kelilahrachel - Tumblr blog

[kelilahrachel]

Going to Hogwarts: A Magical Read-a-Thon TBR

Going to Hogwarts: A Magical Read-a-Thon TBR

I don’t often participate in read-a-thons. A lot of that has to do with the fact that I can’t always accurately predict what my schedule will look like in any given week until the beginning of that week. So why have I decided to participate in a month-long read-a-thon in a month in which I’m already planning on spending a lot of time working on other creative pursuits?

Because, with this…

[kelilahrachel]

I'm not over-committed, I promise...

I’m not over-committed, I promise…

Sometimes, I’m not sure why I take on so many responsibilities. I work full-time, in a job with varied and unpredictable hours and multiple responsibilities. On any given day, I could have eight or ten hours of time-specific commitments, and on others I might have only a list of things I need to work on with a deadline a week away. Sometimes I have responsibilities and appointments on the…

[kelilahrachel]

The changes of a year...

The changes of a year…

There is so much that has changed in the last twelve months. I moved again, this time to a different state – one that I had barely even really visited before I moved, where I knew almost no one at all, in an entirely new area of the country. 

 A few days after my last post, I traveled to North Carolina to interview at a boarding school. I now work at that boarding school, full-time, and I…

[kelilahrachel]

Presented without comment.

EXCEPT to say- commonplacecaz.

[kelilahrachel]

On Book Formats, or Why I Maybe Hate Hardcovers

On Book Formats, or Why I Maybe Hate Hardcovers

I moved across the continent, from Toronto to Los Angeles, just over two months ago. Part of that move meant going through the bookshelf that leaned against the wall opposite my desk and figuring out which books were actually mine, and which those I was attached to enough for it to be worth shipping them. By and large, I left a lot of books there, to begin to friends or donated to a secondhand…

[kelilahrachel]

One for the Parents

Thank you parents of theatre kids.

Thank you for cheering us on at auditions. Thank you for celebrating with us when the cast list comes out. Thank you for driving us to rehearsals. Thank you for your support during tech week. Thank you for the snacks you provide. Thank you for watching our show once, twice, maybe even three times or more. Thank you for still smiling and laughing even when you’ve listened to the joke or song over and over again. Thank you for the hugs when the Post Show Blues hits. Thank you for asking us about our favourite shows. Thank you for trying to understand all of our terminology. Thank you for understanding why we like to get to a show early and stare in awe at the theatre. Thank you for waiting in the cold while we all obsess over the actors we see on stage. Thank you for for being wonderful, even if you aren’t a theatre fan yourself. Thank you for the endless support. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

[kelilahrachel]

Fake Rule: The generic pronoun in English is he. Violation: “Each one in turn reads their piece aloud.”   This is wrong, say the grammar bullies, because each one, each person is a singular noun and their is a plural pronoun. But Shakespeare used their with words such as everybody, anybody, a person, and so we all do when we’re talking. (“It’s enough to drive anyone out of their senses,” said George Bernard Shaw.) The grammarians started telling us it was incorrect along in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. That was when they also declared that the pronoun he includes both sexes, as in “If a person needs an abortion, he should be required to tell his parents.” My use of their is socially motivated and, if you like, politically correct: a deliberate response to the socially and politically significant banning of our genderless pronoun by language legislators enforcing the notion that the male sex is the only one that counts. I consistently break a rule I consider to be not only fake but pernicious. I know what I’m doing and why.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story (via allthingslinguistic)

[kelilahrachel]

Thank you - a writer's realization

Thank you – a writer’s realization

Writing seems like it should be a solitary craft. The idea of it feels like it centres around a single person sitting in front of a piece of paper or a typewriter or a computer and laboriously putting down word after word, based on an idea that they discovered in their head alone without the aid of anyone else. My experience with writing has been anything but this. While my ideas for what I write…

[kelilahrachel]

My November is apparently going to be absolutely crazy, and it’s something I’ve brought upon my self.

I have actively decided to take on NaNoWriMo, hoping to get through a first draft of a novel that I have been thinking about writing for about a year now. (I spent some of October working on planning out chapters and setting and characters, though I still feel like there is more than can and should be done to be on an entirely secure and even footing when it comes to what I want to write.) I haven’t written anything today, and I am about a thousand words behind the goal from yesterday, but I know that I tend to write more easily in the evenings after I am done at work, and I have the weekend to catch up a bit if I end up needing it. (If anyone wants to follow along my progress on the novel, my username on the NaNoWriMo website is kelilahrachel. I don’t have many buddies, but I’d love to have some people to keep me motivated.)

On top of that, I have six books (yes, six – one of them is a digital copy as I haven’t managed to get a copy from the library yet) that I am teaching as novel studies with my various students. There are three others that I am planning on starting novels with in the near future, but I think with five going on right now, I have a feeling that I should wait until after the winter break to start those.

Add The Time Machine on top of this and you have all the books I’m currently teaching.

Then there’s the list of books that I am reading for myself. Most of these are from the library, as I tend to pick up books two or three at a time, and it piles up fairly quickly. There are actually fourteen right now. And then on top of those, I have the book I am in the middle of on my e-reader, and another from my bookshelf that I have been in the middle of for literally almost a year.

  Seriously, why do I have so many library books right now?

  The last thing is something that doesn’t have to happen this month, but it’s something that I want done by the end of the year so that I can release at the beginning of the year. It’s also something I’ve been working one for a while: a banner image and icon for this blog. I started work on it a long time ago, but haven’t done anything to finish it for over a month now. So I feel like I need to get that done as well.

To balance all of this, and to take into account that I have a lot of other things that really need finishing this month (and I want to finish as much of my current journal as I can before the end of the year), I have re-organized my bullet journal for November, giving myself a bit more space for my daily and weekly logs, and breaking down or expanding all of my monthly pages so that they are a little more clear and therefore more useful. (Photos of my monthly pages for this month, as well as my new weekly and daily logs are below.) I’ve added in new things that I want to try out and am really hoping work well, but I can’t yet make any judgements on them, except that I have been forgetting to use a couple of the new things so far. I’m also trying to journal every day, so that I have a chance to let out my thoughts and anything that is bothering me for whatever reason. I have included the prompts from the Boho Berry Challenge as well as a way to have something to write about when I can’t think of anything.

I’m hoping that I’m able to make it through this month with all of my sanity intact. We’ll have to see if it actually happens.

What have I done? My November is apparently going to be absolutely crazy, and it's something I've brought upon my self.

[kelilahrachel]

Listening Love

So I took a week off of posting. I needed it. but now I’m back. Today, I want to talk about something that I haven’t talked about before: podcasts. I have been listening to a lot of them lately. And I have a lot of them. Most of them are related to other “nerdy” pursuits. One is centred on A Song of Ice and Fire, another around Harry Potter. One is mostly focused on Disney, but also delves into…

[kelilahrachel]

Me Too

So this is going to be different from what I normally talk about. This isn’t about reading, or journalling, or even the art that I’ve been meaning to get to and haven’t. This is my story with sexual assault. It starts long before the actual “incident”, and runs long after. It starts with how I met the person who would later assault me. We met through an international religious youth group. He had…

[kelilahrachel]

#GetGraphic Read-a-thon Wrap-Up

It’s bee a busy week, which means that I’m only now getting around to doing a wrap-up for the read-a-thon last weekend. I ended up reading a total of nine graphic novels during the read-a-thon, or the twelve I had planned on. Since that’s still more than was necessary, I’m not too upset with it. I completed all of the challenges, too, which I’m really happy about. So they are as follows: Read a…

[kelilahrachel]

#Preptober Tag

I should probably be doing some actual planning instead of writing this post, but this is what I’m doing. This is something I came across on YouTube yesterday, and I decided it’s something that I want to do. This tag was created by the YouTuber, Danni Darling. Hopefully, it’s self-explanatory, but if not, it’s basically a bunch of questions about what I am planning for NaNoWriMo and how I think I…

[kelilahrachel]

...and another last minute read-a-thon

…and another last minute read-a-thon

Earlier this week, I was watching a monthly TBR from LittleBookOwl, and discovered that there is a read-a-thon happening this weekend. It starts today, October 6, and goes through Sunday, October 8. Once again, I have decided to take part at the last minute, which I think partially came from the fact that I’m behind on my reading goals for the year (more on that at some point), and also that the…

[kelilahrachel]

#Preptober - preparing for writing

#Preptober – preparing for writing

I completely forgot, when I set up my bullet journal last week, that NaNoWriMo is only a month away. Normally, start planning about a week beforehand, but in the past, that has meant that I’m not fully prepared for actually writing the entire novel. I’ll often hit a roadblock about a week into the month and not find myself unable to figure out what to do next. Typically, this is me not being able…

[kelilahrachel]

Planning ahead - October 2017 Bullet Journal

Planning ahead – October 2017 Bullet Journal

Since it’s pretty much the end of September, I’ve been slowly working on planning out what October is going to look like in my bullet journal. For me, this is sometimes hard to do before the month actually starts because I don’t actually know what page I’m going to end up on when the previous month ends. This month, however, there isn’t much going on in the last couple of days (in fact, I know…

[kelilahrachel]

Summer Reads

It’s weird trying to do a reading recap now, having not done one in months. There’s also a little bit of weirdness because, unlike the last few times, I have am finally out of my reading slump. It seems that taking a month where I only had access to my ebooks actually helped me feel less intimidated by my reading list and more likely to sit down and read. (it probably also helped that, at the end…