Letter #2

Dear October,

        The internet is down campus wide and everyone is freaking out. I can’t say it doesn’t affect me: this shut-down is accompanied by the same uncomfortable feeling    in the pit of my stomach that I always get when I feel cut-off, alone. But what’s different this time is that I’m not alone. Losing access to Facebook or e-mail for a few hours doesn’t mean I’m on some secluded island where no one can reach me. I’m surrounded by people, and what’s more I’m free from the distractions that the internet so readily provides. Maybe that’s why it’s so scary when our connection goes down. We can’t be without the knowledge that distraction from reality is just a click away.

This afternoon I finished some homework in the library and then I took a walk. I like the internet because when I share things, I feel like a participant in some big important conversation. But stealing the ten minutes it took to walk around campus, I felt like a different kind of participant. The kind we become just by being alive. And October, I must say, your sunsets really are spectacular.

Laura

Song of the day: "I Will Go Anywhere With You" by Julia Nunes

Letter #1

Dear October,

        You dawned crystal clear and impossibly bright. It’s still a little warm for scarf weather, but I couldn’t resist. The last week of September was full of trips to coffee shops and impromptu celebrations with friends. After a week like that, it can be hard to be sucked back into reality, and today I was faced with a growing mountain of homework and an unexplainable restlessness. Not the best way to start a new month. But you brought other things, October. Things like the promise of a paycheck for my work in the Writing Center, and crafting the perfect last sentence of an essay. Then there’s the feeling that comes with each new beginning, like stretching your muscles after a night in cramped sleeping quarters. Suddenly you feel more awake, you have space to move, and each new experience is the world opening itself up to you, little by little.

Laura

Song of the Day: "Lost in my Mind" by The Head and the Heart

Introducing: Letters to October

Dear Readers,
       Hello there. This is different, isn't it? I am writing to inform you of a new project I am starting. It's called Letters to October, in which I write a letter to the month of October on each day of the month. Each letter will be accompanied by a picture and a song of the day. This project was mostly inspired by my favorite Youtuber Emilieofnewgloom's Letters to July series. If you watch her videos (and you should!), you have some idea of what I want to accomplish with these letters. I have always been partial to keeping journals and diaries, but they always seemed to diverge into a boring or bland recounting of events. With Letters to October I hope to capture the essence of each day, and what better time than during my favorite season, Fall. One of my favorite parts of Emilieofnewgloom's series is that we got to see July through both her and other's perspectives. I would love, LOVE to see some of you undertake this project alongside me. Consider this your formal invitation to participate and share your Letters to October on your blog or through other forms of social media. And, if you decide not to participate, I hope you will enjoy seeing October through my eyes. I, for one, am SO ready to see what it has in store.

Laura

The inspiration:

Song of the Day: 1234 by Feist
(Oh, and at the end of the month I will make a spottily playlist of all the songs from October!)

I will see you on October 1st!

I'm in College!

Hello, lovelies! There's been a bit of a scenery change since you heard from me last....

My dorm room

If you haven't guessed yet,  I'm in college! In preparation for writing this post I did a lot of thinking about how we as humans hate the idea of change, but when it happens we just sort of naturally adjust to it. I guess it's kind of a survival mechanism, something we picked up from our ancestors. But when you're in the midst of facing momentous change this is pretty cold comfort. A few weeks ago the thought of being a college student both terrified and excited (but let's face it: mostly terrified) me. I was about to be left in a place, 2,000 miles from home, and be expected to make friends and go to classes and become an adult. Yeah... 3 weeks in, and I'm definitely not that far yet. But I have changed. Or rather, I'm learning to live my life in the context of my new surroundings. Before I left for Iowa I couldn't fathom the life of a college student outside of what I've seen on television or heard from friends, but now I'm living it, because I can't not live it, and it is so much more that I expected.

My favorite study spot 

First of all there's the concept of time. In college, time is something you have way more control over than you did in high school. Of course you sill have to go to class, but everything is more broken up, and there isn't any significantly large block of time where you have to be in one place doing one thing. As a creative person, this has been semi-difficult to master. The first time I was faced with a three hour block of free time before dinner, my thoughts swam. There's so much I could do! I could work on a short story, or study for Lit class, or write letters to the people back home, or attempt to make new friends! The list went on. It's easy to become paralyzed by all the things I want to do, and end up getting nothing done. Since that first afternoon I've slowly been getting better at making time for the things that are important to me. Not to mention the fact that I've met so many wonderful people, and am learning something new on a daily basis!

Campus geese!

Okay, so what does all that mean for this blog? Obviously I have no intention of giving up on this blog anytime soon, but things are probably going to be a little sporadic (like that's anything new) until I really get the hang of this whole time management thing. I have several other projects I'm working on as well, including a Tumblr that my best friend and I made in order to keep in touch. So much of our inspiration is shared, and it would have been a shame to loose that connection because we go to school in different parts of the country (me in the midwest, she in the northeast). If you would like to check that out, you can find it under the "Collaborations" tab at the top of this page. I also have some great posts and possibly a blog-specific project planned for the future, so stay tuned for news about that!

City lights 

I guess that's all I wanted to say for now. I've never been very good at the "life update" type of posts because there is way more life than can possibly fit into these 550 words. This will just have to do for now.

Rainbow!

If you have some questions (or advice! o_o) for a newbie college student, feel free to drop them in the comment box. As always, thanks for reading :)

Review: Ready, Okay!

I finished Ready, Okay! by Adam Cadre last night after two afternoons of solid reading. This was, in part, due to the heart-wrenching downward spiral of the characters' lives, but also because I was vanquishing a year or so of book guilt by finishing it. After recommending it profusely, a friend of mine lent me her only copy of this book, and what did I do? I started reading it and then...stopped. For a really long time. I'm not sure exactly what made me put it down, but a year passed before I was able to pick it back up again, at which point I just decided to start over from the beginning. From that rocky start came one of the most powerful reading experiences I think I've ever had.

Ready, Okay! examines the lives of a handful of teenagers in suburban California. Allen Mockery (our narrator) is a jokester, amateur psychologist, and friend to those in need. Surrounding him are a host of other characters, including Peggy (his best friend), Molly (his little sister, who has some pretty strange ideas regarding clothing), Echo (his steely eyed twin), Krieg (his foul mouthed brother), and plenty more. You will meet quite a few people in this book, and all of them will surprise you. You will learn about their childhood, their family life, and their secrets. Before you know it, you will be so wrapped up in Allen's world that his friends will feel as real to you as your own. With wit, sarcasm, and probably some bias, Allen lets us in on everything, from gossip around school to his difficult family history. Even though only a few days had passed since I started the book, when I put it down I felt like I had grown up with the people between its pages. 

Allen's voice is sharp and funny and I constantly found myself laughing out loud at the things he said. True, more than a handful of the jokes were cringe worthy, but that doesn't mean that his witty comments weren't still highly entertaining. As his sister Molly told him in one of my favorite scenes in the whole book: "Your sense of humor is pathological. It's a defense mechanism. Echo's defense is to be insular and anti-social; yours is to crack a joke every twelve seconds." The other thing I loved about Allen is that his first instinct is to help people. It's this instinct that makes him so endearing to the reader, but also brings him (and us) a lot closer to the people around him. 

Even though it has a sense of humor, Ready, Okay! doesn't shy away from serious topics. Far from it. Instead, it plunges headlong into the pool of issues that teenagers face on a daily basis, from friendships and school gossip to sex, drugs, and parental abandonment. As the book progresses, and the lives of the characters deteriorate, you begin to see how everyone is connected- how the people you know, even if they are just acquaintances, can have such a huge impact on your life, and how those you thought you knew by heart can still surprise you.

I recently learned that Adam Cadre is working on a re-write of Ready, Okay! I think he is right to re-work some things, and I definitely want to read the revised version as soon as it's available. In the beginning I was majorly confused by the number of characters (so many siblings with similar names!). Allen makes some pretty long speeches when he happens to call someone out on something (which happens a lot), and, though this may also be due to the book's small type and unconventional chapter breaks, I felt like no matter how much I read I didn't make much progress. These things bugged me while I was in the middle of the book, but as the story careened towards its end all of that fell away. 

This book was a roller coaster ride of hilarity and poignancy, laughter and tears. It's honest and and funny and a little weird at times. Long after closing the book the characters stayed in my head, and I was still thinking about them when I woke up this morning. And if you do decide to read it, don't give up, even if it takes you a year. Trust me. It's so worth it. 

Patchwork

Hello there, reader! I've been trying to write a post for several days now, but for some reason I found myself facing a bad case of blogger's block (that sounds weird, doesn't it). So I went back into my old posts looking for inspiration, and I began reading all of the ones I started but never finished. Of the 106 posts I've started, only a slight majority were actually published. Though it feels like somewhat of a cop-out to my writer brain, I thought I'd share a few excerpts with you today- out of context and only loosely stitched together.

7/23/13
Stories exist to help us make sense of this jumbled mess we call life. Often I've found myself wishing that life was more like a novel. That I could track my progress like a character arc, and that there would be one defining moment in which everything would miraculously become clear, and I would understand the reason for the challenges and suffering that I had to face in order to get there. But in life, there is no "reason" except to live. Every plateau of self-realization is only temporary before we begin the climb to the next climax, facing new hardships along the way. Each life is a collection of hundreds and hundreds of rising and falling action. We are essentially made up of stories.

7/16/13
From my notebook on May 29, 2013- 5:45 pm: We've been in New York for about four hours now, and if this city does not make you aware of your own insignificance I don't know what else will. From the air it almost doesn't look real- like a toy city or a landscape out of a dystopian novel. Or rather, it looks like you have always seen New York, from the air in movies with the narration of some unknown character coming at you from the television. It is always one voice, one out of so many millions, because it is impossible to listen to everyone's voice at once. In the city of a thousand stories, we only hear one at a time. 

If that is New York from the air, then New York from the ground is the opposite. There are no pristine helicopter shots here, no toy buildings with toy cars. New York from the ground is like being dropped into a jungle. Everything is gritty, tangible, unmistakably real. It's as if the chaos is singing to its own tune, and you have to find the melody and hum along.

4/17/13

I want you to think about a person that you trust. I mean the kind of person you would hoist up onto a ledge to get away from zombies, knowing they they would turn around to help you up, too. Trust is a form of respect. It's saying, I respect you enough to know, with every fiber of my being, that you''ll always tell me the truth. I'm asking you to extend that trust to yourself and your creative endeavors. That doesn't mean that suddenly you will think all of your ideas are perfect, or that that twinge of self doubt will go away. It won't. But you'll know when it's grounded in reality and when it's not. We trust people because they tell us the truth, and you should trust yourself enough to know when an idea isn't working. The important part is that you trust yourself enough to try, even when you are unsure about something. A little uncertainty is natural. Doubt to the point of not going through with it is self destructive.

11/20/12

This was inspired by this post on my friend's blog.

You know what I would love to do? I would love to finally write a novel. I would love for college essays to flow seamlessly from my head onto the page. I want to travel to Ireland and I want to meet interesting people. I want to go to a social event where the person I'm with is not constantly checking their phone. I want to live in a city where people don't mind walking places and where trains are cool again. I wish I could be one of those people who writes obsessively in notebooks and isn't afraid to do sketches and water color paintings in the margins. That, and I want to have a drawing style, so that when people look over my shoulder at some random doodle they will say, "Ooh. That's really good. I like your style!" I want to go to a concert. I'll buy a t-shirt there and wear it to school the next day. I want to express my love of Sherlock and Nerfighteria to everyone I meet, but I'm afraid to for reasons I don't completely understand. I want to meet someone who's read the same books I have. I wonder if we all have a book twin. Maybe there's someone out there who's read the same books as us and we don't even know it, like those twins that were separated at birth but both built benches around trees in their front yard. I want to work at an indie book store somewhere. Or, in the next best scenario, be a "regular" at one. 

I want to have a writing retreat that I can go to whenever I feel like it. Maybe a lake house or a table at a local coffee shop or office space in an abandoned artist's studio or a garage apartment. I'd have a big wooden desk and bookshelves lining the walls and an obscene amount of rugs on the floor.  Better yet, make it an attic studio in Paris or a stone castle in Ireland. Maybe I'll end up in an artists commune out in the dessert and we'll all live in Airstreams and type on antique typewriters while the mountains turn purple behind our heads. Someday, I'll get a brilliant idea while riding on a train.

I hope you enjoyed this little trip through my past! Also before I go, a quick update:

1. I didn't hit 50,000 words during Camp Nanowrimo, but I wrote 16,000 words during the first two and a half weeks before life took over. It was a great experience and one I'd definitely like to try again.
2. I leave for college in just a little over a week! I don't know how much time I will have to blog, but I'm going to do my best!
3. You can now sign up to receive e-mail updates when I make a new post! (Considering the erratic nature of my postings, this could come in very handy ;) Just enter your e-mail address into the box in the top left hand corner of this page.

As always, thank you so much for reading! If you have thoughts on any of the scattered postings above, don't hesitate to leave a comment. 

July: The Month of Finishing

My life right now: I'm in a boat floating in a sea of unfinished things. It's actually my normal state, but this time I'm working towards being finished. And working towards finishing feels a lot better than doing nothing.

So if this blog has been a little sparse lately, that's why. Blogging is something I can always do more of, which is why it's been kind of pushed to the side during my "Month of Finishing," which is what I've just now decided to call July.

Partly to keep you all informed, and partly to keep myself accountable, here's a quick look at what I've been doing/thinking about:

1. First of all, I wanted to say a HUGE thank you to Christopher Gronlund over at The Juggling Writer for writing a truly inspiring post in response to mine about Expectations vs. Reality. He was so sweet regarding my blog and he brought new insight to the points I was making. Thanks Christopher. You really made my day and I'm sorry it's taken me so long to respond!

2. So...I'm doing Camp NaNoWriMo this month, which if you haven't heard, basically consists of trying to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. It's something I've been wanting to do ever since I heard about it several years ago, but never had enough time until this July. If you'd like to keep track of my progress you can see my word count in the left side bar under the typewriter.

3. Reading. I've got so many books I want to read! I'm currently trying to finish my required summer reading, which I am LOVING so far. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin is beautifully written and also gripping and scary and emotional. I was totally not expecting that. I'm still not really sure what to expect from this book. I will let you know how it turns out.

4. Collaboration! Ok so my best friend and I are working on something we've been trying to do every summer for the past three or four years. We're going to make a book of our writing and artwork and publish it through Blurb. When it's done, it will be the culmination of not only ten years of friendship but also the result of our creative efforts so far. Scary but exciting.

5. This blog. My New York recap post is sitting half-finished in my drafts folder. I have a list of books I still want to review. You probably won't be hearing from me much this month (I've got a lot on my plate), but as soon as I get some of the larger projects out the way, I really want to devote some time to writing all those posts that have been nagging at me all summer. Stay tuned.

Links:

I don't usually share links like this, mainly because I almost never click on the links other people share when they're in list form. I don't know, maybe I just get overwhelmed. But if you are the kind of person who loves going through link lists, then I hope you'll enjoy this! (I promise, these are worth taking a look at.)

Under All this Noise: On Reclusion, Writing, and Social Media : Awesome, awesome article on what it means to be an author and a recluse in today's society, where the compulsion to share everything is turning into a "business strategy."

What a World : Beautiful, heartbreaking letter from Ken Kesey to his five closest friends after the death of his son. Incredibly sad, yes, but hopeful, too. 

Letters to July: One of my favorite Youtubers is making daily video letters to the month of July. Short, lovely, and good for the soul. While you're on her channel you should also check out her video called "The Secret Life of Things."

The Fishbowl: Where Ideas Swim: My best friend's blog. She has challenged herself to post something every day in July. Go forth, read, and support!

What are you working on this month?