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delicatebluebirdruins · 4 years

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Rereading THG 1

Part 1 the tributes; Part 2 the games; Part 3 the victor

My notes and thoughts as I reread the series in light of finished Ballad (it should have been sooner but I wanted to finish the book I was currently on... I was planning on ending the series and I’m on the fifth book of the six book series its going to drag me for a while I can tell so here I am)

1 - 4

- the first time we see Kat and Gale together they’re in the woods and then they go to the lake when in Ballad the lake is the last place Snow visits in D12

-- I’m listening to the audiobook narrated by Tatiana Maslany and I love that she actually did a quack sound and I quite like her as Katniss thus far

- the humiliation from being made to see the the Hunger Games as a barrel of fun and games

- So what did happen to Lucy Gray?

- I kind of snorted when I read this bit “As far as Reapings go at least this one has a slight entertainment factor” Snow was probably watching this and just going

- I always love the salute

- “Family devotion only goes so far for most people on reaping day” interesting line especially watching Haymitch’s games in CF

- Katniss references 7 year old Prim cleaning there fathers old shaving mirror every night-- not really a comparison but Snow looking at and smelling the powder in his mothers compact mirror--- Did Prim stop? if so when? and why?

- In Ballad Grandma’am made Tigris and Snow sit down and eat their meal together =Kat is telling the bread story she tells us she made Prim wait and fetched her mother and they sat down together eating one of the loaves and had some tea as well... However, I’m sure we can all see the differences in the two very different families

- Everlark shaking hands with the “reassuring squeeze” compared too Lucy and Jessup shaking hands with the blatant show man ship of it all- random note I liked Jessup and was sad with when he died and this was one of the scenes where I wished we were in another persons head as well

- Prim’s faith in Katniss vs Tigris and her faith in Snow

- from Ballad we know they did not have a chance to say bye so when did this come in?

- Katniss’s reaction to the gifts and the gratefulness for them until she rejects the cookies from daddy Mellark

- the conversation between Gale and Katniss is also reminiscent of something in Ballad

“you know how to kill.” “Not really.I say”... The awful thing is that if I can forget they’re people, it will be no different at all”

- I wonder about Johanna’s thought process in her Games

- the differences in trains between Ballad and this

- about Mockingjays “something of a slap in the face to the Capitol“ We all know what Snow thought about them so that leads to even more wondering how long the mockingjay is a symbol of the rebellion

- Katniss appreciating the food and then annoying Effie with eating the rest of the food by using her fingers is still great

- Haymitch self medicating and the first reference to Haymitch’s job of mentoring I wonder if the 10th games is the first and last game when the Capitol kids did mentoring or when the victors became the mentors

5 - 8

- Katniss about Peeta’s kindness vs Snow about Sejanus

- The woods became our saviour and I was desperate to save us.... In Ballad the Snows also struggled with finding food for a few reasons they were in the city with a war going on

- Mrs Everdeen admonishing Katniss about her eating habits

- Everlark exchanging a exasperated look and Katniss admonishing her self about it

- “the best looking tributes always seem to pull more sponsors”

- 64 years of “progress” leading to the tributes having their own recognisable train

- Katniss winning over the prep team with a little manipulation via a smile and sweet words

- D12 were the stylists ordered to be bad or just incompetent?

- Relief about seeing Peeta and his knowledge of fires

- them laughing about their costumes and Haymitch 😂

+ Cinna was there a chance of the fire going horribly wrong?

When did the parades start being a thing and I hope to god it wasn’t inspired by what happened to Brandy?

- who throws the rose?

- The reaction of the Capitol people and how Katniss feels about them

- Katniss about the elevator is precious

- Effie wanting to threaten Haymitch with a gun to get him to the sponser table

- Kat wanting to press all the buttons in her suite

- Was Delly Cartwright just the first person Peeta thought of

- I wonder what Lavinia was running away from specifically

— “that I let the Capitol kill the boy and mutilate her without lifting a finger... Just like I was the games”

- “I can’t do anything, says Peeta” that’s me

- The effect Katniss has on people and think about Maude Ivory

- “its weird how much he’s noticed me... And apparently, I have not been as oblivious to him as I imagined, either”

- the knot station and the camouflage station is two stations that don’t get a lot of action why is that

- I love the bread lesson

- one of the gamemakers fixated on Katniss?

- Rue 😟😔 we first learn her name when Everlark at the spear throwing station

- i kind of hyper focused on the “we finally escape to bed”

- And of course the private audience with the gamemakers theres a little showmanship

— upstaged by the pig

— all the different places Kat shot at

— the reaction of the Avoxes and Gamemakers

- insert point here that I forgot

- “And I realise the impossible has happened. They have actualy cheered me up”

- “I grin at Peeta and realise I’m starving”

- the portrayal of Everlark being a team and the later romance

- the eleven probably made Snow grind his teeth

- the interview prep... “if you appeal to the crowd... you gain favor”

- the interview dress being eye catching

- “I am as radient as the sun”

- the difference between the interviews in Ballad and the ones in THG are also telling

— I think I’m goin to stop listening to the audiobook despite my liking of Tatiana Maslany because I’m also rereading the physical book kind of sad but not really

- Caesar and Lucky interview techniques born from their circumstances in the timeline

- Peeta’s confession gets me everytime... and I really really want to know what he was thinking in this reread

- “It’s all a big show. It’s all how you’re perceived” another Ballad similarity

- Another possible tie it in “more than a piece in their games”

- I really can’t imagine why cannibalism doesn’t play well with the Capitol audience....

- When did the trackers get developed? and when did they start being used for the Games?

-- In Ballad the mentors had a group planning session with Dr Gaul so did this become a regular thing that the head gamemakers had to add things to the games during their stint?

- Who came up with idea for the old arenas to be used as vacation spots?

#the hunger games #ellie rereads #ballad of songbirds and snakes #tbosas spoilers #kind of #feel free to chat with me about this #reaction gifs #shit #jodie whittaker #part one #long post #May #2020

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rigelmejo · 3 years

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March Progress Updates, and April Goals:

This hopefully will not get to long. Progress made in March.

Chinese progress:

Chinese novel chapters read in March: 64 (most are 寒舍, these chapters average at 10 pages on my phone compared to the usual 20, so also for size comparison’s sake this is equal to around 32 20-page chapters... still I think this is most chapters I’ve read in a month so far)

Chapters I studied with Listening-Reading Method: 4 (L-R to The Glass Maiden, Love and Redemption’s novel. I only did it as I felt like it though... and as usual the way audio didn’t line up to chapter endings made it hard, so next time I do L-R I’m still planning on Guardian or Silent Reading. That said, this amounted probably 2+ hours of audio. Currently on The Glass Maiden: chapter 5, Audio 12)

Chinese shows watched: 10. (At the beginning of this month I was watching Word of Honor and Killer and Healer raw, until english subs came out. I did well enough to follow the plot so yay I plan to take advantage of that next time I can’t wait for subs ToT but I still don’t catch nuance super well so the eng subs I still picked up new stuff... related to this I definitely think I could rewatch Guardian in chinese only now, if I wanted to pay attention to the chinese lines/wording, especially since that plot I know well already. A big part of why I’m missing some nuance is usually the first watch I’m trying to catch all the plot so some things go over my head, then if I rewatched a woh or kah episode I caught more little line details)

Chinese Spoonfed Audio listened to: 11 (I was in the habit of walking and listening to one file per day, but then I twisted my ankle lol ToT. I would love to just... finish these files. That said they make great chill practice/review)

Japanese progress:

Japanese Audio Lessons: 1 (I was trying to do something with this - very good resource - but ended up not focusing on it).

Japanese KH Let’s Play watched: 6 (so 30 minute to 1 hour lets play videos, where I listened and looked up words as desired in jisho.org. I also watched a few random things like Ratchet and Clank I found in japanese lol, but I’m only counting this cause its what I watched for a decent length of time and paid attention to)

Tae Kim’s Grammar Guide, lessons read: 10 (I’m almost done with part 1 which has 11 lessons - i think the guide has 3 main parts. I’m trying to read ahead of doing the Nukemarine deck’s tae kim relevant portions)

Nukemarine Memrise decks: finished LLJ 3 - Kanji, 289/318 finished in LLJ 4 Tae Kim part 1. (Ideally I would like to get done LLJ 4 part 2, LLJ 5 before I start trying to PLAY a video game in japanese again. LLJ 4 parts cover beginner grammar, and LLJ 5 is 1000 common words. Long scale ideally, I would like to finish Nukemarine’s first 8-10 decks, since I think that sets a good foundation and utilizes all the main parts of it - the rest is like more in depth intermediate/advanced niche stuff. From there I’d like to just go back to immersing, maybe read my 2 textbooks that focus on Japanese Reading eventually. The short term goal this month was to do the OLD stuff I’ve done in these decks years ago, and surpass it. Which I DID. As of this month I’ve gone farther in the Nukemarine decks than I did last time I studied japanese or tried to play japanese games/read manga. So good job mejo! ToT You are officially studying new material. I’m not... in the most flashcard mood ever, and not really in the mood to read Tae Kim very much... but doing those 2 things has been the most effective study this month so its what I ended up doing)

So yeah... made some decent progress this month. As usual I did not do what I expected to do. I REALLY really thought in February or March I’d finally Listen Reading Method go through Guardian but lol... still hasn’t happened. That said, I found files for all of Silent Reading’s audiobook and Guardian’s audiobook I already had (and because of how avenuex made it - the chapters LINE UP perfect with the text). So I am prepared to L-R a priest book I love whenever the motivation finally hits.

Reading has been going a lot better than I ever could have expected. And I did try a few pages of a few other novels - I still have many words to learn lol. The second I switched to a new novel my words I had to look up increased a LOT. That’s good in a way though, it means the next novel I go to will teach me a lot too. At the moment, I plan to kind of just stick to hanshe - and probably this author - for a while. At least as far as intensive reading where I look up each word. The ease of reading feels good and I’m not ready to give that up quite yet (I will be once I get invested in a new story tho probably lol). I have also been slowly extensively reading Guardian, and if I do pick books for extensive reading they’ll likely be priest ones for now. Just because I have english translations available to reference and read first, and I’m familiar with priest’s writing style, so its an extensive reading material I can pick up a lot of words from context when I read. This past month Guardian was the only novel I really extensively read a bit - and with the eng translation to help, it went well.

I also checked HSK words this month, and my brain forgot 100-200 HSK 4 words, and like half of HSK 5. Its not an issue right now since I’m studying to read and watch shows, not to pass an HSK test. But its something I should keep in mind. I got tempted to go through HSK flashcards but... genuinely I need to separate my study activities if I intend to focus and make progress. When I’m doing flashcards for chinese AND japanese I just end up giving up and doing none. The only time study methods don’t seem to interact is when its immersion, since i don’t have to ‘progress’ through material I just have to choose to do ‘some random thing’. (So no lesson 1-10 etc that I must do in order, just any random video or chapter read counts).

So in light of that, my April Study Plan I would like to be mostly the same. Will it work out that way, who knows? But Ideally:

Chinese April Plan:

Read chinese chapters. (intensively - hanshe or X, extensively optional - Guardian probably)

Try to Listen Reading Method a bit (probably Guardian, or Silent Reading)

Optional - continue listening to Chinese Spoonfed Audio (would be nice to get into the 20s)

Optional - watch some shows in chinese (realistically I predict that if 2ha’s Immortality drops in April I will 100% be doing this if english subs aren’t immediately available, and doing as many eps as needed so this count could well be 10-20 eps lol by the end of April. but if english subs are then I probably will be too busy to bother watching anything with chinese subs only. this activity is highly dependent of if i will have a reason to)

Related - read through Guardian and/or Silent Reading in english (while this is not directly studying at ALL, the more of these I read the less I’ll avoid ‘L-R’ since the prep-work and time L-R takes will be shorter, also then it’ll be enjoyable refreshing instead of me trying to follow the plot for the first time... same with extensive reading, if i’ve read in english then the extensive reading is less mentally draining and less daunting and i tend to do it more... this past month my Guardian extensive reading was mainly just restrained by how much i’d read beforehand in english)

Yes, mainly big reading focus again, with optional activities where I might listen more. L-R would ideally work great alongside me reading, just because then I’d be practicing both listening skills and reading.

Japanese April Plan:

Continue reading Tae Kim’s Grammar Guide (would be nice to get through at least 10 more lessons)

Continue through Nukemarine LLJ decks (intense goal is to get through LLJ 4-part 1, LLJ 4-part 2, and LLJ 5... though I would be floored and happy if I just get a few hundred into LLJ 5...)

Optional - try to play some Nier in japanese at end of month (dream goal is I get through enough of Nukemarine by the end of April to play the game getting remastered IN japanese TOO but. That’s probably a pipe dream lol. I’m getting the remastered Nier at end of April and if its like Automata then it’ll come with both language options, and it would be very cool to have an english and a japanese save file...although the language is ??? since its like sci fi fantasy so if its hard i might not play it long... but just to have a foundation enough to even play it a little would be cool. I could always play KH2 if i feel like maybe i have hope lol)

Optional - watch more japanese lets plays (fun, easy, why not)

Bolded is what I really PLAN to do in April. But we will see lol.

#study plan #april study plan #april #march progress #progress #march

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stormears · 7 years

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Post-apocalypse AU, based on a fanart.

A fic I hope to finish, inspired by a fanart and an unrelated fanfic and my rekindled liking for this show. I hope I can finish it, and it’ll be a sort of writing practice for other WIPs I have right now where I feel like my writing “muscle” isn’t putting out the best words or ideas for the story.

**This fic would feature Izuku and Bakugou traveling through the somewhat deserted remains of civilization while also sorting through the desolate remains of their relationship and cleaning that up, and sorting through their respective pain from all areas of life. It’d also have a little bit of Omegaverse in it, haha. Here’s a sample. It’s about 1700 words.**

(A few sentences have ////// in them randomly because those remind me to double-check my word choice/explanation and use a better one when I can think of one.)

Izuku lived in one place for most of his life. He hid in his bedroom many times and suffered heartbreak without romance. Heartbreak of disappointment, of shame, of a young man who saw nothing in the future. He did not grow up entirely alone, but once he was alone, his hide was slow to toughen. He was frail and soft when he was young, and when he decided to grow out of these stages, his first steps were weak. But they were taking him somewhere.

He had taken only formative steps when great and unseen changes began to appear on covers of his magazines and announcements on his mother’s television. He was just old enough to rightly worry about it and how it would affect his life. He would divide his time between studying and shivering and comforting his mother, his only anchor.

They were a quiet and gentle family pair, constantly aware of the other’s burden. They shared a knowing acceptance of their warm and silent household and the total lack of visitors, for years. They held each other up. Izuku removed the knife from his mother’s hand when she wielded it on herself. Inko soothed the bruises and broken skin when her son returned home late from school and cried and would not speak of what was done to him. When a cloud formed over the capitol city across the sea and a black snow fell, and the folk with flying and jumping quirks dropped dead from the air, Izuku had been wrung and bled and cracked open enough times that he had finally been spurred from mewling fear into action. He had planned; he was prepared. He had a plan to take his mother and himself to the opposite side of the country. Unmissed, unnoticed, they moved to Yokohama. It was about as far east as they could conceivably go. With the paychecks of one nurse and one teenage clerk, they paid the rent and occasionally saved money. They remained unnoticed in the new place and the new community; the new apartment was as quiet as the old.

The assaults went on around the world at random and reached its fingers into their lives through the papers and the internet exclusively, because televisions were going quiet. Now the two of them did not feel as alone as before; now huge swaths of the populace were forced into the sort of quiet suffering and burying their heads that this mother and son had done for many years.

They trudged on through the daily trials—pain fatherless loveless poor pathetic lonely ugly spiteful sobbing numb—while pursing their lips at the events in Europe and China and the changing maps and the big stores, theaters, and clothing outlets closing as the employees fled. The American ocean-taming heroes Songbird and Stingray were lost in a flood, and two weeks later Izuku graduated from high school a year early: taller than his mother, prepped for college, close to being a grown man. His mother took him out for ice cream. Then they went home and watched a movie they had recorded some days before. Nothing else to do.

In their separate internet lives, Inko and Izuku learned around the same time that the areas that had had their landscapes torn up by the bombings were spreading a green, heavy gas and the people remaining nearby were spreading a disease. Warnings about it were posted at Izuku’s college. His calculus professor disappeared and was replaced by one who could both write differentials and whose quirk made his sweat into a cleansing solution the students were forced to use on themselves even though it stung to the touch. One day Izuku came home from the campus gym and his mother said she had a surprise for him and when he’d closed his eyes for her, she jabbed him with a syringe.

Inko was a thief and a smuggler now. She lied to the mailing desk, her boss, the desperate interns and the nurse practitioner and had taken the only three vaccines in the hospital for her child. When Izuku asked if she had injected herself first, she lied. He did not suspect her because her next statement was truth and she shook a little when she said it: she did not think she would be going back to work tomorrow. Izuku reluctantly agreed to stay home from school for a few days as well. He made dinner for the two of them while a crazy person with a loudspeaking quirk yelled somewhere on their street and was silenced by someone else.

It progressed. The two of them stayed indoors. They played board games. He did pushups and wrote things in notebooks, muttering always, and she listened to audiobooks and cleaned the place many times, muttering nonsense. Izuku noticed.

When a neighbor knocked on the door and asked to see Inko, Izuku slammed his fists on the walls and shouted and screeched like he had the disease or had lost his mind. His arms were strong now and the stranger fled from his ferocious false clamor. He never left his mother alone in a room for very long.

It progressed. It had been three bombs from three places that started it. The blasts had opened up holes in the ground where it congregated, where people fled from. But the disease was moving everywhere, killing spectacularly, randomly. The internet said it was airborne, or blood-borne, or carried by mosquitoes. Small island nations were specially protected and safe, or they were overrun. Quirkless people were immune to the disease, or sometimes it killed them in their sleep, or created cancer, or it killed them fastest of all. All Might was still alive and carrying the sick and injured to quarantine sites in China. Definitely China.

It progressed, and it must have come in through a window or a vent. Their apartment had been a haven up until then, Izuku’s pepper spray trap at the front door had repulsed one would-be invader, and they saw no green gas anywhere, but Inko fell ill. She was weak and sore one day, stayed in an exhausted sleep most of the next, and had a fever on the third. On that day, she could not move any more. Izuku picked her up in his arms—she had lost some weight and he felt her shivering—and he carried her to her bed in the slow and tender way she deserved. He brushed her hair out of her eyes and mopped sweat from her brow and face until she stopped sweating. He found swift moments when her eyes were shut or her vision drifted to swipe away at his own tears, so she wouldn’t see that he knew.

“I’m so lucky I had you,” Inko said. Her son was holding her left hand in both of his, covering it and keeping it warm. She placed her right hand over both of his so she could cover him instead. Her son let her. “You’re always so good. You give so much. So proud of you for that. So much.”

Izuku returned the squeeze of her hand and did not know what to say now. His head spun with too many thoughts and he was biting his tongue a bit to keep from saying them and in front of her. He had to breathe deeply to keep from stuttering and steady his breath away from the jagged gasps that were coming out now. He asked if she was thirsty, or wanted him to run a bath. She needed fluids, so he would have to go get her some water very soon.

“No. Just wanna lay here. Thank you.” she replied in between her heavy breaths. Izuku nodded and kept hold of her hands. She was staring at him then, an unpleasant, alien flickering in her eyes like the light source within was failing. She was waiting for him to speak to her, or she was staring vacantly at him vacantly at him without comprehending. There was no way to know.

She pushed out of Izuku’s grip, towards his wrist instead, and she stroked a little expanse of his skin and back up the curve of his hand. She just wanted to feel a little more of him and have a little more than just the sweaty, big palms. When the lights came back on in her eyes, Izuku felt an unpleasant shiver in his back and shoulder blades. She was working up energy and the proper words to say something. She wanted to say something important and he knew it by how she used what little grip she had left on him.

Underneath some layers of Izuku’s observations about Inko’s condition, and how much food they had left and vials of chemicals he’d stored and his mask and the equations for the boots and the solar batteries with his precious AM labels on them, was an invasive vision of an empty apartment. This sight of an apartment that didn’t have her in it was so jarring that Izuku flinched hard enough to crack joints in his back to banish the visual. He blinked with some surprise at his mother, who was smiling at him. He knew she wanted to talk about something, or a few things.

He bit his tongue and listened. The realization was thin but sharp and he knew it would press in as time went forward and crush him soon. He had to listen to her. It would be one of the last things he heard, before he went outside.

#fanfiction #BNHA #KatsuDeku #BakuDeku #Not my best work but it's mostly practice to hone them writing muscles #Bakugou and Izuku were friends but Bakugou got into Yuuei and Izuku didn't and they just stopped talking #Izuku had awful and lonely teenager years wherein he picked up exercising and studying ;fake quirk devices; just to keep busy #Because being alone with hobbies and distractions is better than being alone and doing nothing #The disaster is purposefully unspecified for now. Thank you for reading these tags! :)

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daniellethamasa · 4 years

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Hey all, Dani here.

Today felt like the longest day ever at work. The minutes and hours just went by so slowly and it didn’t help that I just wanted to not be at work and instead to just be reading. But thankfully the day is over, and there is only one day left in the work week. So I’m really looking forward to another weekend of reading, and blogging. Because this weekend I’m doing all the writing and prep work for next week’s National Library Week posts, which is fantastic.

Anyway, I should start with talking about what I’ve done in the past week. Well, I tried out a couple more recipes in my Instant Pot, and we’re probably going to try a couple more new recipes this weekend. It has made cooking so much faster and in some ways easier. Don’t get me wrong; I love to cook, but it is so nice to make a dish that would normally take an hour or so instead will only take like twenty minutes. So I absolutely love my newest kitchen gadget.

And, of course, I’ve been playing more Animal Crossing. It is a relaxing game, and though there is a lot of taking out loans and all that, it doesn’t take a whole lot of time to repay them…unlike loans and debt in real life. It’s quite nice, and though my island is still fairly simple, I enjoy it.

Okay, well let’s talk about watches. We finished season 3 of “Grimm” and started season 4. We also watched “Super Troopers,” and “Watchmen,” and it was the first time Damian ever watched that movie, so that was pretty interesting.

All right, well that’s it for all of that, so let’s get into books.

Books finished: Love and Other Words by Christina Lauren, You Deserve Each Other by Sarah Hogle, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and narrated by Tatiana Maslany, The Library Book by Susan Orlean, Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World by Vicki Myron, and Fruits Basket Collector’s Edition Volume 4 by Natsuki Takaya.

Yeah, so it has been a pretty darn good week of reading. As you can see I have a couple of finished reads that will be part of my National Library Week set of posts, which I am so super excited about putting together for you all. 🙂 Oh, and I should mention that my finishing The Hunger Games was the audiobook version, and Tatiana Maslany was absolutely fantastic. She is so good at nailing the subtle nuances of tone and subtext. I’m going to have to pick up the audiobook versions of the rest of the trilogy to listen to in the future.

I am in the middle of a few different books right now, two of which are NetGalley reads. One I didn’t realize is actually like the fourth or fifth book in a series–oops–but I guess each book follows a different couple, so I’ve been able to follow along without being too confused. I’m also somehow reading a suspense/murder mystery story; it has witchcraft and Celtic lore and mythology in it, which is why I picked it up, but there’s more mystery than I had anticipated. Still, thankfully, I’m enjoying it. And I’m also starting to really get into Shorefall, which is a book I have highly anticipated since I finished reading the first book last year.

And there are so many books I want to read soon, so I have no idea what I’m picking up next. But I’m sure I’ll finish up my work week with some good reading, and then have a lovely weekend of reading, which sounds absolutely perfect to me. I’m so excited about all the books I’m reading and all the books I’ll be reviewing soon.

What are you reading this week? Let me know in the comments, and I’ll be back soon with more bookish content.

Weekly Wrap-Up (60) Hey all, Dani here. Today felt like the longest day ever at work. The minutes and hours just went by so slowly and it didn't help that I just wanted to not be at work and instead to just be reading.

#Books!#Manga #Reading #Reading Challenge

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ghostlypeachkryptonite · 6 years

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The schedule is probably the one thing that everyone struggles with, and I’m not going to lie, it is hard when you work from home. But once you can crack your schedule, there is nothing that you can’t do. A while ago, I heard a saying that made my blood boil, “you have the same hours in the day as Beyonce”. Yeah, we know, but I’m pretty sure that Beyonce had one hell of a hustle on her hands at the start of her career too. We are so quick to put people down because we compare ourselves to celebrities and successful people who are further ahead on their success journey than we are.

Because we live in a world where money is needed to survive, Latte Lindsay runs a number of affiliate programmes and offers paid/sponsored content. If you choose to click the links and read the posts, the site may earn a commission or receives a payment. All of the opinions are my own. Opinions expressed here are author’s alone, not those of any partner brands/company(s), beauty & lifestyle brands, airlines or hotel chain, and have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of these entities unless specified.

Let’s break the schedule down

First of all, you should be getting around 8 hours of sleep. This is non-negotiable because it is for your long-term health. Getting enough sleep at night is one of the foundations for success and I don’t want to hear otherwise. Yes, there are people who claim that they only sleep for a few hours before they get up and start working their butts off, but this is going to damage their mental and neuro health in the long term. As much as we all want to succeed, I still want to have my brain intact when I’m in my 80’s and 90’s, not suffering from dementia which has been linked to a lack of sleep in your 20’s, 30’s and 40’s.

Second, let’s say you should be doing around 8 hours of work a day, five or six days a week. This is where it can get tough for some people because they work full time and they want to overextend themselves. Do not worry about it. If you are working 8 hours or more on your full-time job, then taking 8 hours to work with intention on your day off will give you much better results than trying to push through the tiredness. I know it is tempting to work into the small hours of the morning to be part of the hustle porn community, but it isn’t worth it. I’ve done the hustle until 3 am, cramming everything in, typed until my fingers have gone numb. Do you know where it got me? Nowhere. I was tired and burnt out from it. If you work full time, choose one day a week to really focus on your own stuff and then take one day off to relax.

My third point is about learning. Learning can be done in an hour a day if you study with intention. They say that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill but this is rubbish. It can take as little as 20 hours to master something if you can push through the initial frustration that comes with learning something new. Learning can be done in so many different ways, there are plenty of free ways to get bite size knowledge to help you and your business to grow. You might scoff at the idea of having to study a little bit every day but this is where most people fall down.

The number four thing that you need to schedule in every day is some self-care. Self-care is something that I am really passionate about. When I was a care worker, I saw first hand the problems that people faced as a result of not looking after themselves properly. I like to take an hour a day to get a shower in peace, fresh clothes, a cup of tea with some quiet time before I have to get the troops out of bed. But I also like to take an hour at night to relax and unwind before I go to sleep.

Number five is keeping the house clean. Within my schedule, I have around 3-4 hours for cleaning, doing laundry, and general maintenance of the house so it doesn’t look like I’m constantly in the middle of an exorcism with an asshole of a poltergeist. A clean house is important when you work from home because having a clear space helps prevent distractions. Plus, having a clean house as a parent is one of those ultimate goals that we wish we could have, why not blow everyone out of the water by actually doing it?

And finally, the kids. I have worked out a schedule for my kids so that they know exactly what is going on. They get bathed, fed, clean clothes. My toddler spends all day with me so I make sure that there is plenty for him to do. When it comes to me sitting working, I keep him in the room with me and give him attention when he needs it. When the older ones are at home, they all play together. I know a lot of women experience mom guilt when it comes to working and not dedicating their every waking minute to their kids, but don’t. In fact, you could use your work to your advantage and get the kids involved. I hand mine dusters so they can “clean” with me. When I am learning something, I get my babies involved because their little brains are like sponges and you never know what information they might pick up. When I am writing, I talk out loud and write things back to them to help encourage their vocabulary. Use what you do as a good foundation for life skills that they can use themselves as adults.

My weekday schedule

5am- Get up and have some time to myself to get showered and organised. I have a beauty routine that I like to do every day that makes me feel like a million quid. 6am- Start work. This might be answering emails or checking what I have planned on my to-do list. Or, if I’m feeling brave, I’ll get stuck in with a few hundred words for one of my books. 7am- Get the kids up and ready. This means showers, breakfasts, getting packed lunches sorted…..everything you could possibly think of for getting little ones ready for the day ahead. Even if it is the weekend, my little ones will be up early anyway (they have no concept of time and lack the ability to lie in). 8am- Multi tasking hour- This is the hour of the day that I have a bit of everything going on. I’m finishing getting the kids ready, having a quick tidy and opening curtains back, making lunches, throwing stuff in the dishwasher, and doing the school run. 9am- Normally by this time, I’m back in the house and I get cracking on whatever book I’m working on. Sometimes I am dealing with my editors and making changes to drafts, other times I am cracking away at the word count. 10am- Cleaning the house. After an hour of work, I stop typing and clean the house for an hour. This can be running the hoover over the floors, making the beds, and dusting the furniture. I also like to get the dinner prepared at this time so there are no excuses later in the day that result in a takeaway having to be ordered. 11am- Now I switch back to work mode and do some work on the blog. I might have a sponsored post that needs to be done or I get try and get ahead of myself with blog posts for the week or month. 12pm- Food and tidying up the house. I need to eat a lunch, and so do you. It is important to stop and take a break during the day for a meal. For around 30 minutes, I sit and have a meal without my phone, laptop or TV distracting me. And after I have eaten, I give the kitchen a quick tidy and clear up any mess that I have made. If the kids are in the house, they get fed at this time too. 1pm- Back to the blog- This is another chance to get some more blog posts scheduled for the week or month ahead. 2pm- Social media, promotional work and the school run is the name of the game at this time of the day. A lot of this is probably considered “busy work” that should probably be done by an assistant but I really enjoy doing this stuff myself. 3pm- Book time again. After going back and forth, different ideas can stew and mature in your head so I find breaking it up can really help, especially if you want to avoid writer’s block. 4pm- Ironing– Clothes get washed and then they need ironed. This is a great time for me to listen to an audiobook or a podcast. 5pm- Cooking and dinner time. Because I prep dinner early in the day, it is normally a case of turning some dials and pushing buttons. 6pm- Book time, and this is the last chance I have to work on a book in the day. 7pm- Kids bedtime routine. It’s bath time, into pj’s and snuggles with a story for the little ones. I can have this done within an hour so the kids are tucked up in bed for 8pm. 8pm- Me time hour- This is hour of the day when I get into my comfy clothes, maybe have a bath, I read or do something crafty like knit. Personally, I like to read most nights, maybe around 5 nights a week and then spend the other two knitting or cross stitching. 9pm- Sleep. Yep, it’s time for some shut eye and if I get into bed now and sleep, I get a full 8 hours.

Is this set in stone? No, I try to be flexible because there are days that other stuff needs to happen. One morning a week I schedule in appointments and pick up the food shopping. My weekends are kind of similar but I cut down on the cleaning and workload to spend time with my family, maybe an hour of cleaning and an hour of work at the most. The purpose of the weekday schedule is to make sure I have time to spend with my family at the weekends.

How to create your own schedule

Building your own schedule is one of the simplest yet most effective things that you can do to make your day easier. Think of it this way, when you where at school, you had a timetable of classes and things that you need to do during the school day. Some days there could be around 7 different subjects that you needed to turn your attention to, and for around 12 years you managed to study a variety of different things within 6 hours. Imagine what you could achieve if you sectioned your adult life like this. Work out what you want to do in the day. These will be unique to you. Use the circles below to work out the first part. I recommend making sure that you get 8 hours of sleep, 1 hour of self-care for a shower and a cup of tea.

Ok, I get that the pictures are not my best artwork, but that is how I sat and worked out my day and what needed to be done. Do not be afraid of being picky about what you do and how you work out your day, it should be work for you and your family to get the best out of your time.

What do you think of the schedule? Would you ever try anything as extreme as this? Let me know what your day looks like in the comments section.

The Ultimate Schedule for Working from Home The schedule is probably the one thing that everyone struggles with, and I’m not going to lie, it is hard when you work from home.

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islandofkiwi-blog · 8 years

Text

A New Start

tl;dr: I wrote a sci-fi novel that I don’t want to fall to the wayside during the long, traditional publishing process so I recorded an audiobook version that you can listen to here (YouTube) or if you so choose you can read here. (blog) This is the beginning including the Prologue and Chapter 1. Hopefully I will upload one chapter a week until completion. Now let’s get down and dirty.

An Introduction

22, male, United... oh this isn’t a profile for a dating website? whatever. Welcome to my little island of insanity! Glad you survived the fall, back button is that way in case this gets too boring for you. But please don’t go. It’s lonely and dark and I hear the lemurs scratching on the outside of my hut in the night. Anyways, welcome! I guess this is the part where I’m supposed to tell you what I’m doing on this island, who I am, how you can know that I’m not going to eat you. I mean that last one is pretty ridiculous, though you kind of look hungry. Are you hungry? You look like you could stand to eat more, anyways. Gods! where are my manners. I’m Steven Embers and welcome for the third and final time.

The Book

What do the lemurs say at night, scratching at my door?

“Let me in, let me in, sir. I fear a deadly storm”

I started writing this novel at sixteen, but I had no idea what I was getting into. I had a falling dream, a vivid vision that I wanted to put to words and sometime later I had a catchy set of sentences that I wanted to use somehow: “My name is Bailey Prince. It’s a girl’s name.” One became the beginning, the focus of my story, my motivation, and the other I wouldn’t get to write for another four years. Initially, I wanted it to be a quick story, I wanted to publish a novel before I finished high school. I lacked both the writing and publishing experience to know that was a pipe dream. Writing itself is not that difficult, I think anyone with an idea and enough motivation to work on that idea could finish a full length novel, but I wanted to do it right. I wanted every plot hole covered, every scene to have motivation, every word to have meaning within the whole. It took me two years to get the character motivation and plot in the right place. I finished a proper first draft at twenty, almost exactly four years since I started writing on the first blank page and I actually thought in my naive, little mind that I was done with the story.

Agenting/Query Hell

I never let in the lemurs. You just have to look at their conniving faces to know they’re up to no good.

I knew a little bit about the query process while I was researching during writing, but I wasn’t prepared and lacked the marketing knowledge to appeal to a savvy agent. I think anyone who has tried to cold query an agent before knows what I’m talking about, but let me use a metaphor to explain to anyone who may not have the background:

Say your work of art is a special snowflake and you are the wind who blows that snowflake onto the front porch of whatever agent you researched who is in line with your needs and has experience with your genre. Now, your snowflake may be the most beautiful snowflake ever created with such nuance and character that no one could resist it, but there’s still the issue that around the front steps of every agent, a ceaseless blizzard blows day and night. Millions (I mean probably millions, who’s counting) of snowflakes are blown in from all around the world, and every agent is expected to sweep the snowflakes off their front porch every day and scour for that special snowflake among a million (again who’s counting) special snowflakes that they can sell to make a living, and that’s all before they can go to work to selling their other, laminated, super-special, chosen snowflakes. The odds are not in your favor, my breezy friend. The only thing you can do is blow and blow your snowflake onto more and more agents steps until you have effectively queried every agent in the world.

I didn’t even make it very far. I queried for about two years and maybe fifty plus with only one positive request among them. I was obviously doing something wrong. My writing sample was weak. My first chapter (ironically the first you will listen to/read should you continue your stay on my island) was/is hilariously weak, and I still have my own issues with it after about fifty revisions. My query letter sucked. I threw away probably half of my potential agents on weak queries alone. My spirit was flagging. The process was probably what I hated most about it, because you send out a query letter that you think has potential and you don’t hear back for a month, maybe more, or maybe not at all, and you’re left wondering if you’ll get any help to revise for the next query which you send out a month of no good news in an endless cycle. Anyways, two years of playing the cat-mouse game, I was pretty burnt out and don’t want to pursue traditional publishing for a number of reasons, one of which I will go into in a bit. I don’t like complaining about this out loud, because I’m not asking for pity and I know my own deficiencies. I mean there’s the chance my work was completely unmarketable but positive attitude, yeah?

I came to this island myself. The lemurs are a product of my own insecurity and that burden isn’t on you. Well, maybe it is now.

The (free) Audiobook

#callanAudible #pleasedontsuebecauseiwantedtomakeabadpun #doesAudibleownthetrademarkonfreeaudiobook #feelsliketheydo

So I decided I didn’t want to do traditional publishing and the main reason was because I knew it would take time to gain a benefactor in an agent or a publisher and then it would take time to get it out to market and that was all time I felt like I didn’t have. The science element in my book made me feel like a mad genius when I conceived it at sixteen. It’s less interesting now that genetics has made leaps and bounds. Seriously, my butthole clenches every time I watch a SciShow update on genetics. I need to share this work before the science catches up and I don’t look like the visionary I am! lol. Giant ego aside, I seriously want to share this even if only a marginal number of people will see it compared to if I had chosen to wait until I had it (and my query letter) polished to a point where it was irresistible. I’m also aware that original content on the internet is so easily accessible, and you can entertain yourself without paying a dime for several lifetimes as long as you have access to the internet. That’s why I’m releasing for free. I don’t want to deal with a paywall restricting any potential audience member I have. This is me releasing six years of work without expecting any kind of monetary gain in return. As far as I’m concerned this story will always be free for anyone to enjoy. I haven’t decided if I’ll give up my creative copyright to let people make money off my idea, but if people like it I assume they’ll find legal ways to re-appropriate it anyways. I will be releasing an audio version on YouTube and a text version on Tumblr every week, so if you like it you can follow the respective places for updates. I’ll be releasing them alongside each other, so if I fail to get an audio version out one week I won’t post a text version. I’m hoping I can get them out every Monday. It’s been my New Year’s Resolution for like the past four years to get published so this is me making good on that however I can.

The recording process has been really difficult not easy as far as prepping my voice and editing it together and doing pickups because I realize later that there was freaking echoes in the room I was recording in. Sigh. I will try to get my act together so I can produce consistently. I’m not a voice actor, or a sound mixer, or anything like that. I’m recording on a middle-range microphone, editing to the ear and just doing it before and after work/sleep. Be patient with me, and I hope you like it.

If you look around, even from the vantage point of my tiny island, you can see a couple billion other islands out there, each with a story to be found or some artwork to be shared. We each blow our snowflakes into the world and hope that maybe one person will like it. We can only blow and pray that someone will pluck our snowflake out of obscurity and pack it into their own, precious snowball of experience and it will be part of them forever.

Keep on dreaming,

Embers

#writing #new years resolution #self-publishing

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