November 2021 Doings!

It's Christmas! Christmastime, anyway! The tree and decorations are up, I'm listening to Christmas music while I write this, and I started my Advent calendar (which contains cheese! not only that, but pretty good English cheese! plus cheese-related jokes for each day!) earlier this week. This is the first time I've had a food-based Advent calendar, and I am quite pleased with it at the moment. But this post is not about Christmas. It's about November, which only contains a small slice of Christmastime — and that at the end. Let's see what happened the rest of the month.

Writing!

• In theory, this past month was NaNoWriMo. In practice, it was a month in which I was writing and feeling grateful for the words I did get and letting the ones I didn't go (because I was tired and when I'm tired I have trouble being creative and focusing on one task).
• My current WIP is Bastian Dennel, PI #3, which had a name very briefly in the planning stage but then lost it when it turned out to (A) not actually fit the piece of the story it was meant to fit and (B) sound too similar to the title of another book I intend to write if I have time. It's a Cinderella retelling, the first I've written in . . . um . . .
• So I just had the realization that this is the first time I've actually written a Cinderella retelling. Not sure how that happened. I know I've had ideas for Cinderella retellings in the past, but not many, and none I've acted on. Maybe it's because Cinderella has never really been my favorite fairytale? But I don't dislike it to the point that it actually motivates me to come up with a better version. (Or it could just be that there's already a lot of Cinderella stories out there. I don't know.)
• In any case, I'm writing one now. I'm at about 17K words and 11 chapters in, which is nowhere near as far along as I wanted to be, but also . . . November is a busy month, and the days are short, and my motivation drops when the sun goes down. So I'm grateful for the words I have in there, and I'm still optimistic about finishing the rest soon.

Reading!

• Another light month on the reading front — in terms of quantity of books, anyway.
• This month only included three new-to-me reads: Vespertine, Coraline, and Curse of the Midnight King. Vespertine was absolutely one of my top reads of the month, if not the top read of the month. It was everything I wanted it to be and more: Margaret Rogerson's magnificent style of storytelling and knack for excellent protagonists and relationships, a dark and rich world (with LORE), major Abhorsen vibes (in the best possible ways), multiple enemies-to-friends dynamics . . . it's so good, y'all. Coraline, on the other hand, was a bit of a disappointment. Maybe it's because I'm an adult and not a kid, but I didn't find it half as creepy as people made it out to be. It was a good story, but I didn't love it. As for Curse of the King, I posted my thoughts on it a few weeks ago, but the TL;DR is that I liked the story even though I didn't really connect to one of the main characters.
• The rest of the month was made up of rereads. I finished the Dragons in Our Midst series with Circles of Seven (still one of my favorite Davis books) and Tears of a Dragon (still one of my least favorites, though I did like it a bit more than I did the last time I read it). I also reread The Fifth Elephant, which I liked the first time around and liked better still this time. I'm hoping to get to Thud! and Snuff soon, but I continuously have trouble getting ahold of them at the library when I want them. (I've only been trying to get to them for the last four years at least.) And How To was, of course, very fun to read. Randall Munroe's stuff always is. (Technically, there's a chance I'm still reading it when you read this post, but I expect that I finished it Thursday night after I finished writing this post.)
• The biggest reading achievement of the month is that I finally did what I've been meaning to do all year and started back on the Wheel of Time books by rereading The Eye of the World. It was, as I remembered, a long book that feels its length. But I do think I liked it better this time than I did the first time I read it — and I did pick up on a bit more, even though I never even came close to finishing the series. It's kind of funny to look back at my notes and review from the first time I read it, though, particularly when it comes to my opinions on certain characters.
• That said, now that I've made a start on the series again, I'm a bit more motivated to continue. My current plan is to aim for a book or so a month until I catch up with the Wheel of Time readthrough on Tor.com, then read along with that. Or maybe I'll keep reading at a faster pace. We'll see.

Watching!

• So, mostly I just watched Critical Role, and not even much of that. I'm definitely not doing a good job keeping up with the new campaign (though I guess I'm only a couple episodes behind, which isn't bad). I'm still enjoying it; I just haven't had a lot of time for it. Laudna and Imogen are probably my favorites characters of the new campaign, but Orym and Dorian are very close seconds. I can tell that all the players had a lot of fun coming up with their characters, though, which is delightful.

Life!

• It's kinda weird that this is the hardest category to write. It's probably because I have a record of what I wrote and read in any given month, but I don't have a good record of what I actually did.
• Anyway. We'll hit the highlights first. The most exciting bit of November was, of course, Thanksgiving. My sister brought a friend home from college with her, so that was different — it was the first time she or I brought a friend back from break with us as a guest and not just as someone getting a ride from us. Both my sister and her friend had a lot of homework, but we managed to get in several games of Sentinels. As for the actual holiday: I made a cranberry apple pie and rolls, and my mom made pumpkin pie and green bean casserole, and we went to celebrate with some other families from our Bible study, and that was delightful. And the day after that we put up our tree, which I already sort of talked about.
• A bit less exciting but still important to me: we celebrated my birthday about midway through November. We didn't do anything big, but my mom made pecan pie, and we went out to eat, and it was nice, y'know?
• So much for the big events. In terms of smaller occurrences, the second meeting of my board game Connect Group went a bit better than the first. I mean, I still only had one person show up, but it was a different person, and the person who came to the first meeting would've been at the second as well had she not been out of town. And I had someone else express interest later in the same week, so I have high hopes for next Tuesday! (I'm trying to temper them with the knowledge that it's the holiday season and everyone's busy.)
• I didn't have as much success as I hoped with doing more photography. Sadly, I missed out on some photography workshops that I would've enjoyed — I knew they were happening, but they were connected to a larger event, and I didn't realize that they were workshops in the sense of "Opportunity to actually take pictures of a thing" as opposed to "Slightly more interactive talk on how to take pictures of a particular type of thing." That said, I did go out with my sister on Thanksgiving weekend so I could take some pictures of her with the stained glass windows at the church where I work, and I think those will turn out well once I do some editing. I'll have to do a bit of sort-of-HDR and exposure-and-focus-stacking, I think, to get the effect I want.
• (It's only sort of HDR because HDR, or high dynamic range photography, usually doesn't work with live subjects — you're stacking different exposures of photo on top of each other to bring out maximum detail and color, and any movement or change in the image can create "ghosts." But I think that since I'll only be really using it on a portion of the image, it'll be ok. We'll find out.)
• On the D&D front, this month was really fun. The group I run finally got to play again, and the characters survived their first venture into the Feywild (and I got to play a twisty and overdramatic fey lord; it was delightful). And in the other campaign, we fought a sea serpent, got quite a lot of money from a giant's horde (the giant had attacked us earlier, and we'd found a map to where he kept his treasure), and had some really good roleplaying moments with one player's new character reacting to what is, essentially, his first time adventuring with a team.
• And then, of course, there's my day job, which continues to go reasonably well. I keep bracing for the wave of holiday busy-ness to crash down and pull me under, but so far, things have been pretty calm. Another month and a bit and I'll have worked here for a full year, which is quite exciting.

December Plans

• I need to finish Bastian Dennel, PI #3. This is a very definite must. I'm also hoping to squeeze in a couple holiday short stories and maybe start writing a new novella that's not in any of my established storyworlds? We'll see how much time I have and how well the rest of my WIP goes. If nothing else, I'll find a way to fit in my annual New Year's Eve story. (And, of course, I have to balance that with a bunch of blogging: my year-end book roundups, yearly goal posts, Winter 2021-22 reads, and regular weekly blog posts . . .)
• On the reading front, I want to read a fair bit in Kindle Unlimited, since I forgot to cancel my subscription in November and I want to make it worthwhile. I'm also hoping to start rereading the next Wheel of Time and maybe the Legends of Karac Tor series as well. And I'm going to squeeze in some of my favorite Christmas reads, namely The Enchanted Sonata. If anyone has any additional recomendations, I'd love to hear them!
• Speaking of Christmas: I'm almost halfway done with Christmas shopping already — in fact, I wrapped and sent off one person's gift last weekend. I have some left to do, though, and some of it involves actually making things, so that'll take some time.
• And, of course, it's Christmas cookie time! I already have some ideas of what I want to bake this year, and I'm super excited for that. (How soon is too soon to start baking?)
• I don't actually have any big Christmas plans — just the usual things my family always does, plus my work's Christmas event. But that's fine by me. I like quiet, especially when it's quiet because we choose for it to be quiet and not because it has to be quiet.
• I also need to get busy doing photography towards some of the upcoming 2022 contests for the photo club. One of the contests is street photography, which . . . I do not know how or where to do that. But I'll figure something out, I suppose.

How was your November? Any exciting plans for December? How did NaNoWriMo go for you, if you participated? What are your favorite Christmas reads? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!

August 2019 Doings!

Welp. That's another month gone. For once, I was aware of the time passing . . . if only because I was painfully aware of how much longer I had to work on my Camp NaNoWriMo novel at times. Speaking of which, let's jump into the Doings!

Writing!

• Obviously, the main event of the month was Camp NaNoWriMo. My 12 Dancing Princesses/Hades and Persephone retelling is turning out significantly longer than I anticipated, which is . . . I don't know how I feel about it, honestly. I do know that I forgot how talkative some of these characters are.
• I'm not going to lie; a lot of this month was a struggle. I had a week where I barely had time to write, and another few weeks after that where I didn't want to write or do much of anything creatively productive. I'm pretty sure I know why — because most of the books at the top of my TBR were Asian fantasy, which I didn't want to read while I was still starting my new book for fear that they'd influence the setting or story more than intended. But that meant I basically didn't read anything, which meant that once my well of inspiration started getting low, it never got refilled. Lesson learned, I guess.
• I did manage to finish the month, though, after a weekend trip that involved a lot of writing time in the car and after binge-re-reading Today Nothing Happened, a journal webcomic that's about as far in genre from my WIP as possible. My final count for the month was 20,140 words. So that's great.
• And, in case anyone was curious: no, the book doesn't have an official title yet — particularly since my comment in my last Doings post about how the term Earth might not exist in this world sparked a discussion about why not and a revelation that I got mixed up on my etymology. (That is to say, the Earth is named after the dirt, not the other way around.) So now I'm trying to decide between two names:
  • Blood in the Earth. (Fits really well thematically with the book's setting and certain plot elements, but I'm not sure if people would see the term "Earth" and think our planet first, rather than dirt or soil — which would be a problem; while the world of the book resembles Earth strongly, it is not actually Earth.)
  • Blood in the Soil. (This avoids the confusion about Earth and fits most of the same themes that Blood in the Earth does, though it has somewhat different connotations. My main concerns with this one: for one thing, I'm not sure it would lock me into "Blood in the [insert s-word] for future titles, and for another, it kind of sounds like a Southern gothic novel to me? Though I could be wrong; I don't read Southern gothic.)
  • There were almost three names here, since I was still kinda considering Blood in the Night, but then I realized that it sounds like a vampire novel. So . . . that's out.
• I also worked a bit on my D&D campaign during some of the points where I didn't want to work on my novel. (You would think that would be just as draining, but it kind of depends which episode I'm working on.) I currently have a bunch of ideas for different episodes and challenges, and they're all kind of right around level 3 or level 4, so . . . good thing characters tend to stay there for a while. I am seriously excited for this campaign, though, even if it's a long way from done.

Reading!

• So . . . you know how basically tried to devour the library the last few months?
• That did not happen this month.
• Basically the only books I read were the other Five Golden Braids books — all of which are pretty great, by the way. But each of them gets a list-post next week in the blog tour, so I'll skip talking about them now.

Watching!

• The most exciting thing I watched all month: How To Train Your Dragon 3! In the theater! One of our local theaters was showing it again on special, so my sister, my mom, and my sister's friend and her family all went to see it. I liked it on the whole, aside from some intended-as-comedic elements that I thought didn't need to be there, but I also have mixed emotions about the ending.
• I mean, on one hand, it was a great ending — thematically fitting and all that. It definitely paid off all the character and plot conflict that we'd had over the rest of the movie.
• But on the other hand, I am sad about certain things because those things involved goodbyes and it was not OK.
• Also, this may have been the prettiest of the HTTYD movies, but don't quote me on that.

• The second-most exciting thing I watched all month: I finally saw Spider-Man: Homecoming. Like most Marvel movies involving Tony Stark, it was a good movie, but could have been better if certain people actually bothered to communicate. Seriously, that could have eliminated a significant number of the more frustrating plot problems. And it's not like the pieces weren't already in place! And I'm going to rant about how I would have written the movie differently if I were in control — it's been out long enough that everyone probably has either seen it or knows all the spoilers. If you don't fit in one of those categories and you care about staying that way, just skip past the whole indented section.
  • So, a lot of the conflict comes from the fact that after Germany, Tony is kind of ignoring Peter — or, not necessarily ignoring, but at least not responding. And he gives no explanation for why that we're aware of. Bad call. We'll give Tony a pass initially, 'cause Steve kind of did a number of him in Civil War. But once he starts pulling himself back together and saw that Peter was still all excited to be a superhero and an Avenger, what should or could he have done?
  • Simple. Contacted Peter, maybe even invited him to Avengers/Stark Tower and basically said "Look, kid, you did great in Germany, you're excited, all that is awesome. But you're not quite ready to officially join the Avengers yet. So, the next several months are training time. Keep practicing with the new suit, keep proving what you can do at street level, and when you're ready, you can go on another mission with me."
  • Even better: Tony also uses this as an opportunity to set up a regular "check-in" time when Peter can talk to either him or (more likely) Happy and let them know how stuff is going, ask questions, that sort of thing. Y'know. An actual mentorship. That would've been great, but not absolutely essential.
  • Possibly Tony also uses this opportunity to start whatever training program Karen referenced in the film for helping Peter learn how to use the suit's advanced features (though that would eliminate some of the tension and comedic elements later on).
  • (Possible counterargument to this part of the plan: Tony is a busy man. He has bigger things to worry about than a kid superhero. Counter-counterargument: the film makes it pretty clear that Tony was aware of what Peter was doing anyway, and also, taking responsibility for your choices is a thing.)
  • So. Now Peter's not as frustrated by the fact that he's not doing "real" superhero stuff because at least he knows he hasn't been forgotten about. He's still hero-ing every spare minute, probably, and so the film's plot goes more or less as it would anyway up through the first encounter with Vulture up through the bit where Peter finds out where the weapons deal is happening and tells Happy about it.
  • At that point, instead of Tony still pretending he's ignoring Peter and secretly calling in the feds, he tells Peter "Great work, kid; I've called in the feds and we'll take it from here." Peter probably protests that he wants to still be involved. Possibly he shows up anyway and still messes stuff up somehow, but in that case, it's his own storming fault and Tony is honestly justified in taking the suit away.
  • Or, possibly, it doesn't even get as far as the weapons deal. Possibly Peter instead tells Tony about tracking the Vulture and his crew to Maryland, Tony says "Great; thanks; we'll take it from here," and Peter interferes then and gets the suit taken away then — though, obviously, that would have made the Washington Monument scene go very differently.
  • After this, the film continues basically like it did anyway, and the climax goes down pretty much just like it did in the movie, 'cause that was honestly really great.
  • And after the climax, Tony still invites Peter to be an Avenger, and Peter probably still says "Thanks, but I think I need more training." Or possibly it's more low-key; maybe Tony shows up with Peter's new suit in hand and is like "Hey, you did great. You're still technically in training, 'cause you're a minor and probably shouldn't be doing full-time heroing, but you get to go on missions with me sometimes now. Speaking of which, suit up." That would lose the impact of Peter's choice, but I think it would still work thematically.
  • Aaaaand there you go. Spider-Man: Homecoming as rewritten by me.
• Ok, for those of you who didn't want to read spoilers: those are over now. MOVING ON.

• In other movie-watching news: I'm trying to figure out how I feel about western movies.
• See, my dad really likes western movies (specifically John Wayne western movies), and I like the idea of westerns (to the degree that I had a whole subplot in one novel that was basically "how close can I get to a western in a medieval-ish fantasy setting?"). But the only western movie I'd watched until recently was the original The Magnificent Seven, which is a good movie with great character development . . . culminating in the death of a lot of the characters I really liked.
• Needless to say, this did not make me feel terribly inclined to watch more westerns.
• However, my dad recently bought a collection of old John Wayne movies and wanted to watch some of them. And I was feeling bad about having judged an entire genre off of one work, so I said I would watch a couple of John Wayne movies before I went back to Cedarville. And that is how I ended up watching Blue Steel and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and why I'm now trying to figure out how I feel about the genre as a whole.
• (Blue Steel, for the record, was intensely unimpressive, but it was also obviously a low-quality movie with equally low-quality writing. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, on the other hand, was very well-written, very well-acted, and very well-staged. The scriptwriters and directors did an excellent job of showing you that even minor characters had lives and dreams outside of the plot, the conflict was pretty well set up . . . but certain things didn't happen like I expected them to, and I'm not sure if I like how they happened instead. Also, Tom Doniphon is problematic, but he reminds me of certain of my characters, so now I don't know how I feel about him or them. It's a problem.)
• Oh, and I watched more Star Trek. I continue to prefer The Next Generation to the Original Series, but I don't think that surprises anyone.

Life!

• I MADE PECAN PIE! Obviously this is the most important thing that happened all month.
• (It's not. But it was delicious and I'm very happy about how well it turned out.)
• Anyway. Even aside from Camp NaNoWriMo, July was pretty busy, especially the first half of the month. That's not a bad thing, but it doesn't help my ability to write.
• Independence Day was fun, but low-key: we went over to a friend's house, enjoyed some really great barbeque, and watched the DC and New York fireworks from the comfort of the friend's living room. (It had been threatening rain all day, plus no one was really that excited about going somewhere to sit in a buggy field to watch things explode, so we decided it was better not to risk anything.)
• Next on the lineup: Cow Appreciation Day! Yes, we did go to Chick-Fil-A for all three meals. But, look, if they're going to give me a free chicken biscuit or BBQ chicken sandwich or whatever and all I have to do is show up wearing a cow shirt, I will absolutely take that deal. (I mean, technically I got a breakfast burrito instead of a chicken biscuit, but my point remains.) This was also the day we went to see HTTYD3, so it was a good day all 'round, if not a terribly productive one.
• And shortly after that, my grandpa came to visit (as he usually does this time of year), so that was fun. That said, we didn't do a ton while he was here, since he's having hip problems. We did go to 7/11 on 7/11 day for free slurpees, though. And then, oddly enough, we then visited him a week or so after he left so that he and my dad could make my sister a desk hutch for Cedarville. (Why did we not just make it here? Basically, Grandpa is better set up for woodworking projects than we are, and we had to be in Pennsylvania anyway to drop my sister off for the camp she was volunteering at, so . . . why not?)
• So, yeah, that's pretty much all the event-y stuff. In non-event-y stuff: my sword is progressing fairly well. All the pieces are printed and sanded, so now I just have to epoxy them all together and paint the whole thing. I'm also toying with the idea of making some kind of sheath for it, but I don't have the skills to make a model for 3D printing . . . anyone have any suggestions?
• And, yeah, as you probably guessed from the start of this section, I've been baking! So far, I've made several loaves of sourdough bread (I still can't get it shaped right, though I'm making progress on the density problem), pretzels (twice! they were delicious), pancakes (also delicious), and pizza. I'm unreasonably proud of the pizza.
• (Also, I play Hearthstone on and off, but July was more an "on" month than an "off" one because they were running a special event and I absolutely loved their special twist on the game for the first two weeks of the month. I really wish there was a way I could play those characters outside the event, 'cause they made those particular classes two to five times more interesting than they had been. Well, three of the five did. The other two, not so much. Needless to say, this did not help with Camp NaNoWriMo, especially since the most interesting week of the special event coincided with the week in which I felt least inspired.)

August Plans!

• Mechanical Heart releases August 7! That's less than a week away! I am quite excited but also a bit stressed — more about the tour than the actual release. It should be good, though.
• On that note: you get a blog post every day next week on both my blogs. Different blog posts, even. On Light and Shadows, I'll be posting five reasons why you should read each of the Golden Braids books. Meanwhile, Dreams and Dragons will be hosting an assortment of interviews.
• And after that, I will probably take a week or two off of blogging, both because I'll be tired from the blog tour and because I'll be headed back to Cedarville the week after my book releases!
• This semester should be pretty solid on the whole. I don't have any classes that I'm dreading, though I am nervous about some of my graphic design classes — I've heard that the professor is tough. But, hey, I get to learn how to make fonts, so that's exciting. Plus, I get to take a creative nonfiction class, which was one of the creative writing courses I was most disappointed out missing back when I decided not to do a creative writing minor.
• Besides that, August will mostly be occupied with trying to finish up projects: the draft of Blood in the [Something], the first month or two of my D&D campaign, my sword, my knitted cloak (or, part of it, anyway), a few other dorm items, and so on.
• Also, I need to get back to the whole reading-all-the-books thing. And I have shows I want to watch.
• So, yeah.

How was your July? What are your plans for August? Which title do you think sounds better, Blood in the Earth or Blood in the Soil? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
-Sarah (Leilani Sunblade)

Hello, friends! In case you haven't noticed, the month of March is almost over, and April is almost here. And that means . . . you know it . . .

I've participated in every Camp NaNoWriMo event I could since 2012 or 2011, one of the two, and I'm not about to stop now — especially since I need the extra motivation to finish certain projects. (Mechanical Heart edits/rewrites are taking so storming long. I blame politics.) However, I'm also pretty sure that this round of NaNo-ing will be more difficult than some of the other times I've done it. I'm busier; I have more stressful classes; and I'm having trouble with my project but I don't have time to take a real work-on-something-else-to-reset-my-brain break. I know others are in the same boat, so I thought I'd give us all a hand by posting some Camp NaNoWriMo encouragement for the month.

(Also, on a housekeeping note: because I would like to not die of stress, I will probably take a blogging mostly-hiatus for the month of April. I'll post Doings next Friday-ish, but that's about it.)

Camp NaNoWriMo Encouragement

1. There's a reason you're writing your story. There is a purpose to the fact that you are writing this story at this time. You probably have your own reasons for writing what you do, whether you just want to have fun or you're trying to finish a to-be-published book before its deadline. But there are other reasons too; there are plans at work beyond your own. So whatever you're writing, even if it's the "wrong" book in some sense, there is purpose behind it.
2. Imperfect but existent is better than the imagined ideal. Or, in other words, what you write doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be written. This is something I really need to remember this month, since I'm kind of in a weird spot with my WIP. I'm writing a lot of new material, but I'm technically editing the book as a whole, so I feel pressured to make everything perfect the first time around. But I need to keep in mind that what's written can be edited and made better, but what stays only in my head does me no good, no matter how good or bad it seems.
3. The only true failure is giving up. Did you put words on your page? Did you make words you had better than they used to be? Did you sit down and try to make the words go even if they didn't cooperate? If you did any of these things, you have not failed, even if you didn't accomplish exactly what you intended.
4. You are capable of more than you think. The only thing easier than overestimating your abilities is underestimating them. We so easily say "Oh, no, I can't do that; that's too big a challenge for me." And sometimes that's true — sometimes there is a story you're not ready to write or a goal that's too much of a stretch. But those situations are rarer than you think. And here's the thing: for me, at least, if I say "I don't know if I can do this, but I'll try anyway," I often succeed. Even if I don't, I learn more from trying than I would from doing nothing.
5. Camp NaNoWriMo is an adventure. Here's the thing about adventures: they're never easy. If they were, they wouldn't be adventures. But the challenges in adventures always mean something; they're never purposeless. And, y'know, every adventurer has bad days — it's not all ponie rides in May sunshine, as anyone who's read The Hobbit knows. But, as we also know from that book, even dragons have their endings, and bad days don't last forever.

In conclusion, whether you're pumped and ready for Camp NaNoWriMo or not at all ready but hoping to give it your best shot, don't forget that it's an adventure and you need to give yourself grace for the bad days and take full advantage of the good days. Best of luck, and may the words flow easily from your pens!
Thanks for reading!
-Sarah (Leilani Sunblade)

November + December 2018 Doings!

So, yeah, I missed the November Doings! post. I blame finals or something. And now I get to sum up two months in one post at the busiest time of year. Why do I do this to myself? Oh well.

Writing!

• Mechanical Heart basically consumed my life for the last two months, as far as writing goes. In my second rewrite, I planned to rearrange a few scenes, give Josiah's sister a slightly bigger roll, and expand a few scenes and elements so things would flow more slowly. The story would expand by maybe five chapters maximum, and I'd be done in about a month.
• Obviously, though, that didn't happen! Instead, I doubled the length of the story, added a bunch of new scenes and possibly a new subplot (I can't remember for sure how much of any subplot was in the original), and spent waaaay too much time making it all happen.
• For what it's worth, I do think the story is much better for the changes. I just I wish I'd been able to finish a little faster, especially because I still need to write several of my Actual Writing Job short stories. (Thankfully, I already have those plotted, so all I have to do is actually write them.)
• Oh, and I wrote three different holiday specials: "A Symphony of Thanks" and "The Promise Star," both of which I've posted on my blog already, and a New Year's special that will go up tonight at midnight. I enjoyed writing all of them; it's nice to work on something so short and contained after spending so much time on longer pieces. I think the New Year's special was my favorite, but that's mostly because I find the concept pretty amusing.

Reading!

• November and December were actually relatively good reading months, despite (or perhaps because of) how busy I was. I actually ended up doing a lot of rereading, which is kind of a rarity. Around mid-November, I reread the Raven Cycle — don't ask me why, but I certainly don't regret my decision. There was a lot more of certain content than I remembered — or maybe I just ignored it before. I don't know. I still enjoyed the series a lot, though. Then, once I got back home on Christmas break, I reread all of Donita K. Paul's DragonKeeper and Chiril books. I used to love the series, but I hadn't read them in years, and I wanted to know how well they'd hold up. Thankfully, I actually enjoyed most of them more now than I remembered, especially the last two DragonKeeper Chronicles.
• On the downside, I want a minor dragon more than ever now. But I'm used to that.
• I did read quite a few new books, though! The best of these were Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom, which I talked about in my End-of-Year Book Freakout last Friday. Close behind was the Five Poisoned Apples collection. It's an excellent set of short stories, each better than the last. I think "Red as Blood" was my favorite, with "Fairest One" and "Snowbird and the Red Shoes" close seconds. And, to be honest, I can see now why Blood in the Snow didn't make it into the collection — it focuses on a slightly different aspect of the tale than most of these stories do, and it shares some significant elements with another story that absolutely deserves to be in there. That's not to say that Blood in the Snow is worse or better than any of the stories, just that it wouldn't have fit as well with them.
• My third-favorite read of these past two months was Skyward, Brandon Sanderson's new YA release. I will admit that I wasn't as thrilled with it as I hoped to be. Sanderson came through on what he promised: a strong and stubborn heroine, a fascinating sentient spaceship, epic space battles, and a pretty cool space academy. Plus, he gave us some pretty great female friendships — always a plus. But a few elements of the story fell a little flat, and certain characters and elements seemed a little more expected than you'd typically find in a Sanderson novel.
• We round out the month with Dagger's Sleep and Christmas in Talesend. The latter is a fun collection of Afterverse Christmas stories that I read on Christmas Eve and thoroughly enjoyed. The former is a mixed bag of a Sleeping Beauty retelling by Tricia Mingerink. The storyline and concept were great, and I liked most of the characters . . . but not all of them. Plus, the worldbuilding bugged me a lot. Still a good read, but not a great one.

Watching!

• I actually watched a pretty wide variety of stuff these last two months: some Doctor Who, a few episodes of Miraculous Ladybug, the last of the first arc in Sword Art Online, and a lot of random Studio C, Door Monster, and It's a Southern Thing. I enjoyed most of it, and I'm quite glad that I discovered the Door Monster YouTube channel. They make mostly geeky D&D and video game-based sketches and they're just really fun.
• On a less cheerful note, unless anyone can convince me otherwise, I think I might be giving up on Doctor Who. I managed another few episodes — the one with Dickens and the ghosts, the first Dalek episode, and Satellite 5 — but I keep getting frustrated with the show, the characters, and the storylines. If I'm giving up too soon, please tell me, but otherwise? I have other things I'd rather watch.
• Also: PART SIX OF JOURNEY TO THE WEST HAPPENED! I've basically been waiting for part six for literal months. (Was it worth the wait? Yes. 500%. And you should go watch the whole series; you can find the playlist here.)
• I also learned that, if you're going to start an anime, you should sure there's an English version available (or at least English subtitles). On a completely unrelated note, Re:Creators on Amazon Video doesn't meet either of those qualifications.
• Most of what I've watched recently, of course, has been Christmas movies: some I watch every year (like White Christmas and Grinch) and some that I haven't watched in years: the Barbie Nutcracker and the first two VeggieTales Christmas videos. (What? I had knitting to do, and I needed something short.) Let me say, the VeggieTales ones are seriously underrated and a lot more fun than the last time I remember watching them. I think I may need to add them to my list of movies I watch every Christmas. We'll see.

Life!

• I literally remember next to nothing about November. I think I spent most of the month in a state of perpetual NaNo-and-school-induced stress. Um . . . I drew dice and pencils a lot for 2D Design. That happened.
• I went to the Ayo dance org's fall showcase midway through November. That was fun, though I enjoyed last year's show better. This year's show involved a lot of swing dance, which was cool, but I didn't enjoy the songs nearly as much.
• Also in November was the art and design org's Clay Night, an event in which all the people not in the ceramics class got to head down to the ceramics lab and learn how to do hand-thrown and wheel-made clay creations. I had mixed results with most of my creations, and I struggled more with the wheel than I thought I would . . . but I still want to do it again. (I really wish I had the time and money to try stuff like this out for more than just a night — during this semester, I've had the chance to experiment with a lot of media, but I didn't have enough time with any of them to decide to turn them into a long-term hobby. Not that I have a lot of money for them even if I did want to do them long-term . . .)
• And there were the PWID internship reports, of course. This year, I was giving a report, not just listening, which made the event mildly more interesting but also much more stressful. I don't think I sounded half as professional as I wanted to, and the fact that I initially went to the wrong building didn't help — PWID events are usually in the same room as our classes are, but this year we had so many people that we had to use a room in the BTS. I think it turned out all right, though.
• Then, in December, everything was either CHRISTMAS or FINALS. I honestly think they both caused me about the same amount of stress. I only had one actual final, but I had really big final projects in all my other classes: a fifty-minute group presentation, a website redesign and rewrite (thankfully, I was only really responsible for the rewrite; my partners handled the design), two infographics, a logo, and eight art pieces on the theme of pencilness.
• Once again, I covered Campus Christmas Open Dorms for the college paper — but this time I both took photos and wrote an article. That was an interesting adventure. I was really impressed with my hall's setup as well. We decided to theme our hall after Clue and had a whole interactive mystery set up. I was pulled in to help write the storyline and dialogue, which turned out a bit more stressful than I expected (mostly because the other writer didn't get me the information I needed until a day or two before the actual event . . . gah!). Still, it worked out, and I think it's the best Campus Christmas my hall has had in the time I've been there.
• I also spent a lot of time knitting and crocheting, making Christmas presents for my hallmates. I'm not going to say what they were because some of them read this blog and left before I could give them their gifts . . . but I am happy with how they turned out in the end.
• And my roommate and I made gingerbread! Which turned out super yummy but also sparked a discussion about the uses of molasses that left me astonished. (I maintain that it is delicious on biscuits at breakfast. She's never heard of such a thing and wouldn't try it if you paid her. But it's fine. Part of the problem is that the only molasses she knows is baking molasses, not sorghum molasses, which is lighter, sweeter, and far superior.)
• Of course, I had Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks, which means I got to spend a lot of time at home, enjoying the company of my family. I introduced them to Codenames, we ate much good food, and I very much appreciated not having to go to class. Plus I had time to do a lot of reading, which makes me happy.

• And we went to Mount Vernon, which I haven't been to since I was, like . . . six-ish. We weren't allowed to take pictures inside the actual house, which was disappointing, but the tour was still very interesting. I think it'll be helpful for story research as well — even without taking pictures, the memory is a good reference for how locations in one of my book series might look.
• Then we had Christmas itself! My grandpa came down for the holiday, and that meant that my mom made ladylocks (otherwise known as an absolutely delicious type of pastry cookie). He arrived Sunday, and on Monday we went to our church's Christmas Eve service, which was insanely crowded — in fact, we intended to go at 2:00, but even though we arrived on time, we couldn't find seats! We ended up coming back at 3:15 to get seats for the 4:00 service. It was worth the wait, though: very well-presented and moving.
• And now we just have by Bible Study's New Year's Eve party tonight, which is always a good time, if sometimes a little overwhelming.

January Plans!

• I head back to college in about a week and I still don't have my books. I'm more than a little stressed about this. But I'm excited about my classes next semester! I have two honors seminars on interesting topics, Tech Tools 1 (a class on different graphic design programs — all of which I know how to use to some degree already, but that means I can really dig into the projects), Instructional Design 2 (which should hopefully confirm whether or not instructional design is a good career option for me), Web Design (which is apparently online instead of in the classroom; I'm nervous), and User Experience (which I'm also stressed about but is with a professor I like, so it's fine). Also, I have no actual classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which is going to be super weird but also should give me plenty of time to work on projects.
• I'm also excited to get back to D&D. My character just leveled up again at the end of last semester, which means I get to choose her Sacred Oath — basically, it's character development and new special powers. And I'm enjoying the group I'm in, even though it's a little more combat-focused than I expected. (Honestly, that's probably for the best, since I'm still a little awkward about talking in character.) Also, I now only need one more level before I get to start dual-wielding, and that's exciting.
• As far as writing goes, I'll probably talk about my plans a little more when I do my goals post for the year (probably coming on Friday). In the short term, though, my main project is the remainder of my Actual Writing Job short stories, which need to be written, edited, and submitted very soon. After that, I'll get back to longer projects.
• Other than that, I don't have a lot of plans for this month. Classes and orgs will likely proceed as usual. In my spare time, I'll read, write, and hang out with my roommate and hallmates as much as possible. I'd like to get to the gym more often and do more watching of shows with my roommate, but we'll see how those work out.

So, that's my last two months. What about you? What have you been up to? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
-Sarah (Leilani Sunblade)   

NaNoWriMo 2017 Day 10!

 

Wordcount: 13,645
Words Written Today: 1,849
Hours of Writing Today: 1.02
Writing Music Obsession: My Anime/Asian Playlist

“And what good does it do for him to notice a goose girl?” Baili clutched her staff, almost— almost— wishing to whack the other girl over the head. “In my current state, I am nothing to him, just as you keep pointing out all of us animal keepers are to the nobility!”

“Maybe so. But you are the fairest nothing in the land, and that will count for something. At the very least, his highness may begin to wonder why a goose girl is lovelier than his loveliest of brides.”

I am very, very surprised by how well NaNoWriMo is going. I worried that I'd have trouble fitting in a solid hour of writing per day, but I've actually had several days when I've gone significantly over an hour. My wordcounts are building up equally well; I have 17.5K words edited and so I'm over halfway done. Not as close to being fully done as I might have been had I stuck closer to the required wordcount for the contest, but oh well . . . At the moment, I'm not stressing too much about trying to cut down wordcount or rework the plot to make it shorter. I'm just trying to get down a more polished version of what I originally wrote (although there is one scene that I'm 99% sure I won't type out, at least not in the main document, because I knew I was going to cut it before I even wrote it). Then, once that's done, I'll go though and cut and rearrange and make every word justify its existence.

In terms of the story itself, everything's going magnificently. I finally brought in the prince (and remembered that I really need to try to get him in earlier when I do my second round of edits), and then two of my characters had a massive row. It was very fun for me to write, since it essentially signals that Baili has reached her snapping point, when she's done with just enduring and ready to fight for what's hers. Plus, it was very cathartic for the characters involved, especially since one of them has been carrying around a lot of bitterness for a very long time and this is where she really starts to heal from that.

We'll see if I can keep this pace up for the rest of the month. I have to start work on final projects pretty soon, which will take up a lot of time. On the other hand, one of my classes is essentially canceled for the next week, which gives me a fair bit of extra time to work on that class's final paper, and I have Thanksgiving break the week after that (yay!). Whatever happens, I'm looking forward to it.

If you're doing NaNoWriMo, how's it going for you? If not, how's school treating you? Also, how do you feel about writing character conflict? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for stopping by!
 -Sarah (Leilani Sunblade)

October 2017 Doings!

Oh, look! It's November, the best month of the year! (Well, one of the best months, anyway. April and September are pretty nice too.) October, though? October can be great, but sometimes— this past October, for instance— it can be a pretty mixed bag. Don't get the wrong idea; it wasn't a bad month . . . but it was a pretty tiring one.

Writing!

• The thing about college . . . if I don't have either a deadline or a challenge to meet, I don't write. I want to write. I carry my notebook around in hopes that I will write. But things that don't have deadlines, or that have very distant deadlines, tend to get pushed to the side in favor of everything that's due this week. And I apparently have a knack for taking on projects that end up more complicated or time-consuming than they're supposed to be, which doesn't help matters at all.
• That said, I managed to edit the first two and a half chapters of Blood in the Snow during the first half of October. 4K words down; probably-25K words to go . . . (Well, actually a little less at the time I write this, but that's November news.)

Reading!

• My reading for October has been mostly dominated by C.S. Lewis's books— which is a good thing! I started the month by rereading The Silver Chair so I could give a presentation for it in one of my classes. Then I also reread Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra for the same reason. I haven't read the Space Trilogy in years— not since I was in my fairly early teens and mildly obsessed with Dekker's Circle Trilogy. As you might expect, I didn't really get it the first time, although I did enjoy it. I liked it even more this time around, and I actually look forward to reading That Hideous Strength as soon as I have time. I actually think I prefer Out of the Silent Planet to Perelandra, although most people seem to like Perelandra better. I can understand why; Perelandra is an amazing book; it's theologically rich, with a fascinating concept, deep themes, and a surprisingly high-stakes conflict. I know and appreciate all that, and I do genuinely love the book; it's become one of my favorites. However, I also like stories and exploring new worlds and new peoples, and Out of the Silent Planet gives me a little more of that and a little less theological argument, and so I suppose it's just easier for me to enjoy. And I feel quite uncultured and unspiritual for saying so, but it's the truth all the same.
• I also took my first step into Lewis's nonfiction this month with Mere Christianity and quite enjoyed that as well. Lewis covers a surprisingly broad range of topics, he explains them well, and he presents his message in a friendly, familiar style that makes even complex concepts understandable and enjoyable to read about. At times while reading the book, I felt as if I were sitting with Lewis and a few friends beside the fire on an autumn evening, each of us with a cup of tea and Lewis with his pipe, listening to Lewis talk. Other times, mostly when Lewis made a particularly dry and sarcastic comment, or when he covered an especially difficult concept, I felt like I was sitting in a really good lecture by my favorite philosophy-and-Bible professor. Both are good things. The content of the book, of course, was top-notch. I could probably write a whole post, or a whole series of posts, just going over different insights that stood out to me.
• My only non-Lewis book this month was Before She Ignites, which I read and reviewed for my college newspaper. I was surprised how much I enjoyed the book! A lot of really hyped mainline fantasy and sci-fi ends up disappointing me because of content or overwhelming romance or annoying characters. But Before She Ignites had surprisingly little romance and plenty of intrigue, diversity, mystery, drama, and worldbuilding, along with great characters and excellent handling of real issues. There weren't as many dragons as I expected, but I'm ok with that. And, ok, yes, the main character could be a touch naive and helpless at times, but she made sense and grew past those things, so it was all good, and I would definitely recommend the book.

Watching!

• Still watching Fairy Tale. My opinions on the show haven't really changed much, although I enjoy it more and more as I watch it, become increasingly attached to the characters, and get used to how the episodes generally play out. And apparently we're about a fifth of the way through, according to my roommate, so we might finish by the end of the school year. We'll see.
• However, I have rather mixed feelings about the last two arcs. The first one was Erza's backstory, which is good- Erza is one of my favorite characters, she has an interesting past, and it was an exciting storyline- but at the same time, it was kind of depressing in parts and featured altogether too much of the "No! I must do this alone! I must sacrifice myself to save you!" variety of dramatics. Then the second arc involved one of my least favorite characters getting a his well-deserved punishment, plus lots of cool magic, a super fun teamup on the part of Loke and Lucy (who I ship very hard, by the way), and a focus on one of my favorite minor characters whose name I don't know how to spell. On the other hand, it also involved betrayal and characters turning other characters against each other, so . . . yeah. That happened.
• As for the arc we're currently in, I'm not sure how I feel about it, but I met Wendy (one of my roommate's favorite characters) and quite like her. All things considered, she's one of the more accurate depictions of a 12-year-old that I've encountered in fiction.
• So, yeah. I haven't really watched anything besides Fairy Tale, but I haven't had much time to. We'll see whether or not that changes next month.

Life!

• Basically, October has mostly consisted of running around, trying to do all the things, because right around Fall Break is generally when professors decide to throw everything at you. In the course of four weeks, I've presented on two C.S. Lewis books, written two book responses and one report, edited a group essay, taken my first English exam, created, perfected, and presented my professional portfolio, and created various and sundry design projects for Visual Rhetoric. On the upside, that's roughly half, possibly two thirds, of my big projects for the year out of the way. On the downside, I don't feel any less busy now.
• Oh, and on top of all that, I also wrote my first book review for my college newspaper and took my first photo assignment! I covered the Women's Ultimate Frisbee team practice, which I figured would be pretty fun. While I have no interest in sports, I have friends on the team, and I've had success with action photography in the past. Then my dad pointed out that the lens I had on campus wasn't exactly ideal . . . but I got the shots I needed and had a good time doing it, so it's fine.
• Fun or not, though, I was more than ready for Fall Break when it came around. I went home with my roommaate again, and we spent the first two days of break crafting our costumes, which I posted about on Tuesday, and eating yummy homemade food (like sausage potato chowder and legit homemade donuts). Then, on Saturday, we went to her grandparents' house to celebrate her grandmother's birthday, which was fun and involved fireworks and more delicious food (namely apple and pecan pie- I've been craving pecan pie for literally a year now and I finally got some and it made me happy). And if I seem a little food-obsessed . . . well, my college's cafeteria is in the country's top ten for a reason, but it still gets old after a while, especially when they keep serving my least favorite things and never seem to have my favorites. Plus, as I mentioned, pie. And donuts. Both homemade. Those deserve as many mentions as I can give them, arguably.
• On the other side of the spectrum: I'm still doing Martial Arts and very much enjoying it. It's actually a really great stress reliever, which I didn't expect. I mean, it's hard and tiring and sometimes I wonder if I'm doing anything right and if I'm ever going to actually improve, and I never can get my stance quite right for my forms. But at the same time, martial arts force me to slow down a little, to think a little more about what I'm doing, and it makes me feel like I've accomplished something (which is invaluable when I spend so much time working on long projects). So, yeah. No matter how busy I get in the next few months, I'm not quitting this.
• Speaking of stress relievers: my church's Bible Study has finally started up again! We're going through 1, 2, and 3 John, and I think it'll be interesting. We have an actual book this year, as opposed to just talking through a chapter or two a week, so we'll see how that works out. I'm excited to be back, though. Even though we lost a few people from last year, it's a great group and we also have good (if sometimes weird) discussions.

November Plans!

• It's NaNoWriMo! I'm going Rebel this year and not starting a new novel. Instead, I'm rewriting Blood in the Snow so I can submit it to Rooglewood Press in December. Not only do I think this will be a more achievable goal for this year, it's more practical. I need to get this done soon; I don't need to start another novel, especially since I have so many already that need edited. For maximum effectiveness, minimal stress, and easy conversion to NaNo-winner-dom, I'm actually tracking and recording my time spent rewriting, rather than my words. (Well, I'm still tracking my words, but I'm not recording them on the NaNo site.) My official goal is to spend 25 hours rewriting this month. My hope is that a time-based goal will help me keep writing even when I would normally allow myself to stop on days when the words flow well, but will also keep me from getting too stressed when I'm stuck and can't accomplish as much as I want. Also, I don't actually know how long Blood in the Snow is, so I don't want to set a word-based goal and then have it not be enough.
• Of course, besides big writing projects, I also have final projects in most of my classes. Most of those aren't due until December, of course, but I need to start them sooner rather than later. The exception is my final project for my portfolio class, which is basically a series of mock interviews, and which is happening this week and next week. I've finished my phone interviews— huzzah!— and those actually went fairly well. Now all I have to do is survive the face-to-face ones . . .
• Because of NaNoWriMo and the start of final projects, regular blog posts may or may not go on hiatus during this month. That said, I also may or may not post occasional NaNoWriMo updates, potentially featuring snippets, so . . . yeah. I'm not sure you're really missing out.
• I'm also starting work on Christmas presents already. I'm a firm believer in keeping holidays separate, even if certain people who I know occasionally try to start Christmas music in September. However, Christmas presents I'll start thinking about as early as I please. There's no reason to restrict giving to one season, and when you handmake gifts, you can't always wait until after Thanksgiving to begin. That's just a recipe for stress, even if you can make a hat in about a week.
• Of course, Thanksgiving is only three weeks away, which means the certain people don't have long to wait before I'll gladly join in on the Christmas music . . . and which means I get to go home! I don't want to say I can hardly wait, because that implies a conscious eagerness, and often I'm too busy to think about how much I want to be home— which is a good thing, don't get me wrong. If I spent all my time thinking about how I'm not home, I'd be miserable. Besides, I like being at Cedarville and spending time with friends and going to class and all that. But at the same time . . . I miss home, and I miss my family, and I want to be back.
• Other than that, I don't have any real plans for November . . . but I don't exactly need other plans either; I have plenty to keep me busy.

How was your October? Do you have any plans for November? Are you doing NaNoWriMo, and if so, what's your project? When do you think you can start the Christmas season? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
 -Sarah (Leilani Sunblade)
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June 2017 Doings!

Wow. That was a long month. On the upside, that means I've got plenty to say here. On the downside . . . are we sure that was just one month? We are? Ok then. Guess that means I'd better get started on this post, 'cause there's a lot that happened since my last Doings!.

Writing!

• Did I actually beat both my writing and editing goals for June? Yes I did!
• Well, more or less, anyway. I wrote almost two new scenes for Destinies and Decisions, so that counts towards both writing and editing. I'm quite happy with the scenes, but I think I need to cut down one of them, because Ariana's backstory and me trying to create culture kind of took over everything and it's sort of sidetracking the actual point of the scene, which is that someone is getting poisoned.
• And then I got tired of working on Destinies and Decisions (or possibly just didn't want to face the fact that I need to cut down that scene), so I went back to working on Fight Song and edited about two chapters, took a couple weeks off, and edited another two chapters. So now I have about a month's worth of buffer, which means that I should be able to post chapters regularly all through Camp NaNoWriMo. Which is this month. What even.
• I also started compiling worldbuilding information about my different worlds on my phone so I'm not just storing it all in my head and a notebook that I usually forget to take places with me. At the same time, I'm working out how I can connect my major storyworlds into a multiverse, since I've already established that several different stories have multiple worlds and that'll save me some trouble later on because I won't have to keep inventing new worlds when people worldhop; I just have to decide which existing world best suits my needs (and, if necessary, create a new continent in that world because so far, there's exactly two worlds where I have sort of established that there's multiple continents and exactly zero where I've developed those other continents). But that also gives me the opportunity to do cameos and crossovers if I want, which I think could be super fun. Even without those, it's been pretty cool working out how the different worlds relate to each other in terms of magic levels and when they were created and how much people travel to and from them, plus I realized that one of the worlds that's I've only mentioned and haven't actually visited would logically be either pretty sci-fi or pretty dystopian or both and now I'm super excited to write a story set there, if only I had more time.
• Of course, if I spent a little less time on Pinterest and Candy Crush and a little more time editing and writing and stuff, I probably would be able to get a lot more done. But oh well.

Reading!

• Huzzah for another good reading month! All but four of those books I read during my hiatus, which isn't surprising; I almost always get a lot of reading done in the mountains. It's a definite highlight of June.
• The other highlight of the month was reading The Masked City and The Burning Page, which, if you missed my post yesterday, are the sequels to The Invisible Library and are every bit as awesome. I seriously cannot rave enough about this series; it's all kinds of fabulous and unlike some of my other favorites, the books are short enough to read in an afternoon. I would say more, but you're going to hear me rave about them a fair bit when I do my Mid-Year Book Roundup, so . . .
• Going back to the start of the hiatus, I intended to go on a Great Dekker Reread. About five years ago, I counted Dekker as one of my favorite authors, mostly because of the Circle and Paradise trilogies. However, I hadn't read his books in a while, so I decided to reread them and see how they held up. Sadly, it wasn't great. I still enjoyed the Circle trilogy the most, but compared to Sanderson and Stengl and Tolkien, his books feel almost shallow, driven too much by emotion and passion to suit me. (Don't get the wrong idea; there's still some excellent stuff in there, including some unique ideas and a fantasy world that's a nice change from the standard medieval Europe setting. They just aren't as great as I used to think they were.) Saint suffered more; it's supposed to be a thriller, but this time around, I didn't get much of a thrill. The best part of the book was honestly the villain, which is something I don't say very often. As for Showdown and Sinner . . . Well, I DNF'ed Showdown after remembering how annoying most of the characters are and how ew-please-no creepy Marsuvees Black is, and once I did that I didn't bother with Sinner.
• All that said, while I don't love Dekker's books as much as I used to, I'm glad I read them when I did. They shaped who I was then, and just as importantly, they shaped my writing and led to some of my favorite stories I've written. Without the Circle trilogy, I would have no Berstru Tales because Rachelle wouldn't exist. Without Saint, well, Between Two Worlds would probably still exist but it wouldn't be the same story it is today. So, yes, I'm not the fan of these that I once was, but I still owe their author a great deal.
• Aside from invisible libraries and not-so-great rereads, the rest of the month's books were good, but not spectacular. As expected, I quite enjoyed Beggar Magic (steampunk! mystery! fun friendships!), The Lord God Made Them All (an excellent end to the series of biographies, particularly since we get to meet Herriot's kids), and Thief of Time (Discworld weirdness, as usual, but there's Susan and there's time-related powers, so that's awesome). More of a surprise were Dragonwatch (which I didn't expect to like as much as I did), Heidel (which is officially my new favorite of the Nine Princesses novellas), and The Creeping Shadow (which definitely redeemed the angst of the previous book). The only new-book disappointment of the month was Coralina, since it's really hard to enjoy a book when you can't root for the heroine through most of it.
• On a final book-related note: I also listened to an audio drama of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which was fun. I was already familiar with the story, having listened to a heavily abridged kids' version of it many times when I was younger, which was a good thing because sometimes the voices were rather difficult to keep straight. I enjoyed the story, and I'm quite pleased to have slightly expanded my Shakespeare experience . . . even if some of the lines I remember best are, quite honestly, Helena and Hermia's fabulous insults for each other in one particular scene.

Watching!

• Has been canceled because I had no time to watch anything in June. I thought about re-watching Avengers: Age of Ultron and found a site where I can watch Agents of Shield, Agent Carter, and Serenity, though. So that's something?

Life!

• The month started out with my yearly hiatus/cabin camping trip. As usual, that was a lot of fun. While I love the internet and technology and wouldn't want to live without it, it's nice to take a break now and then and enjoy nature. We did plenty of hiking (though not as much as we have in some previous years) and shooting, I took lots of pictures (which I still need to edit), we roasted marshmallows, all that fun stuff. I think this was actually one of our better trips; the weather was surprisingly nice, which meant we spent much less time walking in mud and debating whether or not to go out and risk the rain and freezing while Daddy set up to take pictures at some scenic overlook, and much more time enjoying ourselves.
• As usual, on our way back from camping, we stopped at my grandpa's house for a couple days to rest and recuperate and do laundry before making the long drive home. While we were there, we drove into Pittsburgh for an afternoon. We didn't do much there, just walked along Mount Washington and rode the incline and, once again, took lots of pictures. Again, I still need to edit them . . . in my defense, I've been busy, plus my mouse broke a few months ago and I was waiting until they went on sale for back-to-school to get a new one.
• And then we got home! Finally! We were all pretty tired, and we knew we'd be traveling again in about a week, so you'd think we just stayed comfortably at home until that next trip. Right?
• Wrong! Because that Tuesday, look where we went . . .
  
  
• That's right, Niagara Falls! When I was younger, I really wanted to see Niagara Falls, but we were in Virginia and we never made it up there. But in New York, we're close enough to make a day trip out of it . . . in the sense that we were back home within 24 hours of when we left, anyway, not in the sense that we got back home the same day. We did all the usual things: walked around to the different overlooks, went through the Cave of the Winds (which is not actually a cave but which was cool enough to make up for that disappointment, because you're almost right under the falls in some spots), rode the Maid of the Mist (also very cool, and the falls look waaaay bigger from the bottom), took lots of pictures, all on the American side and all before dinner. Then after dinner . . .
  
  
• I went to Canada! Which is mostly just exciting because it was the first time I'd been out of the USA, not because Canada was all that remarkable, at least the bit I saw. It honestly seemed a lot like the USA, just with more French and a different view of the falls. (On that topic: I will admit that Canada has the more scenic view of Niagara Falls, but you can get more exciting pictures on the US side, at least in my opinion.) That said, I'm sure Canada is much more exciting when you're more than a mile from the border. And we did get to see fireworks over the falls while we were there, so that was cool.
• We finally got back at 2:00 the next morning and had a couple days to rest and recuperate before leaving once again, this time for Virginia, on a Top Secret Mission. Actually, it's not especially secret because I think a few of you either know or can guess what we were doing there. But as far as anyone who doesn't know (or is an internet stalker person) is concerned, it was Top Secret. It also lasted just over a week, which was rather longer than we hoped, but that's ok because look what I got:
  
  
• If you can't read the titles: that's four Wheel of Time books, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Howl's Moving Castle (because my copy was falling apart when I got it and I found a really pretty copy of the same version), The Queen of Attolia, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Enchanted Forest Chronicles (all four books! hardcover! in really good condition!). Our trip lasted just long enough that I could go to the big library book sale that happens every July, so I ended up spending ten dollars for nine books (or thirteen, depending how you look at it), and it was marvelous. I almost got Dune as well, but decided to wait until I'd actually read the book to buy it, just in case.
• And then we went back to New York for a week of welcome rest and planning for more trips, because let me tell you, July's going to be plenty busy. Speaking of which . . .

July Plans!

• There will be much travel. I can't say more, but we're going to spend a lot of time packing, which I don't look forward to, and a lot of time in the car, which is actually sort of a good thing, because the other major thing that's happening in July is, of course . . .
• Camp NaNoWriMo! I'm working on a Snow White/Goose Girl retelling for the Five Poisoned Apples contest. I think it's going to have an Asian-inspired setting and feel, so that the whole "black as ebony, white as snow, red as blood" thing makes slightly more sense (because paleness equaling beauty was a legitimate thing in ancient China and Japan, and literally the only other way I can think of to justify it is to make Snow White a vampire and I'm not sure how well that'll fly with this contest). I'm sure I'm not the first person to come up with that idea, but oh well. Hopefully it'll turn out well; right now I'm second guessing basically everything about this potential novella. (Of course, the decision to procrastinate serious planning on it until two days before Camp NaNo started probably didn't help matters . . .)
• Those two things will probably keep me pretty busy, but if I happen to get bored, I still have plenty of summer reading to catch up on, plus some spring reading that I didn't realize was out. And there are several books I want to reread if I have time . . .
• Also, I really want to go blueberry picking, because there's a farm that does that not too far from my house in NY, and the blueberries are so much better than storebought. Plus you can pick blueberries with minimal bending down or accidentally reaching into spiderwebs or anything like that, and you can eat while you pick. And then you have fresh blueberries at home for ages afterwards. What's not to like?

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

September Doings! (What even.)

. . . A bit late, as I warned it would be. But didn't I just do one of these? For the end of August? Wasn't that just a few weeks ago? Why am I already doing September's Doings post? Where did the time go? I think something or someone's stealing it, really. It should not be October already. However, since it is, I suppose I'd better go ahead and chronicle my Doings.

Writing!

• Um. I . . . almost fulfilled a writer stereotype and wrote in a coffeeshop at one point? But I had to read Acts and catch up on what previously happened before I could actually start writing, so . . . that didn't happen.
• And I wrote a paper on whether or not objective knowledge exists and is knowable. That was interesting.
• But, yeah, I didn't get more than a few hundred, maybe a thousand, words written on both my projects combined. And editing? Ha, no.

Reading!

• So I thought I read more than this this month . . . it felt like way more. Maybe that's just because I spent so long on some of the books.
• As you can probably see from the picture, I've mostly continued on my children's lit kick, because obviously that's what you do when you go to college. Obviously.
• The highlight of my purely-pleasure-reading this month was rereading George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie, both of which were just as good as I remembered them. I also read The Golden Key and Other Stories, which was a mixed bag- The Light Princess and The Day Boy and the Night Girl were good; the other two stories I wasn't as impressed with. All the same- if you haven't read anything by George MacDonald, you need to fix that. Now. Really.
• Placing just after the George MacDonald books is The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley. I read The Hero and the Crown, the prequel to this book, last summer and wasn't terribly impressed. The Blue Sword turned out to be much better; the setting is very unique, a mix of Middle Eastern and expansionist Britain (the expansionist Britain coming in as an outpost of said expansionist-Britain-like country), and I enjoyed the story once I got through the rather slow start.
• I also finished The Odyssey, which I read for Western Lit. I was quite sad to say goodbye to Odysseus and company after having spent four weeks with them- but oh well. Again, if you haven't read this, definitely do. (I recommend the Robert Fitzgerald translation; it's easy to read but preserves the beauty of the poetry.) Another excellent book I read for school is The Lost Letters of Pergamum, a fictional correspondence between Luke (the gospel author) and a Roman nobleman. If you enjoy historical fiction or want a fairly accurate-but-enjoyable look at the early Christian church, I'd definitely recommend it.
• And another few miscellaneous books: The Mysterious Benedict Society and Savvy both I read on the recommendation of my roommate. I enjoyed both, though I wasn't wowed by either. And the second and third book in the Fairyland series were enjoyable in their characteristic dark-and-weird way. I think there's a fourth book, but I haven't been able to find it yet. Oh well.
• Not pictured: The Hobbit and The Thief, both of which I reread at the end of the month. I think this is going to be the autumn of Greek-ish things, between rereading the Queen's Thief series and all the Greek/Rome-related reading I had to do for classes.
• Also not pictured: Plato's Republic. Which I did not enjoy. At all. BUT I FINISH IT THIS WEEK THANK GOD. And the other books I have to read for that particular class all look pretty interesting. So thank God for that as well.

Watching! 

•  My roommate and I managed four more episodes of Firefly this month. We would've watched more, except we were both rather too busy. I'm enjoying it more and more, particularly now that I understand what's going on. Mal and Kaylee are probably tied for my favorite character. And the last episode we watched showed some of Simon and River's backstory, which was cool. 
• Yeah. That's pretty much all the watching we did together. But we did decide that after we finish Firefly, we want to start the BBC Merlin, and the BBC Robin Hood sometime after that. We'll see how long it takes us to get around to those . . . Particularly since my roomie pointed out to me that Merlin is five seasons long, twenty episodes to a season. So, yeah. That could take us a while.

 Life!

• So. Yeah. College. My life basically revolves around going to class and doing homework. (And trying to get to bed at a reasonable time. That's important, whatever certain people say.) 
• As previously mentioned, I wrote my first-ever college paper (not counting the ones I did for dual-enrollment classes). I think I did ok, but given the topic and the professor, I have no idea.
• The professor, for the record, is one of my favorites- he teaches philosophy and he's very smart and kind of intimidating but also rather funny (in a sarcastic way) and good at explaining things so we can understand.
• I also had my first exam in New Testament Lit (which actually happened in October- just last Monday- but it's noteworthy and it happened before this post went up, so it counts). I spent several days leading up to it panicking over whether or not I'd get my notes/study guide typed up in time for me to actually study. Thankfully, I did, and the test went very well indeed. 
• Roughly two weekends ago, my Honors mentor and I met at a local coffeeshop, and then my roomie and I went to the local thrift store. Both things were fun, and my roomie and I are thinking that coffeeshop/bakery and thrift store trips are going to become a regular thing- not every Saturday, but at least once or twice a month, weather-permitting.
• Around the middle of the month, my dad was in the area on business and stopped in to see me, which was really nice. And then my whole family came up (over? down? I have no idea how to express the direction I am from home, mostly because I just know that I'm somewhere vaguely west) for Parents' Weekend, which was even better. We had a couple meals out/off-campus, one of which was with some friends from VA, went to see some other family in the area, and generally just hung out. (And did practical stuff as well- for example, my dad helped me set up a budget now that I have an idea what kind of expenses I'm dealing with, and we installed bedrisers and an amazingly awesome bookcase/hutch in my dorm.)
• That being said, Parents' Weekend was also Homecoming, which meant there were about three million people on campus and everything was slightly crazy. But it was all good.
• And I've been exercising regularly. It's a requirement for one of my classes, but it's still highly satisfying. Also highly necessary, because the dining hall has ice cream and a few other pretty yummy desserts and it is very hard to say no to ice cream. Particularly when there's flavors like Oregon Blackberry Cheesecake and Banana Cream Pie and Deep Sea Treasure (which is caramel-on-caramel-on-caramel).
• A final random thing: a few of my hall-mates and I took the New York Times' Dialect Quiz, and apparently I talk like I'm from Florida. What even. Everyone else got fairly accurate results, so I don't know what's wrong with me.

October Plans!

• Did I mention that my life revolves around classes and homework? Because, yeah, it does.
• In that respect, things coming up this month: a paper on "what is justice" in which I plan to reference The Princess Bride in the introduction, a midterm in Honors (which I need to start prepping for soon), an annotated outline of Ephesians (which I am not at all looking forward to doing), and, of course, the usual readings and such for all the classes.
• Also I'm doing strength training with the weight machines in the gym in addition to doing cardio stuff. I actually started that today, and got through nine different machines, feeling pretty good about how I was doing . . . and then I tried the chin-up machine and basically died. Oh well. Nine out of ten isn't bad.
• You know what else is happening this month? Fall break! I'm going to stay with my roommate, and it's going to be pretty fun. We're going to watch a lot of Firefly and have a craft day and I'm not sure what else but yeah. (And we'll also need to work on schoolwork, but that's beside the point.)
• Also this month: Halloween. Which usually I wouldn't do much of anything for . . . but my dorm does a Halloween event, and so does my major, which means I get to dress up TWICE. I may or may not have been planning out ideas since September. Yeah. I'm excited.
• Plus, Lady Dragon, Tela Du is releasing this month, which is super exciting. I got to beta-read LDTD, and let me tell you, it's amazing. There'll be an actual review going up during the blog tour, but for now . . . yeah. It's a major step up from WPFP, and I love the characters (for the most part) and the story and there's just so much YES.
• NaNoWriMo is also coming up, as you all probably know. I won't be doing a whole 50K novel . . . but I do hope to go rebel and take on a somewhat smaller editing goal, just to participate and get working again. We'll see; I still need to figure it out. (On that topic: anyone want to win a NaNoWriMo survival kit?)
• . . . Speaking of which, I should probably finish Fight Song. I swear I'm going to eventually. Maybe I can manage that over fall break as well?
• And, of course, there will be much more reading done. I'm going to finish my reread of the Queen's Thief series, reread The Lord of the Rings (slowly), and hopefully pick up some new reads as well. Hopefully. We'll see how that actually works out; maybe I'll cut back on reading and work on writing in that time instead. Whether or not I do that depends if I can write on an exercise bike, though . . . We'll see what happens.
• And I'm still searching for a church. It's slow going, especially since I have to find rides to any churches I want to visit. I've found two that I kind of like, but neither feels right, I don't think . . . maybe October will be the month I find the right one?
• So, yeah. This month will be pretty busy. Let's hope I survive.

 How was your September? How's your October going? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!

-Sarah (Leilani Sunblade)