back to the start of the month for some non-classic reads. On the indie fiction front, we have three recent releases: Honor: A Quest In (Kendra E. Ardnek), To Court a Queen (H.L. Burke), and If Wishes Were Curses (Janeen Ippolito). That's pretty much the order of how much I like each one as well. Honor is excellent; definitely the best in Bookania. If you haven't read it yet, you should. To Court a Queen was also fun, even if the hero wasn't my favorite I've encountered of his archetype. It messed with fantasy tropes in pretty fun ways, and the plot was good. If Wishes Were Curses, on the other hand, didn't quite meet my expectations. I was excited for an urban fantasy mystery, but instead the story spent far too much time gallivanting about with romance and destiny and so forth. That's definitely a personal problem and not a strike against the book itself, but it's still frustrating. (That said, I did like one particular element of the romance quite a lot, so there's that.)
• Then we have four mainline fantasy reads. As She Ascends is the sequel to Before She Ignites, which I read and reviewed for Cedars in September 2017. I didn't reread Ignites before reading Ascends, which proved to be a mistake; I spent the first half of the novel trying to remember who everyone was and what happened in the last book. This book is also another lesson in why fantasy heroes need to communicate, but what else is new? The Graveyard Book was interesting and clever, a bit odd but enjoyable nonetheless. I may reread it next October, when I'm properly in the mood for creepiness. Monstrous Regiment was my latest jaunt through Discworld, and it was neither my favorite nor least favorite in the series, but I know I don't agree with part of its primary message.
• And, finally, we have my favorite thing I read all month: The Aeronaut's Windlass! I take this book as proof that steampunk, when well done, is honestly one of the best genres. You've got sciencey magic, quirky characters, airship battles, magical science, cat societies, intrigue, spies, more airship battles, romance, pirates, and did I mention the airship battles? And, as the cherry on top, you've got Captain Grimm, who's the best possible blend of practicality and heroism, whose grasp of airship tactics is matched only by his understanding of human nature, and who has wit and skill enough to spar, verbally or physically, with anyone who comes his way. He's high-key the best.

Watching!

• Surprisingly, I watched a lot of movies this month — well, compared to how many I normally watch.

• As I'm going to talk about in a minute, spring break happened in March, which is part of why I watched more than usual. (It's a bit odd — after years of watching movies only rarely, the rest of my family has suddenly started watching movies and old TV shows on DVD every couple weeks, if not every week or multiple times a week. Part of that is probably the fact that we finally got a new TV last summer after having kept the same one for basically as long as I've been alive, but it's still a little bewildering.)
• Anyway. I got kind of off topic there. So, until recently, my sister hadn't seen Star Wars, which is obviously a state of affairs that had to be fixed before next fall. My family watched Episode 4 before spring break, and then we watched Episodes 5 and 6 while I was home on break. I'm currently hoping that they'll hold off on the rest of the movies until May, when I'll be home again, but only time will tell.
• We also watched a few episodes of Star Trek (mostly because my grandpa's copy of Star Wars is on VHS, and his VHS player was messed up, so we had to watch something else). I have come to the conclusion that the only way I'll get through the original series is if I watch each season's episode in the order of this-interests-me-most-right-now instead of chronological order. Obviously, I'll watch all, or almost all, the episodes in a season before moving on to the next season.

• Speaking of watching things out of order: my roommate and I are temporarily back on the Fairy Tail boat. We've been unable to find English dubs of the next episodes in order, though, so we're jumping ahead to watch Fairy Tail Zero, the prequel arc. So far, we've only watched one episode, and it was . . . depressing. But at least tiny!Mavis isn't a complete Pollyanna. That's something.
• Most exciting out of everything I watched this month . . .

• That's right! I actually watched a Marvel movie within a year of when it came out! It's a miracle, y'all. I'm not going to say that Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse is my favorite Marvel movie ever. (It isn't, not while Thor: Ragnarok is on the table.) However, it's still a really good movie. The characters are beautifully drawn in multiple senses, and the writers successfully gave all everyone a reasonable bit of development even while keeping the focus on the main three, and they gave each of the main three their own narrative without letting the two secondaries in that core group take over the plot from Miles.
• Miles, by the way, is a cinnamon roll. And his relationships with the other characters are fabulous.
• Also, the art of the movie is gorgeous. And the action scenes are almost all amazing. (There's, like, one that frustrated me? But generally, amazing.)
• Also: Miles has an actual family and relatively non-horrible relationships with his family members. What the actual pumpernickel. It's a spidey-miracle. Recent films and books have gotten a little better about family relationships, but (with a few exceptions, like Black Panther) not much. Miles's relationship with his parents isn't perfect, true, but it's a normal sort of strained? You can tell that the family members really care about each other, even if they disagree about certain things. So, yeah. That made me happy.

Life!

Crochet snake that I made for my roommate based on a pattern by H.L. Burke. Its name is Apep.

• March was mostly characterized by DOING ALL THE THINGS and traveling ALL THE PLACES . . . if by "all the places" you mean Virginia. But I went there and back twice, and those were the two big events of the month.
• The first trip back was, of course, for spring break. I very much enjoyed being back home for a week! We didn't do much out of the ordinary, but I appreciated the chance to relax and spend time with my family and catch up on some recent book releases. (Plus, I went to the discount bookstore near my house and got new books, so YAY for that.)
• The second trip to Virginia was actually to Roanoke with some friends from the Honors program. Why were we there? The Roanoke Open Classic QuizBowl tournament! The leader of TDK QuizBowl was taking a team (actually two teams) back to his hometown for the tournament, and he invited me to join them. I wasn't going to go originally . . . and then I realized that, by some miracle, I actually wasn't as busy that weekend as I thought!
• The tournament went very well on the whole. We didn't win, but we had fun and we gave the other teams a good challenge. (Well, most of the other teams . . . some of them steamrolled us, but some of them also do this competitively as opposed to just as a hobby.) I only made one stupid mistake, and that not until later in the day, but I got several questions quick enough to earn my team bonus points. So, I'd call the tournament a personal success as well as a group one. That trip was also where I watched Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse and discovered my latest strategy game craze, Star Realms. It's a fun mix between a deck-building game and a battle-strategy game; you acquire ships and bases and use them to attack your opponent. I've only played the standard game once, but there's an app version that I downloaded pretty much as soon as I got back.
• In other news: I figured out my schedule for next semester. I have two graphic design classes taught by a prof who has a reputation for being difficult, but other than those my schedule looks pretty chill. I'm annoyed that I couldn't get the PWID elective that I wanted (Advanced Composition; I'm taking Intercultural Communication instead), though. On the upside, I'm not taking College Algebra! So that's exciting!
• (For the record: my reluctance to take College Algebra is not because I dislike math — I mean, I don't like it, but my dislike is based on disinterest and not difficulty. However, I've never heard anything good about the college algebra class here, and I have heard that it has a ridiculously high workload and a poorly designed online learning platform. So, in the interest of not driving myself mad with frustration, I'm taking a business stats class instead.)
• The church website redesign is progressing slowly but surely. We know what we're doing; it's just a matter of assembling the content, and not all of that is under my control. I'm not complaining about the slow pace, though. That just means I can work on it when I have time and not feel pressured to compress other activities to make time for it.
• Finally: I discovered Mongolian Metal, courtesy of W.R. Gingell. It's awesome, and I've been listening to it basically all month. That is all.

Doings!

• Camp NaNoWriMo is happening. I'm still working on Mechanical Heart. I think everyone reading this already knew, that, but if not: you have now been told.
• I also have stuff going on literally every weekend this month. I am going to die (of fun!). In case you want to know what's going to kill me (with fun!):
  • Tomorrow: D&D one-shot! Pretty much everything is ready now, which is good since I don't exactly have much more time to prep. I've been working with various people, helping them make their characters, and I have to say: we have a pretty interesting group. Everyone did a very good job of avoiding the cliche and making actual characters, not just collections of traits, and I look forward to seeing what happens.
  • The weekend after: PWID Spring Trip. AKA, we travel for the weekend, have fun, and visit companies to see what PWID people "in the wild" do. This year we're going to Nashville, visiting two marketing companies (!!!), talking to an actual published author, and, among other activities, going to a Grey Havens concert (!!!!!!!!). I'm super excited, and I'm so glad that I decided to go on the trip.
  • The third weekend: Easter break! AKA I go to my roommate's house and hang out with her and her family. We might get to leave early this year — like, a whole day early — and I'm very much looking forward to it. It'll be nice to get off campus and not have a full schedule.
  • The final weekend: TDK formal! I'm in charge of decorating, which turned out to be harder than I expected. But the org treasurer just increased my decorating budget, which means I can actually afford my ideas! I can't wait!
• Anyway. Assuming I don't die of fun, I may die of final projects. On the upside, half of my final projects are actually semester-long group projects, so we really just have to finish up what we've been working on for months now. That's something. On the downside, I'm really tired of user testing.

That about covers it. How was your March? Any exciting April plans? Are you doing Camp NaNoWriMo, and if so, how's that going?
Thanks for reading!
-Sarah (Leilani Sunblade)

January 2019 Doings!

I'm not going to lie, y'all: it's a small miracle that this is up on time. This week — this whole month — has been a cycle of super chill days abruptly dissolving into obscenely frantic and packed ones. (Part of this is my fault; if I don't have a deadline for a project, or if the deadline is far away and the task is small, I'm very easily distracted. However, it's also partially due to the fact that professors and other people keep saying "Oh, here's this project; it's due in two class periods; have fun!" . . . and they do this on weekends when I'm already busy with other stuff.) Anyway. Let's get on with the Doings!

Writing!

• I . . . did not actually meet my writing goal for the month of January, in the sense that I didn't write 300 words per day, five days a week. I did write a ton for the first week or so because I had to finish up my short stories for my Actual Writing Job. Thankfully, I got those sent in on time, the client liked them, and I should be getting money pretty soon.
• The rest of the month, though? I was so burned out that I didn't touch anything creative until halfway through the month after my first Mechanical Heart beta got back to me. At that point, I started doing a little bit of on-and-off work on the end of Mechanical Heart; basically, I figured out that I really needed to rearrange some scenes at the end for the story to work properly. So, I've been doing that and trying to get it sorted out before I look at the rest of my beta feedback.
• Thankfully, almost all of my betas have gotten back to me! And I'm almost done with the last piece I'm rearranging! So as soon as I finish that, I can really jump into beta-inspired edits.
• Oh! And the Year of Snow White Facebook party was just the other night! That was super fun! I ran an online game of Bring Your Own Book, which went pretty well . . . aside from the fact that my computer crashed halfway through the night and wouldn't restart for twenty minutes. That was frustrating. But the rest of the evening was great!

Reading!

• This was actually a really fabulous reading month in terms of how many books I actually read. In terms of the quality of those books . . . it's a little iffier, but it got better as the month went on.
• We'll start with the highlights of the month — obviously, the two Invisible Library novels I read and reread. The Lost Plot was just as good on the reread as it was the first time around — in fact, it might've been made better by anticipation of exactly what I was getting into. As for The Mortal Word, AAAHHHHHHH IT WAS SO AWESOME!!!! All my favorite characters were in one place! And there were murders! And fae! And dragons! Basically, it was all the reasons I love the series stuffed into one book.
• The third major highlight of the month was the latest Fellowship of Fantasy anthology, Paws, Claws, and Magic Tales, a set of cat-themed short stories. As always, some of the stories were better than others, but all of them were delightful in some fashion. My absolute favorite was H.L. Burke's "Whisker-Width" . . . though I may be a little biased there due to the fact that I want the plot of that story to happen to me!
• Moving on to the next level of books, the ones that were great but not quite my favorites of the month: The Last Motley, while not a perfect book, was a fun adventure with plenty of twists and turns. I can see why so many of my friends rate it so highly! Fairest Son was a lovely Snow White retelling from a friend of mine; it could've been a little longer, but overall it was delightful. I also enjoyed K. M. Shea's Beauty and the Beast — of course, I'm always down for a good retelling of my favorite fairy tale, so no surprise there! All That We See or Seem was good as well, once I figured out that it was more romance than adventure, and West was an exciting but emotionally-frustrating sequel to East.
• In the middle ground, we have three books: H. L. Burke's Coiled, Lea Doue's Mirrors and Pearls, and Hannah Moskowitz's Salt. All of these were good books, just not great. Coiled was a lovely retelling of Cupid and Psyche featuring two cursed princes and two cursed princesses. Mirrors and Pearls was a fun Snow White retelling, albeit one that could've been fleshed out a little more. Salt had fun sibling relationships and monster-slaying, but was a little frustrating at times.
• And, finally, we have three books that disappointed me: one by no fault of its own, one by overly high expectations, and one because I absolutely should not have picked it up in the first place. First up: Sarah Addison Fox's Disowned. Now, don't get the wrong idea. Disowned is not a bad book by any means. People who aren't me have rated it very highly, and in hindsight, I understand why. Here's the thing, though: what I knew of the rest of the series led me to expect something with adventure and intrigue and constant danger. Disowned does not have those things. The first half of the book primarily concerns the growing relationships between Celeste and the family that takes her in, with a healthy dose of angst on Celeste's part. It's not bad in and of itself, and I will read the second book in the series to see if it's more like what I expected. (Plus, with indie books, the second book in a series is almost always better than the first one.) I just kind of feel like I was the victim of false advertising or something. Or maybe I just needed to read more reviews. I don't know.
• Moving on! Next up, the book for which I might have had overly high expectations: Brandon Sanderson's Legion anthology. Again, this wasn't a bad book in and of itself. The first two short story/novellas in the anthology are actually quite good. They have everything you'd expect from Sandersons' work: colorful characters, exciting plots, cool magic (in this case, more like cool technology, but you know what I mean), and fascinating twists. The third story also has these things, but it ended in a very frustrating and unsatisfying fashion.
• As for Trail of Lightning: It has content that's somewhat more adult than I really wanted to experience. It's very dark. The main character angsts too much and trusts too little. There's more blood and gore than I expected or was comfortable with. The magic system was super weird and confusing. The only things it had going for it were that it was based on Navajo myths and that it was basically a Western fantasy dystopia. So, basically: plenty of potential, but not enough of that potential came through.

• Oh, and I acquired a lot of books this month! Rosalie sent me a copy of her latest Ticket to Write book, and I won a copy of Because  . . . Anonymous from Diana L. Sharples. Then I bought a lot of ebooks . . . including a preorder of Honor: A Quest In, which you should all go preorder now. Trust me; I beta-read it and it's awesome.
• That said, I didn't read any old books this month. I fully intended to; it just . . . didn't happen. Oh well.

Watching!

• Good news: I am no longer completely behind on the best movies of the MCU! By which I mean that I finally watched Black Panther, almost a year after it came out. Should I have watched it sooner? Yes. Was it awesome? Yes. Is it my new favorite Marvel movie? No. But it is my second favorite! The characters were great (even though I would've been really confused about 75% of the names if I hadn't seen so much about it on the internet first)! The plot was exciting! The themes were excellent! Basically, I have nothing bad to say about it (except the name thing), but Thor: Ragnarok is still my favorite. It also has all those things, plus it has one of my favorite final battle scenes in any movie. So, yeah.
• That said, Shuri is a fabulous science princess and I love her and she's amazing. And I loved that we had scenes with her and T'Challa being sibling-ly. We need more awesome sibling teams of all kinds.

• I also watched the rest of Season 1 of Doctor Who, and I'd like to say thank you to everyone who told me to stick with it; I quite enjoyed the rest of the season! I ended up skipping episode 8 ("Father's Day") because I'm not crazy about the trope it seems to be founded on. I also ended up watching the last five episodes out of order — people who aren't my roommate and I didn't want to watch the Empty Child episodes at night, so we watched episodes 11, 12, and 13, and then my roommate and I backtracked to watch episodes 9 and 10 . . . which weren't actually that scary, but were pretty cool. Of course, I also knew spoilers, so that probably contributed. Also, Jack Harkness makes almost everything better. He's a mess, yes. But he's a fun mess who fits multiple of my favorite character tropes.
• Now we're in Season Two with Tennant, two episodes in, and I'm back to not knowing how I feel about anything. Tennant is a Doctor I've heard a lot about, and I know he's there for a while . . . but he showed up just as I'd finally gotten used to Eccleston's Doctor. I don't know.

• That said, speaking of things that I like better in the second half of the season: the Alfheim Online part of Sword Art Online is fabulous. Much less angst, a really cool world, and a more connected plot all helped keep me more engaged. I mean, the whole subplot with Leafa/Suguha's crush was annoying, but still. My roommate and I finished it two nights ago and I was pretty satisfied with the climax.
• And now we can finally return to Fairy Tail and hopefully get through all the completed arcs of that by the end of the semester. After that, we might watch the second season of Sword Art Online, but that's still a long way away.

Life!

I knitted these for the people who got signed copies of Blood in the Snow. I'm super happy with how they turned out.

• I'm going to be honest: I don't remember a lot of what happened this month. I need to start writing these posts over the course of the month instead of doing the whole thing at the very end.
• The first week of January was pretty chill, other than the fact that I had so much writing to do. At least, I'm pretty sure it was.
• College started back up the second week of January. My schedule is interesting; I'm in class from dawn to dusk (literally) Monday and Friday, I have normal class hours Wednesday, and I have nothing on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I'm sure that contributes to my feeling of either being completely chill or completely stressed; hopefully, I can find a better balance as the semester goes on. I am really enjoying several of my classes, though. Web Design is cool because I realized I know more about it than I thought; my blogs and forums gave me a little bit of a jumpstart with the basics of HTML, so now it's just a matter of expanding that knowledge and keeping all the tags and terms in place. Plus, I can work ahead, which is super nice.
• Both of my Honors seminars are going well, especially Artificial Intelligence. I'm pretty sure that I get more story ideas every week; at this rate, I'll have at least half a dozen science fantasy concepts ready to be expanded into full stories! Oddly, my actual PWID classes are my least favorite in my schedule — which isn't to say that I hate them, but one is a lot of theory and group work (stressful for obvious reasons) and the other is basically on one of my least favorite parts of the writing and design process. So, yeah. They aren't my favorite classes I've ever had.
• I also learned that I do not like leadership conferences, mostly because they tend to tell me stuff I already know. Or, at least, that's what happened at the one I attended this month — it's hosted by the university, and all org officers are required to attend. It was a very frustrating, stressful, exhausting experience.
• D&D is still going strong, thankfully. We lost a few people, but we also gained some new members, one of whom is a good friend of mine from my hall. I also think that I'm getting better at playing as my character instead of playing as me or just doing what seems like the most strategic option. (Admittedly, my character's personality is fairly similar to mine, but there are some differences.) So, yeah. That's a generally good time.
• Also, this week was so cold that the college literally shut down on Wednesday. I enjoyed the day off, but I would like spring, please. I know that's not going to happen, but . . . I can dream, right? (And if you live in Minnesota or Chicago or somewhere that's even more horribly cold, yes, I know, you had it worse. Just let me be miserable in peace, please; I'm not used to this.)

February Plans!

• I really, really hate February, ok? It's the shortest month, but it always feels like the longest. I'm pretty sure that has something to do with the fact that it's the coldest month and hot things move faster than cold things and all that. There's a very scientific reason, that's all I'm saying.
• I also expect that my workload will start amping up pretty soon. (In some respects it already has, but you know.) Odds are high that I'll be spending a considerable amount of time either in group project meetings or arguing with Adobe Captivate. (It's not the easiest Adobe program I've ever worked with, ok? And all the other programs are fairly intuitive; once you know one, you can figure out all of them. But Captivate acts more like Word or Powerpoint, and it's just . . . ugh. I'm sure I'll get the hang of it, but it's taking me a whole lot longer than it usually would.)
• And when I'm not working on something for a class? I'll be editing Mechanical Heart, trying to get it polished and submitted to the Golden Braids group release before Kendra gets another steampunk Rapunzel retelling that she likes better. That's my goal for the month: do something with Mechanical Heart every day until it's finished. It doesn't matter if I edit one paragraph or five chapters, just as long as I make progress. I would make a time-based goal, but that feels like a risky proposition right now since my schedule is so wacky and will probably get weirder as the month goes on.
• As far as reading goes, I don't have any particular plans, but I now need to read two old books instead of just one. I still hope to read The Four Loves so I can ask intelligent questions about it in one of my honors seminars. As for the other . . . I haven't decided yet. Any suggestions?

How was your January? Any fun plans for February? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
-Sarah (Leilani Sunblade)  

August 2018 Doings!

Hello, everyone! August has been over for a week now, so I think it's high time that I post my Doings! On a side note, do you like this format for my monthly update posts? Do you think there's a good balance of topics in here? Sometimes I feel like I'm sort of just talking into the void with these posts, and that's fine, but if there's a way I can improve, I'd like to do that.

Writing!

• So, yes! If you missed it, I'm publishing Blood in the Snow as part of the Magic Mirrors group release! It comes out October 26, and I'm quite excited. Also nervous, because this is a big step, but mostly I'm excited.
• The first half of the month, I kept busy finishing up Mechanical Heart. I had to change the ending pretty substantially in order to be satisfied with it, but I think I got it figured out. That's not to say that the rest of the story won't need another hefty rewrite in some areas, but it is what it is . . . at least it's on the computer now, which means it's easier to cut out certain bits and put in new scenes.
• The other half of the month, I worked on two contemporary short stories for an Actual Writing Job. One is drafted and just needs to be edited. The other one . . . I've been working on it, but I'm struggling. I think I got the pacing wrong or something? It's going to need another serious rewrite.
• Other than that, I spent a good bit of time working on formatting for Blood in the Snow, only to discover that InDesign doesn't work half as well for formatting eBooks as I expected. Honestly, I think I would've been just as well off to do it in Word, and I honestly might do that going forward . . . At least I have an idea what I'm doing for the paperback. That's something.

Reading!

• GUYS. OBSIDIO. I HAVE NO WORDS.
• I love it, ok? Abso-storming-lutely love it. I saw next to none of the plot twists coming. The characters were awesome as ever. The relationships were great. (I especially love Nik and Ella — we need more fabulous siblings — and how Isaac tries to parent everyone — spec fic needs more parentals like Isaac, ok?) The ending — THE ENDING. The ending was amazing. Waaaaay less depressing than I expected. And AIDAN . . . AIDAN is something. I still don't know how I feel about him, but he's a thing, and I think the author handled him well.
• In other news, The Worth of a King is still amazing, and I love it, but if you were paying attention to the blog tour, you knew that already. I mean, I certainly screamed about it a lot. (Not enough. I cannot scream about Worth enough. Y'all should buy it and read it because it's amazing and Delaney is the actual best.)
• Isle of Blood and Stone was another good book, though not as good as Obsidio and Worth. It was less high-seas adventure and more mystery than I expected, but y'know what? I'm definitely not complaining. I'm always down for a good fantasy-mystery, and this one totally qualified. The main character was ok; the side characters were fascinating; and the villain was . . . not who I expected. Let's say that. I have a couple small quibbles with the book (like one particular aspect of the ending), but I'm not complaining.
• I read two anthologies this month. The first is Tales of Ever After; the second, The Madman of Elkriahl and Other Stories. Ever After is the latest Fellowship of Fantasy anthology and contained the usual mix of excellent, average, and meh. Madman is by my friend Emmarayn Redding and contains stories that feel very much like original Grimm fairy tales (including some darker elements). I'd recommend both books.
• And, as you may notice, I've picked up the Harry Potter series again. I'm no longer reading it at the same time as the roomie (because that failed last year), so I should be able to make it through the rest of the series this semester, even with review books and everything else I need to do. Anyway, Goblet of Fire was definitely the best yet, and I enjoyed the storyline . . . even if certain things do make me sad.
• And now for a few good-but-not-amazing books: The Spirit Well is the third Bright Empires book and involves my usual quibbles with the series . . . but did feature more Wilhemina than other books, which I was very happy about. Eliza and Her Monsters was good and featured delightful online friendships, but I found myself unable to understand why Eliza made the choices she did as often as not. And Spice Bringer was interesting, but I also had concerns about certain elements of the story and worldbuilding.

Watching & Listening

• So, I finally finished the Grand Magic Games arc. Finally. Pro tip: don't stop an anime arc five episodes before it ends and then pick it up again two months later. You'll get there and realize that you remember unfortunately little about what happened last. And then the first two episodes you watch will be super depressing and you'll be internally screaming and your texts to your roommate will look something like this:

• So, yeah. That happened. And no, I don't normally send my roommate long text strings like that, but this was a special circumstance. The rest of the arc was good, though! And now we're watching the Eclipse Spirits arc, and . . . well, at least I don't think it's another save-the-world story? It's more personal, which is nice. But I'm very upset about things all the same.

• I also finally watched Thor: Ragnarok! It wasn't quite as amazing as the internet claimed, but it was still pretty awesome. I love a good sibling story, and Thor is probably one of the most sensible characterss in the MCU at the moment. So that was pleasant. Valkyrie's pretty fabulous too. And the final battle? 100% just as good as everyone on the internet said it was. I literally had to go look it up on YouTube about a week ago just so I could watch it again.

• And my family watched Mary Poppins the weekend before I went back to Cedarville, and oh storms I had forgotten how much I enjoy that movie. Pretty sure it used to be my favorite Disney movie, or at least in my top five, and it's definitely back up there again. But it seems to have gone out of fashion with a lot of the internet since I never see anyone talking about it except for "Mary Poppins was secretly a _____" crossover headcanons with other fandoms. And that's sad, because, yes, it's a fun movie, but it also has a message that I think we need more than ever now, and I'm not talking about the bit about cheerfulness. Because, yes, Mary Poppins has a lot to say about that, but the truer message is the need for families to support each other, to come together. Mary Poppins didn't come to the Banks family just to sing a song or two about cheerfulness and ridiculous words and spoonfuls of sugar. She came to make the family start acting like a family; to cease being wrapped up in their own worlds and to recognize the need to help and support one another — all of them! And that's a message always worth hearing.
• (And, as pointed out by the closest thing this movie has to an antagonist, "While stand the Banks of England, England stands. When fall the Banks of England, England falls!" True, he was talking about the institution, but it's by the Bankses, the ordinary families, that England and any other county stand or fall.)

Doings!

• The main event of the month was the return to college, of course. I've been back since the 17th and so far everything's going smoothly. I'm enjoying most of my classes, even the ones I was stressed about. 2D Design doesn't involve nearly as much actual drawing as I expected — thank God for that! The first few projects are all fairly abstract, which I can definitely handle. I mean, the objective is to make things that don't look like real things. That's not a problem. The problem is when I have to draw realistic things.
• I will admit that Instructional Design (the class I was most excited for before the start of the semester) isn't quite as awesome as I hoped. Right now, it's a lot of theory and process and not a lot of actual writing and design, so . . . yeah. That's a bit annoying. I'm trying to reserve judgment, though, because it's a two-part class, and I think that the stuff I'm excited for is mostly in the second half.
• The rest of my classes are good, though!
• I'm also the secretary for the Honors Org, which is interesting. So far, the most challenging thing has been figuring out lists on MailChimp (because I royally messed up several times and had to make whole new lists twice). But I have it worked out now! And the rest of what I do isn't terribly difficult; it's mostly emails and meeting notes and updating member lists, all of which are quite manageable.
• And that's a good thing because Cedarville has gone from no creative orgs to all the creative orgs. And because none of them require dues or extremely consistent attendance, I've basically joined all of them. There's The Studio (art and design; their sketch nights are delightful), The Inklings (creative writing; no points for guessing where they got the name), Photography Club (I couldn't make it to the first meeting, but I'm excited!), and C3 (Creative, Collaborative, Community; basically an org for all creatives, no matter their medium). With those, Honors, my hall, and whatever exercise stuff I decide to do, my evenings are going to be pretty full . . . but I'm not complaining. Honors is the only org that I can't skip if necessary, and I think the other orgs are going to be super helpful for staying motivated with various creative things.
• Oh, and there have been excursions! Our first full weekend back, my roommate, her parents, a few friends from the hall, and I all went to King's Island, where I discovered that wooden roller coasters are the actual best. (I went on three — three! And I would've gladly ridden any of them again.) I also went on my first looping/upside-down rollercoaster, the Firehawk, and have decided to never repeat the experience. I mean, in hindsight, I'm glad I did it the once, and I hope to draw on the experience as story research — the roller coaster's thing is that you're basically on your stomach, facing the ground, the whole time, so you feel like you're flying Superman-style — but it was also terrifying and I screamed the entire time. So, yeah.

• My roommate, a different hall friend group, and I also went to the Rennaissance Faire again this year! Several of us actually dressed up, which was exciting. Unfortunately, it was a lot hotter and sunnier than last year, which meant we all kind of died of heatstroke and dehydration. (But we lived! So it's fine!) We ended up spending much more time watching shows and much less time wandering through shops than we did last year, which I was a little disappointed about? But it was still fun. And the joust was fabulous. (There was a female knight. She wasn't the knight for our side of the field, which meant I wasn't supposed to cheer for her, but I did anyway. And she won in the end, and I'm not disappointed.)
• I'm sure that something happened before I went back to Cedarville? But honestly, I don't remember much about it. I know I got a hammock, which is exciting. And I did more work for my internship, which was interesting. And my family and I did stuff.
• Also, I made myself a new skirt. It has pockets. I'm very happy about it, even though I haven't worn it yet. (It's too heavy for the current weather.)

September Plans!

• Obviously, most of my time will be taken up by classes, because college. I'm still trying to really find the rhythm of classes and homework and social time and everything else. In particular, I'm trying to figure out which orgs and activities (other than TDK) I'm going to do regularly and which ones I'm doing irregularly and which ones I'm not doing at all. It's a challenge; everything sounds fun but I don't have time to do it all.
• Besides that, I'm still working part-time at my internship, though that's slowed down quite a bit. I also plan to start reviewing books for the college newspaper again soon, which should be fun! I'm really excited for the lineup of books I have planned; I just hope that my editor likes my suggestions.
• And, of course, most of my time will be taken up by working on formatting and Blood in the Snow and putting together all the extra, non-story bits that go into a book. I do hope to work a bit on Mechanical Heart as well, and, of course, I have my short stories for my writing job to edit. Those will be interesting . . . one of them definitely needs a serious rewrite before I can send it in.
• So, yeah. That pretty much sums up my plans. September should be a quiet month, but hopefully it'll be a good one.

How was your August? Have any fun plans for September? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
-Sarah (Leilani Sunblade)