Books Read in January

It's hard to believe that January is almost over. Where did all the days go?

I've spent the majority of the month reading, editing, and worrying about adult responsibilities. Very tiring. Even though I'm on holidays, I feel like I've never been busier. 

So, here are the first books of the year. 

1. Heart of Steel (The Iron Seas, #2) - Meljean Brooke

2. Mr Fox - Helen Oyeyemi

3. Rebel Heart (Dust Lands, #2) - Moira Young

4. Fire Spell - Laura Amy Schlitz

5. Please Ignore Vera Dietz - A.S. King

6. The Brides of Rollrock Island - Margo Lanagan *

7. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

8. Monsters of Men (Chaos Walking, #3) - Patrick Ness

9. Between the Lines - Jodie Picoult & Samantha van Leer

10. My Sister Lives on the Mantlepiece - Annabel Pitcher

11. Falling to Ash (Moth, #1) - Karen Mahoney

12. Shadows (Ashes, #2) - Isla J. Bick

13. Feast of Fools (The Morganville Vampires, #4) - Rachel Caine

14. The Farm (The Farm, #1) - Emily McKay

15. Jane Eyre Laid Bare - Charlotte Brontë & Eve Sinclair

Lazing out in the sun with the puppy

And because I'm in love with random statistics and such:

Pages: 5,328

Avg. pages: 355pgs per book

Ratings:

5 stars - 3

4 stars - 2

3 stars - 5

2 stars - 4

1 star -1

Of the above books, only one made it to my all-time favourites list: Margo Lanagan's Brides of Rollrock Island (published as Sea Hearts here in Aus). This was my first novel of hers that I'd read, and holy crap, I regret not picking up her stuff sooner. When I find the time, I plan on picking up Tender Morsels. 

Fire Spell by Laura Amy Schlitz was another book that I really loved--unfortunately it didn't make it onto the fave list, through no fault of its own, it just didn't click in that way. 

Pretty pictures make this book readable.

Another unforgettable book--for all the wrong reasons--was Jane Eyre Laid Bare. Curiosity forced me to pick it up. I love Jane Eyre. It's one of my favourite novels ever. But this... this was a monstrosity. It provided for some lol-sy entertainment, though, so I guess it served its purpose.

Other things that happened in January:

- meeting Neil Gaiman (for the second time in my life)

- getting my first tattoo

but both those two deserve their own posts, so keep an eye out in the next few days. ;)

I hope the first month of 2013 passed without any complications for everyone. And I hope February will be just as awesome as January. <3

Editing Deadline

what edits look like.

So, I'm on holidays. Nothing to do. And I just so happen to have an unedited manuscript which I can't help but dream will become a best seller.

I've come to the conclusion that I need to discipline myself and set a deadline. Since I start classes at the beginning of March, I have one and a half months to achieve my goal of finishing this latest round of edits, and send it out to my crit partners for feedback.

I'll check back occasionally to update my progress. Expect a lot of crying, hair pulling, and rants about how much editing sucks. But I shall persevere.

Wish me luck!

The Next Chapter of My Life : Now Featuring Responsibilities!

So, as you'd probably guessed from the last post, I celebrated my 21st birthday last week. This means that in America, I can drink. Not that exciting, considering I've been drinking legally here in Australia for the past 3 years, but whatever.

Being 21 also means responsibilities, and finally having to act like an adult.

Whenever I'd celebrated my birthdays in the past, the first thing anyone ever asked me was "How does it feel to be ___?"

What sort of a question is that?

Is one day supposed to change you so completely, that you're no longer the same person with the same thoughts and wishes? Is feeling nine years old different from feeling eight? To me, it all seemed to be a huge blur.

But now, I feel that the question finally makes sense.

How does it feel to be twenty-one?

Terrifying, is the short answer to that question.

It seemed that all at once, all these responsibilities and adult things suddenly sprung up, and I have to struggle to understand them, to conquer them, and to be, well, an adult.

I still live with my dad. I've never had a proper job. I have no qualifications apart from my high-school degree. I don't have a source of income. And I desperately want to move out.

There's a lot of problems with this last point. Moving out equals having money in order to actually pay for things, like food, rent, bills, and other things. It just feels like all at once, I'm being bombarded with all these responsibilities--oh gosh, when I get a job, I'll have to do TAXES. How??--and it feels suffocating. They don't teach you this stuff at school. They just expect you to have your birthday, and suddenly know what a mortgage is, how best to save money, how to pay taxes, how to get a job, how to create a routine of fending for yourself in the real world. And it's terrifying, you know?
It's even more terrifying if you're like me and have ridiculous anxiety, and worry about the smallest thing.

I have to take things in baby steps. I'm going to consider adding this to my new years resolution list, because this is important.
Firstly: get a job. Any job. Something to help me get some money, and experience, so I can start saving up to move out.
Secondly: think about moving out. My friends and I have come up with a plan (though, it may or may not even end up coming to fruition, but even if we don't stick to it, I'll be sticking to it and trying to make something of it), that in 2014 we find a place, and live together.
Thirdly: survive, I guess. I don't really know what comes next. Life? Some mysterious next step in adulthood that no one's bothered to inform me about? I don't know.

All this needs to be done while at the same time managing my other goals, studying, and generally trying to survive living.

Seems easy enough, right?

So yeah, wish me luck.

Birthday Haul

So, it was my birthday yesterday (the 9th), and I thought I might as well show off the things I got.
Note: I'll probably still get more on Saturday from my party. The only reason I like hosting parties is because I get presents out of them.

Clockwise:

4 cat mugs

a desktop monthly calendar

a weekly planner/to-do list

a leather compendium

(clearly, I'm going to be more organised this year. Right?)

Lego Lord of the Rings for the 3DS (from my boyfriend)

the fox is one of those masks that you use to keep light out when you're sleeping.

Several books.

I had a wonderful, chocolate-filled birthday. :)

Books Read in December

Ah, December has come and gone. A whole year has finally passed. December has been fantastic in terms of reading. I mean, I got 28 books read. Truth be told, though, quite a few of those were short story/novella e-books, and it helped me bump up my book count.

December is the time of the year where I hide in my room and avoid all social interactions. The Christmas season is a difficult time for me, and the only way for me to deal with it is to hide and read. I suppose I can't complain when it made me complete my challenge.

1. The Spindlers - Lauren Oliver
2. The Sacrifice (The Enemy, #4) - Charlie Higson
3. The Ask and the Answer (Chaos Walking, #2) - Patrick Ness
4. Grimspace (Sirantha Jax, #1) - Ann Aguirre
5. The New World (Chaos Walking, #0.5) - Patrick Ness
6. Errant (Killer Unicorns, #0.5) - Diana Peterfreund
7. Turn Here - Jackson Pearce
8. Clockwork Chloe - Ian Thomas Healy
9. number9dream - David Mitchell *
10. Black Spring - Alison Croggon *
11. When God Was a Rabbit - Sarah Winman
12. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
13. 172 Hours on the Moon - Johan Harstad
14. The Neverending Story - Michael Ende
15. Never Knew Another (Dogsland, #1) - J. M. McDermott
16. Snow White Blood Red (The Grimm Diaries Prequels, #1) - Cameron Jace
17. Ashes to Ashes and Cinders to Cinders (The Grimm Diaries Prequels, #2) - Cameron Jace
18. Beauty Never Dies (The Grimm Diaries Prequels, #3) - Cameron Jace
19. Ladle Rat Rotten Hut (The Grimm Diaries Prequels, #4) - Cameron Jace
20. Mary Mary Quite Contrary (The Grimm Diaries Prequels, #5) - Cameron Jace
21.  Blood Apples (The Grimm Diaries Prequels, #6) - Cameron Jace
22. Dead Girl's Dance (The Morganville Vampires, #2) - Rachel Caine
23. Midnight Alley (The Morganville Vampires, #3) - Rachel Caine
24. The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien *
25. Snow White and the Huntsman - Lily Blake
26. Ransomwood - Sherryl Jordan
27. Mystic City (Mystic City, #1) - Theo Lawrence
28. The Crimson Thread - Suzanne Weyn

So, on that note, the last monthly recap of 2012 has been posted.
I wish all my followers and readers and people-who-randomly-stumbled-upon-my-blog a fantastic new year.

2013 Resolutions

Happy New Year!

I want to focus on this new year with a positive eye and with positive goals in mind. It's important that I look after myself and my mental health.
Anyways, without further ado, here are my resolutions:

• Read at least 100 books

My goal last year was to read 200 books, and I barely made it. The only reason I actually broke my goal was because I'd read a whole bunch of short story/novella ebooks to bump up my book count. It was stressful to try to reach my goal, and I really don't want to go through that again. 100 seems like a nice, safe number. Very doable, and high enough that it'll make me feel good about myself. 

• Write at least one complete novel

As a writer, I need to constantly be writing. Duh.

Notice that the word complete is in there. Last year, I'd written one complete novel, and two novels that were a bit more than half done, but I'd kind of lost myself and abandoned it. I don't want to keep doing that.

• Get passing grades at uni

Uni is very hard for me. Because of my mental health problems, I sometimes don't have the will to get out of bed, let alone travel all the way into the city to be surrounded by hundreds or thousands of people. I struggled last year, because I skipped so many classes and lectures because of my depression/anxiety (also, I was pretty sick at one point). So, my goal this year isn't to not skip classes, because that won't help my mental health, but instead to try to do better at my coursework. If I skip a class, then I have to get ahead: do all the readings and assignments well ahead of time to make up for the lost classes.

• Keep a reading journal

I got this idea from bettielee from Far Seeing Fairy Tales, to keep a journal of all the books I've read this year, and to write short tidbits of how I felt, notable quotes, and other such stuff. It's sort of like reviewing, I guess, except that this will be a project for myself. When I reviewed books, it got to the point where I wasn't doing it for myself any more, but for my readers and for publishers, and for my GR followers. And that wasn't fun. It felt like a chore, a job. But maybe, if I do this reading journal thing, it'll open me up a bit, and get me back on track to writing a review every now and then. We'll see. 

I already have a gorgeous notebook all ready and waiting for my first entry. I'm sort of excited. :)

• Be more social

Because of my mental health problems, it's very hard to make friends, or to keep them. I have severe social anxiety that makes me keep to myself, and ignore people, because that's how I feel safest. But, in order to make and keep friends, I have to open up a bit. Just a bit. This will be a continual work in progress, and who knows, it might be one that I have to keep working at for years. 

Speaking of which...

• Work on bettering my mental health

From the amount of times I've mentioned it in this post, by now you've guessed that my mental health is a bad thing. It consumes me, in the simplest sense. 

Last year, I already took the first steps towards bettering myself by getting myself to a psychologist and getting on antidepressants to help me somewhat. The goal for this year is to find a psychiatrist that works well with me and my specific problems, and to find ways to control my compulsive habits. Like the previous goal, this is something that I need to work on in baby steps, and it may take several years to work towards.

• Finish editing FG

FG is my precious main project. It's the novel I want to get published more than anything. Problem is, I need to finish editing it. 

I'm very slow and lazy when it comes to editing. But this year, I'm going to discipline myself. I need to get better at editing on a deadline, otherwise, no agent nor publisher would want to work with me. 

Also, I'm fairly sure that my CPs are getting really annoyed at me for making them wait so long, haha. You'll get it soon, guys, I promise!

So yeah, these are my new years resolutions. In a years time, we'll see if I've kept them.

Books Read in November

November flew by so quickly, didn't it? I was so busy and overloaded with NaNo, but thankfully still managed to get a decent amount of reading done.

As always, an * indicates a favourite book.

1. Faerie Tale - Raymond E. Feist
2. God's War (Bel Dame Apocrypha, #1) - Kameron Hurley
3. There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill her Neighbour's Baby - Ludmilla Petushevskaya
4. The Amber Amulet - Craig Silvey
5. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet - David Mitchell *
6. Blood Storm (Lharmell, #2) - Rhiannon Hart
7. Carnival of Souls - Melissa Marr
8. After the Quake - Haruki Murakami
9. The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking, #1) - Patrick Ness
10. Ghostwritten - David Mitchell *
11. Every Day - David Levithan
12. Enchanted - Alethea Kontis
13. Infidel (Bel Dame Apocrypha, #2) - Kameron Hurley

The most notable books are, of course, the two books by David Mitchell. He's fairly new to me; I only picked up his most famous novel, Cloud Atlas (soon to be a movie, which is why I was so intrigued in the first place) just last month. Immediately, I was a fan. I'm now going through the rest of his books. Two books on my to-read pile for December are the last two books of his that I haven't read, number9dream and Black Swan Green. To say I'm excited is an understatement. I have high hopes for these books.

Other books I'm planning to read in December include the second and third books in the Chaos Walking trilogy. I'm going to be doing a readalong with Glaiza and Emily from Goodreads when I get back from my vay-cay.

I've got a few more Murakami books to read--I've really fallen for his surrealism--and I want to start reading some more Virginia Woolf.

Sadly, I'm still 7 books behind on my goal of 200 books for this year. I need to read 25 books during December in order to make it. Oy vey. Wish me luck!