March Wrap-Up

What a month it’s been. Long and short at the same time. Up and down. It’s been a month that’s for sure. 🙂 It’s been interesting. At the beginning I wrote a post about being goal-less for a month, and it seemed to go okay.

Reading: I read 14 books this month! Hooray I feel very proud of that number, considering that I’m officially 7 books behind on my goal.  Next year I am not going to give myself such a high goal right off the bat.  I feel like it’s better for my morale to have lower goals that I accomplish and then up the goal. 😀  My favorite books this month were the 3rd and 4th volume in the Saga series.  I’m so in love with the series, I love that it’s a comic and the colors are so vibrant. And the characters are all so amazing and deep. It’s a great story. I also read and reviewed 2 books from NetGalley this month and one book from Blogging for Books.

Writing: Ooh writing.  It’s some hard shit some days. I just read a post by Topaz Winters on writing and imposter syndrome which sums up my writing month very well.  I published my first chapbook this month. It’s titled It Was and has five poems. I’m really proud of it.  I also decided to rewrite Mourning this month, I completely tore it apart. And ended up taking parts of Sappho and adding it to Mourning.  It’s been really good because I feel like Mourning now has a much more firm purpose. As far as when I’ll finish it I really haven’t decided yet. We’ll see what happens.

Blogging: Blogging was really fun this month! I did a lot of character and YA based book posts and that was lovely.  I really enjoyed talking about characters with y’all.

Life: My family visited for a week and a half-ish and that was nice. I really miss them and it’s been hard to get back into the swing of normal life. My anxiety has been really bad this month because of housemate situations. But hopefully that should all be over soon as the trouble maker is moving!  I have this app on my phone that I’m trying to use more often. It’s called Stop, Breathe & Think. I’m really liking it, it helps me reset when I get really anxious or paranoid.

So yeah that was March for me. How are you? How are your goals coming along? Let’s chat. 🙂 

Promoting Creativity: March Edition

Hey friends! Look it’s me getting blog posts out on time! *cheers* No but seriously how did it get to be the end of March already?  Anyway I’m back with another creative person!! This month I interviewed my little sister. Enjoy!

1) Tell us a little bit about what you do. 

Wow. (Chuckling nervously) A little bit? Is that possible? Okay, um… To put it very mildly, I write and draw. I write poetry, songs, random things that pop in my head, historical fiction, flash fiction, fan fiction, non-fiction, and letters to multiple pen pals. I draw, color, paint, chalk and almost anything else you can think of. I doubt I do all of these very well, but I do them enough to pass as a first grader!

2) When and why did you start writing? 

I began at about… six. My older sister Abi (you wouldn’t know her :D) had been writing for quite a while, so I was sure I could do the same. I wrote a story about a princess (what else?) Who decided to go horseback riding on her second birthday (what could go wrong) and gets lost fir sixteen years.  I was pretty proud of myself! I drew the pictures and everything.

3) Tell us about a project that you are currently working on that has you really excited.

Well, I am currently working on about… let’s see… Twenty  ideas? But, I really like my latest idea concerning a boy who escapes from the local prison… which is a cage with an ever open door. But all the inmates know from experience that they won’t leave through that door unless they’re dead. Oh yeah, till one escapes. So, he runs into a crippled kid, who he hangs out with for a while. So then, well I shouldn’t talk about the rest. Spoilers! 😉

4) What are some of your goals for the future?

I am hoping to finish a story, maybe publish it. Dunno.

5) How can we support you?

Well, you can commission me to write or draw something for you. No fee. I might change that policy, but for now, it’s good. Or you can give me writing or drawing tips. Thank you all, and thanks Abi.

Thanks so much for reading everyone! If you want to read more by my sister check out her blog here! 

Side Characters that Need More Love

Recently I’ve been doing posts about characters. I’ve talked about characters I love, characters I hate and now I want to talk about side characters that I think need their own stories.

Isla and the Happily Ever After – Genevieve Martin: I really loved her character! More than the main character Isla even. Gen seems down to earth and interesting, plus she’s bisexual which I think is awesome. I always want to see more diversity in books.

The Raven Boys – Ronan:  Oh angry Ronan. The most interesting of any of the characters I wish that Gansey would fall down dead and Ronan would become the main guy character of this series. His cool dream magic is amazing.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone – Zuzanna: Zuzanna is hilarious and loyal, she sticks by her best friend and add the comic relief that the book needs. I thoroughly enjoyed her character in the first book.

The 5th Wave – Teacup: Of all the characters in this series Teacup is the ONLY one that I felt for. Even more in the second book when so much happens to her.  Can we just rewrite the entire series and make her the main character please?

Pure Trilogy – El Capitan: He becomes the only character I cheer for at the end. And I love that in the beginning he’s a very shady character, I didn’t trust or like him at all. But by the end of the third book he fully redeems himself.

So those are just a few side characters I love.  What about you? Tell me about some of the side characters you loved more than the main character. 

 

 

Daughter of Smoke and Bone – My Feelings Are Torn

Goodreads Synopsis: Around the world, black hand prints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky. In a dark and dusty shop, a devil’s supply of human teeth grows dangerously low.And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherworldly war.

Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real, she’s prone to disappearing on mysterious “errands”, she speaks many languages – not all of them human – and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she’s about to find out.

When beautiful, haunted Akiva fixes fiery eyes on her in an alley in Marrakesh, the result is blood and starlight, secrets unveiled, and a star-crossed love whose roots drink deep of a violent past. But will Karou live to regret learning the truth about herself?

Find on Amazon and Goodreads.

It’s been almost a month since I finished this book and still every time I think about it my brain explodes a little bit.  Like where do I even start?  There is a lot about this book that I love.  In fact right up until the last fourth of the book I was going to give it four stars.  I love the world, it’s colorful and imaginative.  The book is set both in the real world in Prague and in a fantasy world.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone has angels and all sorts of creative chimaera (mixes of animals and humans).  Karou is a human being raised by a group of chimaeras and she spends her time half between art school and half hunting down teeth for the people who raised her.  Yes I said teeth.  We don’t learn till later that teeth of animals and humans are used with magic to create new bodies for the chimaera.  How cool is that?

I really liked that the angels and chimaera are at war and I like that you get to see things from both the chimaera and angel’s perspective. The war has been going on for so long and it’s really sad.  Though on that note I did dislike the POV changes.  I just don’t prefer it in general so I tried to ignore it and just like the story.  I really liked Karou’s character and her friend Zuzana.  I didn’t really like Akiva he spends his time moping about and is just generally lame.

So I loved the book and then the big plot twist was revealed and I was…surprised? Shocked? Appalled. All of the above.  I really disliked it.  I just…

SPOILERS DON’T READ IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE BOOK YET.

I didn’t like Madrigal, I just didn’t like her character at all.  And I loved Karou and so for her and Madrigal to be the same person was just…terrible. They can’t be the same person they felt so different, and now they’re the same? I just didn’t buy it. Didn’t like it…I felt disappointed and cheated.

END SPOILER.

So in the end I gave it 3.5 stars because I really liked a lot of it, and I’m reading the second book because I want to see how it all ends.

 

 

It Was – A Chapbook

A few days ago I found out about an amazing website called payhip from a fellow writer/poet.  She had just published a chapbook and after reading it my creative brain took off running.   I have hundreds of poems just laying around, some of them aren’t so good and are waiting for revisions. Some of them are great and are just waiting for a project to hold them.   So I decided to create a chapbook of my own.

 

Behold “It Was- A Chapbook” by yours truly.   For $0.50 you can buy my collection of five poems.  https://payhip.com/b/n4U2

I’m thinking about publishing a chapbook a month for five months or until I finish with Mourning.  What do you think?  I would love to hear back about my first chapbook, did you enjoy it? Is there anything I can improve on? Is the price reasonable?

Reading YA Pt2: The Possibilities Are Endless

It’s taken me forever to right this post because it took me forever to decide why I even read YA lit.   And the answer just came to me seconds ago whilst reading Paper Fury’s latest post.  So why do I read YA? In my first post I complained a lot about YA and then said at the end I was going to talk about reading what you love.  But I’m not going to write about that today. Today I’m going to expand more on why I do like reading YA.

Why do we read?  For most of us, me included, reading is a form of escape.  We read to travel to other worlds, to become the hero, or simply to get away from normal life for a bit. Reading is and always will be the most magical thing that I can do.  It’s a form of immortality, being able to live a thousand lives all while sitting at home and drinking tea.
And this is why I love YA.  Because the possibilities are endless.

I mentioned in my first post that YA made me fall back in love with reading.   But the longer explanation is this.   YA lit is much more personal than a lot of classical books. First off the language is more modern, the characters sound like me.  They say and do a lot of the things that I do or could do. That immediately gives me a much stronger tie to them than in some classic books.  It’s no longer me reading a book.  It’s me becoming the character.   I love love love this.   As a INFP personality feelings are things that I feel very strongly.  I may even be a bit addicted to feeling things.   So when I can become a character in a YA book suddenly I’m feeling the story on a whole new level.  I’m able to see the world from a different perspective. Which brings me to my second point.

YA books aren’t all about stupid teenagers pinning in love after someone.  Period.  Don’t ever say that.   Yes some YA books are romances (which isn’t a bad thing) and yes YA books are about teens.  But that doesn’t invalidate the book’s ability to teach something. All of my favorite books teach me something. That’s mostly what I look for a in a book.  A new perspective, a new idea. And I have found this in YA books.  I think that to stereotype YA literature is a very naive thing to do.  It’s hard because sometimes I feel like people judge me for reading YA.   I mean I’m almost 21, married and an adult. Shouldn’t I be reading more ”serious” things.     But I’m learning not to let this get to me.  Firstly because many YA books have very serious topics (like mental illness, racism or homophobia) and secondly why should I care? They have a right to judge just like I have the right to read.

I guess my point is this.  I need to learn to not judge YA so harshly and remember why I love it.  Reading is and always should be fun. And I hope you always have fun reading as well. 🙂

So why do you love YA?