Summer Goals Update

So I said I’d update at the end of June, and it’s now the 8th of July. Which pretty much sums up June really- it went so fast I’ve not had time to sit down and really get stuck into my goals, and now we’re a decent chunk into July and I have very little to show for it.

A big part of my lack of productivity can be blamed on my rather suddenly acquiring a job. I’m a temporary administrator for a loss adjuster in Cardiff city centre. I’ve never worked full time before, and the travel alone is a killer, but I’m enjoying it. I’m good at it, and the people are nice, and I feel useful, so it’s great! The only downside is the intense travel anxiety every morning and afternoon- I’m sure I’ll get used to it, but for now… not so much. I’ve been taking a book on the train but most days I’m too wound up to settle down to reading it.

Speaking of books. I haven’t made a single page of progress on my stack of books that I was supposed to read, but the pile did get bigger in the last month. I went into Waterstones to kill time after a job related trip to Newport, and came out with these three:

I’ve finished The Sin Eater’s Daughter. It was pretty good. I loved the way religion was presented and developed through the book, and I did like the characters. I need to get my hands on the next one asap. I’m currently about 150 pages into The Magicians’ Guild, which has been growing on me every time I open it. It definitely didn’t pull me straight in, but I do find with fantasy that it takes me a few chapters to get into a world, even though ultimately I much prefer fantasy to non-fantasy. This book definitely isn’t what I expected, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it takes me. As for Red Queen, I’ll let you know when I come to it.

I also borrowed The Name of the Wind from Josh, but I won’t be cracking that monstrosity open at least until I’m done with The Magicians’ Guild. As much as I’d love to read two or three books at once, I’m just too busy right now.

As for my other summer goals, I really haven’t made any progress. I got the DM’s guide and the monster manual from Josh for our anniversary, and I’ve been dipping in and out of both when the mood strikes me, but I haven’t planned anything for a campaign yet. I’ve done only a few rows of my Hufflepuff scarf, and I haven’t written a single word of my novel. I have played a good few hours of The Witcher 3, but I’m still on the same part of the main quest.

So looking ahead for the rest of July, I have a few things coming up. Next Tuesday is Graduation, which is terrifying and exciting and all sorts of stuff mixed up in one. I found out a few weeks ago that I will be graduating with a 1st class degree though, so that’s pretty cool. The day after graduation, I have a big job interview that could be an amazing opportunity. Then the week after that, my “supervisor” is going on holiday for two weeks, which is going to be interesting since I’m still not 100% confident on a few aspects of my job. During that time is my 24th birthday, which I don’t really care about too much but apparently I’m getting some sort of mystery surprise thing from Josh so thats both worrying and exciting… I’m also going to start learning to drive probably after summer ends.

So yeah. Life is suddenly absolutely hectic, but overall I’m pretty happy. I probably won’t get a chance to post again now until late July or August, but I’ll be sure to keep this blog updated, even if it’s just for future me to cringe at in a years time.

Have a good weekend!

Summer Goals

After a quiet, beautiful drive through the sunny Welsh countryside, I arrived back at my parents’ house, where I’ve been for just over a week now. I’ve had a big clear out of old stuff, eaten two delicious Sunday roasts, registered at the doctors, and hugged my dogs about a million times. Tomorrow I have an appointment at the job centre to sign on for Universal Credit- because although I’ve applied for 50+ jobs in the last few weeks, I am still one of many many many unemployed University leavers.

So until I get a job, I have hours and hours of time to sink into whatever I like. Of course, a lot of it is job hunting, but apart from that, there will never be a more perfect time to chip away at my multitude of hobbies. So, here it is- The list of things I want to accomplish in the unknowable period of time between now and finding a job:

1.  Read, read, read!

My actually kind of meagre book collection.

Over the last three years, I’ve barely read anything that wasn’t a linguistics journal or text book. That didn’t stop me buying books though, so my biggest goal for the foreseeable future is to get my ‘to-read’ pile down at least a little bit. Most of the books on the very left side of my bookshelf are unread, and I have Nabokov’s Lolita in my bag, as well as a virtual stack of epubs on my mac to get through. I’m most looking forward to going back to Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy though, and finally getting into Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn, about which I’ve heard a huge amount of praise.

2. Write, write write!

The aftermath of my dissertation. I got a B+ by the way!

A couple weeks back, I wrote a long post about my experience of doing a creative writing dissertation. I mentioned that I’d become really quite attached to the story, and so another of my biggest goals (not just for this period of unemployment!) is to finish the book. I’d like to get to it as soon as possible, before I start to forget details, but at the latest I’ll be carrying on with it this November for NaNoWriMo.

3. The Witcher 3

 I don’t think I’ve ever been as invested in a video game as I am in this amazing creation by CD Projekt RED. My goal is to finish it as thoroughly as possible. I started playing it when it came out about a year ago, spent my whole summer on it, then didn’t get a chance to go back to it until last week. I’m fairly close to the end of the ‘main quest’ but I’m currently checking out all of the little question marks and finishing off treasure hunts across the map. Then of course I’ll be playing the expansions. I can’t work on this goal as often as I’d like because I’m playing it on my boyfriend’s xbox, and as much as he says he likes watching me play, I can’t reduce all our time together to me galavanting around Skellige. Even if my Geralt (on the right!) is rocking a pretty amazing look right now.

4. Dungeons & Dragons

My fourth goal is to design (and hopefully run) a new D&D Campaign. I’ve got a couple ideas swimming about in my brain, and I’m having a ton of fun creating custom magical items. I’ll (hopefully, finally) be getting the DM’s guide later this month (my wonderful boyfriend decided to purchase it as my anniversary present right in front of me) so I’m really looking forward to getting stuck into that, and then creating an interesting campaign and some fun NPCs. I always hear is that you shouldn’t create too much to start with, and I absolutely plan to stick to that advice, but world-building is a passion of mine, so I can’t promise I won’t get carried away!

5. My Hufflepuff scarf

I started this thing in the summer of 2013 and it’s nowhere near finished. It’s also a mess- half of it was knit English style and half Continental, which it turns out changed my gauge quite considerably. I’m hoping blocking it (somehow) will help, and that it won’t actually be noticeable when I wear it anyway. My goal for the summer is to finally finish it, so that I can wear it this Autumn, when I finally taste my first ever pumpkin spice latte. (The downside of going to University in Bangor is that we didn’t have a decent starbucks, just an offshoot in Bar Uno that always seemed to use far too much syrup).

So that’s it for major goals. I’d also like to lose some of the weight I put on in 3rd year, and I really want to crochet another blanket, but I only have odds and ends of yarn at the moment and I can’t justify buying more until I have a job. I also want to get back into Animal Crossing, as I abandoned my town almost a year ago to focus on my degree, but at the moment I feel like I might just start again.

I’ll post an update on my progress at the end of the month, but until then- Do you have any goals for the summer? Let me know!

A Review of Ruined by Amy Tintera

Anyone that knows me knows that I’m mad about this sort of book, so when i saw the plot introduction on goodreads I couldn’t help myself. I wasn’t disappointed. Ruined was exactly what I was looking for- drama, a blossoming love between enemies, and a new fantasy world to sink my teeth into. Overall, I really enjoyed it. I’d definitely recommend it, if this is your sort of thing. This review is a bit more critical than I originally intended (probably because I’m less than a week out of finishing my degree!), but I really did love the book and I’m looking forward to whatever comes next for Em and Cas.

☆☆☆Spoilers Ahead☆☆☆

Ruined is about a girl who has lost everything in a war with an enemy country. Her parents are dead, and her sister has been taken captive. To rescue her sister, she infiltrates said enemy country’s royal family, and marries their prince. She’s desperate to hate him, but it turns out he’s not so bad after all.

Yes, this is a story we’ve heard before. It has the feisty young girl who cares a lot about her family, and the handsome prince who turns out to be reasonable despite his morally vacant family, and the hint of a love triangle with a childhood friend that we all know is never really an option. These are all things that have become a sort of staple in the trend of fantasy-dystopia YA novels in the last few years. Personally, I’m a huge sucker for all this stuff, but from a brief skim of Ruined‘s reviews on Goodreads, I can see that at least a few people disapprove.

I can understand that. There were definitely times whilst I was reading Ruined that I felt for certain that I could have been reading The Selection, or something similar. Both novels have the love interests live together in a palace immediately after meeting, and in both cases the parents aren’t exactly thrilled with the bride-to-be. Something that The Selection did marginally better, I feel, was that the relationship moved at a much slower pace. The love between America and Maxon took its time, at least compared to Em and Cas.

I don’t think the familiarity of Ruined‘s characters is necessarily a bad thing. Honestly, and I mean this with no offence to writers of YA (as I am one myself!), if you’re looking for the latest and greatest most original fiction, you probably shouldn’t be shopping in this section. Personally, I enjoy this kind of book. I love the intense drama, and Ruined certainly has no shortage of that.

There’s quite a lot of fighting. It seems to be something that’s very important in the culture of all of the countries involved (except Vallos?), and everyone is also very good at it. All of the characters, both male and female, young and older, seem to have a knack for swinging a sword about, and many of them are really quite aggressive. Cas seems to be the only largely peaceful character, which to me makes a lot of sense. He’s never seen war. He even says that it’s easy for him to pretend the Ruined don’t exist.

I was a bit worried about the amount of fighting, especially at the beginning. It struck me immediately that this was going to be the sort of novel where the author gives the female characters a sword and decides that’s plenty enough to make them the ‘strong female character’ current readers demand. I don’t think I was wrong, not exactly. Whilst it’s clear that the female cast of Ruined are tough, I don’t think they’re well rounded enough to be considered strong characters. Yes, they’ve killed. They’re sullen and not really in touch with their emotions, and they much prefer trousers to skirts. So really, rather than strong female characters, they’re just women with the stereotypical traits of a male character, and that doesn’t make them strong characters. I hope that character development in the sequels resolves this at least a little.

There are things that Ruined did well. The setting, to me, was something I haven’t seen a lot of. Rather than the English or Celtic influence that a lot of similar novels seem to have, this one had something of a Spanish or even South American influence (correct me if I’m wrong!). The names of the characters fit with their respective backgrounds, and the jungle made for an interesting change from your average forest. I will say though, I didn’t feel that the change of scenery really made a difference for the story. The characters could just as easily have been traipsing through the Forest of Dean. Perhaps the introduction of more jungle-related things would have helped. Bugs, jungle-related animals, and more description of the trees perhaps?

More description in general is something I definitely would have liked. I’m a big lover of world building, so when a new world is presented to me, I like to get to know it. I would have loved to know more about Ruined magic, for example, but I got the impression from Olivia that we’ll find out more in book #2 (which I’m excited to read!). I also felt like I didn’t or couldn’t really visualise the Ruined marks. In my head they were like tiger stripes, or Blaschko’s lines.

There were a few things I wasn’t sure about. The whole impersonation plan, for example, I didn’t find really believable. Surely there would have been more checks, more guards, more investigation. I also noted that at one point it’s said that Em is resistant to Ruined magic, but at the end, Olivia heals her. How does that work? Is the resistance passive (à la Bella’s shield in Twilight) or does she have to think about it?

Something I particularly liked was the boat scene. I got the impression that until that point, Em had never considered that her mother might be a bad person. As a reader, I had that impression right from the first quote Em gives about her, but it seems that Em was so focused on the wrongs done to her people, she hadn’t really considered the wrongs her people had done. I was also, in a sad way, glad that Damian died. It was true to what the King would have done, and I respect that. I would have loved more information about him though, particularly regarding how Em felt about him.

With Olivia, I was very surprised. I didn’t expect her to be so much like her mother, if you get what I mean. She certainly shook things up! I was afraid for the characters before this, but now… I can sort of understand why the humans are so afraid of the Ruined. That kind of power shouldn’t be underestimated.

So where do we go from here? I’m deathly afraid that Olivia or the Warriors will kill Cas. The issue with wanting to make peace is that if you’re the only one who wants it, then you’re probably going to die. It’s not like Em can really back him up politically since blood-thirsty Olivia is (I assume?) in charge of the Ruined. I hope we get to learn more about the four countries, and about some of the characters that were mentioned but not involved, like the King of Olso.

Overall, I’d say Ruined was pretty good. If you’re a big fan of the fantasy-adventure-dystopia YA trend then I’d recommend it for sure. The world has a lot of potential, and the magic system is something I’m looking forward to learning more about. I’m hopeful for some real character development in the sequels, and I’m excited to find out how it all ends.