Monday is exhausted . . . but still giving to charity!

Okay, so super fast and short post this week. I am in the midst of moving and it's 237 degrees outside and there's not AC or Internet in my new apt, which all kinda sucks and doesn't give me much of a window for, you know, posting things.

But onto the challenge!

Now, I'm familiar with an awful lot of charities, as my extended family has now started giving to charity every Christmas instead of giving individual presents to everyone. So I'm familiar with First Book and Heifer International and Adopt a Classroom and Autism Speaks and all the other charities my family has been involved in receiving gifts for or giving gifts to. And much as I love all those charities, I really wanted to find a new one for this project.

So I started to realize what time of year it was, and I thought, what better way to honor Ethan's memory and his sixteenth birthday than by finding a new cancer-related charity to donate to?

Anyone who knows me in person has probably noticed the bracelet I wear all the time. It's one of those rubber band bracelets, orange and purple (goes with nothing and therefore goes with everything!), and it reads, "Hope Street Kids -- Join the Fight Against Childhood Cancer." I've been wearing this bracelet for going on seven years now, first in Ethan's honor, then in his memory. My cousin Heather bought them for the family one Christmas.

So, first I thought, Great! I'll give to Hope Street Kids. Unfortunately, when I went to their page, I found that it's been inactive for the past couple of years. However, their page lead me to a charity called CureSearch, and I did a bit of research into them, and I really like what they have to offer. They're a children's cancer research center that places emphasis on research and education, which I appreciate. Also, something like 97% of the money donated to them goes to the charity itself.

I was all set to make my donation when something made me search for childhood cancer groups one more time. That's when I found Camp Quality USA. Basically, this is a camp organization that takes kids with cancer for a week and gives them the normal kid's summer camp experience. Each child has a companion assigned to them for the whole week that is trained to assist the kids with whatever needs they have, and they also have year-round programing available. But what really sold me is that Camp Quality also has a Sibs Camp option.

When a child in a family is diagnosed with cancer, everyone is affected. And it's really easy for the healthy children to feel neglected and pushed to the side.When I discovered that Camp Quality recognizes the healthy siblings and supports finding ways to assist them as well, I knew I'd found my charity.

Here's their website, if anyone wants more info: http://www.campqualityusa.com/

Can't wait to hear about everyone's charities!

Week 21 - Challenge Week!

All right! Here we have our second of five challenge weeks! Christina offered us a challenge on charities for this week -- hopefully you have all completed said challenges. I look forward to hearing about your charities!

Greetings from Connecticut

Look, I'm on time and everything! Well then, onto the post.

To answer Alexandra's question, I've never been to any cons, but not for lack of desire. It kills me that I wasn't at LeakyCon a couple weeks ago! Reading everyone's tweets and watching videos from people who were there was exciting, but also just torturous. It looked so amazing and I wish I could have gone! I'd also love to make it to Comic Con someday, but that will have to wait until I'm able to get out to California.

The past week was spent at my family cottage in Connecticut with my friends. Our cottage is on a camp ground with many other cottages and generations upon generations of families have been coming here for camp meeting in August for over 125 years now. To give some idea of how much of a tradition it is, I am the fifth or sixth generation of my family to be coming here. There are many other families at camp who have been coming just as long, so each generation of the same families have grown up and played together each summer. My friends had heard many stories about camp over the years, but had never seen it. But that's finally changed now! We all drove over together last Saturday and spent the last week here (with a one-day trip to New York to see Dan Radcliffe in How to Succeed!). It was really fun and I wish they hadn't had to leave so soon! They left early this morning, so today it was back to the usual camp routine: sitting around, reading, helping around the cottage and camp grounds, and sitting around some more. I have some friends at camp, but they're not here yet and I'm not sure when they're arriving, so it's a waiting game at the moment. My friend introduced me to an ipod/iphone game called Fruit Ninja, so that occupied quite a bit of my time today (more than I'd like to admit). Currently, I'm trying out Words With Friends, which is fun so far though I'm on the "not so good" side of the ability spectrum at the moment. Ah well, better read some more to learn some new words!

That's really what I've been up to lately, sorry to not have anything more exciting to report! I do really enjoy camp despite the seeming boringness. It's nice to just relax and get a break from technology as well. If I hadn't had to write this blog I wouldn't have even turned on my laptop today, and I generally leave my cellphone in the cottage when I'm out around the grounds. It may drive people trying to call me nuts, but it's nice to not be tethered to it for at least one week.

Just another Thursday

Well, I preordered my copy of The Fault in Our Stars, so I'm excited to finally receive a book by an author I enjoy which happens to be signed. Yay! Also, should be receiving Psych: Season Five sometime next week.

Honestly, I don't have that much to write about for this just another day blog. I could tell you how much I really want a Snuggie right now (seriously, my arms really are cold) but that's boring.

I don't know what it is about this week, but it's just had a really bad feeling behind it. Maybe it's because I've been getting less sleep and more food than usual, or that Arabic is really hard to understand when you're listening to it (and I have enough problems in English!). But yeah...

Also, I hate ants. My place is filled with them, and they like to get into things they ought not get into.

Sorry for making you all read this really long facebook status update.

Wednesday is the flakiest of all the things

::crumples to knees in despair:: NNNOOOOOOOOO!!!

Late.

By a lot.

Again.

Dang it.

Bring on the punishments, ladies... Verily I deserve it.

Again.

Dang it.

ANYWAY...

Cassie: I LOVED sky dancers. Those things were awesome.

Christina: I do have a Twitter, though I never use it. carlyncampbell--I know, terribly original. But good idea! I'd be willing to get tweets from you ladies.

Cassie: What a voyage! If you got at all close to Missoula's M, there's a fair chance you saw my aunt and/or uncle. They live in Missoula and hike the M several times a month. Also, PRINCESS BRIDE. Yes.

Alexandra: Props for such creativity! An author who can stick to her characters is a worthy author indeed. I, for one, would love to read your opus.

And now for my week!

I have a halfway decent reason, if not an excuse, for not having posted on time this week. I turned 22 on Tuesday (otherwise a rather nondescript day)! But that's not my reason. I have, of late, been spending unprecedented amounts of time with someone increasingly important with me. In fact, I am writing this on her computer, whose battery is about to die, and so this is going to be a very short post. The person in question is my of-almost-two-months girlfriend. She is the most remarkable human being, and, near as I can tell, she is absolutely perfect for me.

I'm sure I will be updating you all in more detail in the weeks to come, but feel free to cheer in celebration with me! I am one happy, if distracted, Wednesday.

Cheers!

Tuesday's Mostly Just Been Writing

Road trips and I have a long, sordid history together that has given me a certain fondness for aeroplanes, something I still am willing to say after taking a plane ride nearing 15 hours, from New York to Tokyo. After that experience, you must understand how much I hate road trips. Being in the car for over an hour is torture, and frankly, anything in the states I'd want to see is very accessible by plane or train.

Speaking of train, I'm going to PAX this year (by train, from Vancouver to Seattle) - anyone else attend any cons? E3, PAX-East, Comic Con, VidCon?

Anyway, my topic of choice for this week will be writing, which is mostly what I've been doing for this past month. My long-term project, "The Dust of Dead Desire", is on a rocky road right now. I'm at that point where I know my book inside-out. I can recite certain passages from memory without stammering, and that is grossly detrimental to my ability to continue with it. I can't read the passages blindly, I fill in blanks without realizing there were blanks to begin with. As an example, say I wrote the sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over lazy dog." Let's say you've written that sentence about eleven times now over the course of three years, obsessively plotting it and planning it, and you can recite the entire paragraph it is found in. Your eyes just sort of... glaze over while reading it. You don't notice that the the in the sentence is missing from this draft, because you're so used to it being there that you see it there.

As such, I am left with basically just saying that this is the final draft, giving it a few good edits and fixing a few sentences, and settling. After that, I don't really know. Not the most marketable piece. Everything is very tied together at this point in it's existence, every subplot is as essential as the main plot, and to remove any character will require at least two further drafts to work. I love how my piece is, but there are many things in it that a publisher would definitely want to cut. The relatonship between a fourteen-year-old girl, a twenty-something man, and his father, for instance, is not high marketability. It's basically Lolita, except it doesn't really condemn it and they are all elves. The aforementioned girl has a brother in a homosexual, polygamist relationship that I doubt the world's quite progressive enough to handle as an unspoken of element of the story.

On the same token, I don't really want to self-publish it. I have other projects waiting to be written that are at least a bit more marketable, and one that looks as though it could be my literary opus (though "The Dust of Dead Desire" will always be my creative opus), and there's still a lot of stigma attached to self-publication, enough that if I'm not successful with my attempts at selling "The Dust of Dead Desire", and again: paedophilia, polygamy, all cool, then I would have to hide it from future publishers for my other works. Which basically means I am just going to have to put it, my baby, in a folder for many years until I can fine tune it and present it with confidence to my established agent and publisher.

Oh well. It'll always be there for me to revisit. I suppose I may as well tell you about my newest project, the one which will likely occupy my efforts now that I'm done with this. Titled, "Tremble" mostly for the other name for 'milk sickness'. Takes place in a world with a single continent, one which stretches in full around the world. The only way to cross would be through the lands or by a river or canal. A couple hundred years ago, snakeroot - a fantasy weed based mostly on the real plant - spread like a plague and made the lands barren, and the livestock inedible. People took to the seas, on grand ships of unspeakable magnitude, though there were those who stayed on land, many immune to the trembles.

The main character is Regulus, one of the seafarers, who want to cross to the other sea to obtain a rare basilisk's eye (Regulus is often cited as the Latin name for basilisk, as an aside), however the world's ever increasing heat has dried up many canals and made the rivers too narrow or shallow to sail. He finds a desert dweller, a woman named Galene, and she offers to help him cross the savannah, the safest place for the two of them. The whole thing is rather surreal after the premise is established, though. Lots of unspeakable horrors on the continent, things with two many eyes or mouths, an elephant with a thousand trunks, and just your standard fare of fantasy foe (there are sphinxes featured prominently in the desert scenes). It's also not particularly happy, I reckon I'll just have them both die in the desert. :P

Friday has a (quasi) excuse, but is still sorry

*sulks into frame* Yeah.... hey guys... sorry I'm late and stuff. I was going to be posting late on Saturday anyway, but I wasn't going to be this late. To clarify, I'm in Connecticut right now at my family cottage with some friends. We drove from Michigan to here in one go on Saturday (12.5 hours). As I do, I left my packing until the last minute on Friday, so I chose to forego blogging in favor of getting to bed before midnight (I got to bed at 1:30). We spent Saturday driving and I was planning on blogging when we got to Connecticut, but tiredness got the best of me. And then (!) on Sunday, the internet here was not working so, well, there you go. Well, I'm here now! (Also, I think it would be helpful if you guys know my twitter (cestchristina), I can update it via text so if I ever don't have internet again, I can let you know. Do any of you have twitters?

So, onto the topic... I had trouble thinking of what to write about for this last week. I haven't lost much in my life so far. My grandma, my cat, some classmates that I didn't know well or even really talk to... I decided finally to talk about college, more specifically the campus. I went to the University of Michigan (and okay, I still technically live right by campus, but only for a couple more weeks and then I'll be gone from Ann Arbor). I love Ann Arbor and will miss it so much. I love walking around campus (which, unlike many campuses, is integrated into the city, there's no separate U of M campus), walking through the downtown streets, going to the Arboretum. One of my favorite ways to spend the evening is walking to the library, stopping at my bank, and just stopping in to any shops I pass that I feel like going in that day. My favorite used book shop, Dawn Treader, is right around the corner from my apartment and I love just going in there and browsing the shelves and shelves of obscure books (and I always stop in the kids' section to see what copies of Harry Potter they have at the moment). The original Borders is also right by my apartment and I am so sad to be seeing it go. In Ann Arbor, Borders feels more like a local book store than a huge national chain. It was started by two U of M grads and has been right there in downtown Ann Arbor since it first began. It's sad to see the going out of business signs in the windows now. In mid-August, I'll also be losing, along with Ann Arbor, some of the friends that I've made here. One is moving out to New York City, another will be going to grad school at Berkley, my roommate to med school at WashU in St. Louis... Some I probably won't see again. I know I'll see my roommate again, but don't know when. I always knew this time would come and I'm really to move on from college (and move to France!), but going through it is still sad.

My friends and I are now heading out to lunch in a nearby town, so I will be seeing you all on Friday (on time!). I await my punishment...