January Joys: Creative Minds

Have you ever thought about the sheer quantity of things like books, TV shows, movies, web series, art, and clothes? All of the things that come from a burst of creativity, and end up making so many people happy? As I watched A Very Potter Musical with a friend earlier, I couldn't help but think about it. …

January Joys: Reading

I love reading. I love seeing a tale spin off of words on a page and into my head. I love knowing someone got to do something they love when they wrote, and that they did it because they know someone else will enjoy it. I got to spend the day reading short stories and …

The Great Gatsby: Chapters 7-9

(This contains spoilers for The Great Gatsby) I'm not very surprised by Gatsby's death. It seems to me there are very few ways Fitzgerald could have wrapped up a story such as this, and certainly fewer still in so few pages. There's something oddly soothing, too, in his death. The reminder that for all of …

The Great Gatsby: Chapter 1-3

(There are The Great Gatsby spoilers in this) For AP Lang, Anya and I decided to read The Great Gatsby, an American classic. Because it has nine chapters, every three chapters I will write about my thoughts so far. I am a feminist, and for me that means what happens to women in books stands …

Nana

I consider myself lucky for getting to meet my great grandmother. She was a wonderful woman, a huge influence on many of the readers in my family, and the glue that held together her sons' families, especially in the younger generations. A year ago today, she passed, and I wanted to take some time to tell …

The Happy Ending

Prompt: What’s the importance of “The Hero’s Journey”? How has storytelling evolved from oral to written and where is the future of storytelling headed? Are we going back to our roots?   (This post has spoilers for The Hobbit) I would say that the first time I ever truly learned about The Hero’s Journey was in …

Goodbye, Seaweed Brain and Friends

I would like to talk to you today about some of my best friends in the whole wide world: Piper McLean, Jason Grace, Leo Valdez, Hazel Levesque, Frank Zhang, Nico di Angelo, Annabeth Chase, and (of course) Percy Jackson. Yesterday, I finished Blood of Olympus by Rick Riordan. This book came out October 2014, but things …

Learning to Enjoy Learning Again

Okay, there are many other things I could be doing right now, but as none of them are actually due tomorrow and I have been itching to write this post for what feels like months but has really only been a week or two, I'm going to finally write this. First off, hello again! I know …

A Day in the Life of a Modern Teenager

The first alarm goes off and a pair of eyes pop open, a hand fumbles the the "off" switch, and the eyes close again. Back into a doze until the second alarm goes off. Feet hitting the floor, stumbling over to the other alarm on the bureau. The "off" switch again. Retainer put in it's …

Story Magic

My friend Anya wrote a post earlier today about the magic in stories. I suggest you go read it, but the basic summary is that there is magic in movies and in books and in oral stories, no matter how many times you watch/read/watch them and that each person has a different opinion about how …