Hello everybody, and welcome to a post where Faith screams a heckin' lot because THE YEAR IS HALF OVER AND HOWWWWWW

I never read as much as I want, and this year proved no exception. This has also been a generally disappointing year reading-wise (I think I have about three five-stars total so far, gosh), but I'm hurtling through a written TBR pile and actually reading some books I'd meant to read for YEARS, and so I'm going to give you guys some highlights!!!!

As always: My Goodreads exists and you should probably follow it because it's a rollicking GOOD time. Full of snark. Full of sass. Full of loving on soft characters and hating on YA bad boys. FOLLOW IT. xD

All Goodreads reviews will be linked under the books!

Hello, everybody! It's no secret that I am a major fan of Planners, keeping track of my time, and ensuring that I always know how I'm going to use my time. I also have a million and one hobbies, jobs, commitments, and things to do. So today's post is going to be: how to manage all of that! (Or at least: how I do it.)

First off: My planner.



I currently have this Wonder Woman planner, and it's been the one I've used throughout this last school year. I plan to continue using it til I get to college, when I will revert back to my Passion Planner (which is AMAZING because it has everything organized by the half hour for the busiest bees, but I digress). My absolute favorite thing about this planner is the three different sections. I like to organize them as follows:

1. SCHOOL. I am actually doing summer school (one college class, I'm so far over my head, help) so I use this section to write down my assignments and, more importantly, WHEN I plan to do them. I use this in correlation with the app MyStudyLife, where you can upload all your assignments and then check to see what's due by the week. I find that especially helpful for tracking reading assignments when you don't want to pull up your syllabus over and over.

I also write down my piano practice and my workouts in this section, because I see those things as more school than anything. During the school year, this section was much more full of assignments for my 5-6 classes, but it's less full now, for obvious reasons. I expect to have MANY more such things in my planner once college starts.

2. WRITING. THis one could more generally be "the arts", because anything I see as related to my arts is in here. It starts off with my WIP tracker-- ItSF all the way across, a.k.a. my new WIP (If the Sky Falls, the sequel to Holding Up the Sky.)

Then I write down the book I'm currently beta-ing--while I'll typically have multiple beta projects in the works at a time, I try to only work on one per week, and only that one util it's done.

For the longest time, I would just write "art" in here instead of specifying which drawing I was working on. But now that I have so many projects and I'm trying to be way more serious, I'm trying my hand at assigning a certain project a certain day. It's especially nice now that I can try to use different mediums and different pads *wink wink*

Finally, I try to write down "Read" as an item on my to-do list every day. I also have to write down days when I plan to watch shows or movies, because I won't spend any time on those things (or I'll waste time trying to make decisions) if I don't. I have a firmly set TBR this year, and making my way through that is something I need to be intentional about. And then I have enough shows and movies I want to get through that I need to make a plan.

This is, in my opinion, the most important place in my schedule as a creative. For many of us, there isn't time in a day to write AND draw AND make music AND read AND watch something AND edit AND critique AND paint. Gosh, that's a lot just looking at it. But since it's my summer, I try to get as many of those things in as I possibly can, and I want to be intentional about it. Not just "Oh, maybe I'll write today, if I get time for it."

No, I've found that the best way to make time to write is to put writing ON YOUR TO-DO LIST FOR THE DAY. Make a list of things to do and MAKE SURE WRITING IS ON IT.

3. LIFE. This is the most general--I write down my meals on here (it's more fulfilling, somehow, to check those off after spending half an hour a day on each), my shifts for work, my chores, things that NEED to happen, my bills, my family time, shopping, and anything else I want/need to do in a day. Some days have WAY more than others. Sometimes I'll go through and add more stuff in after I do them so I can check them off.

So what do I want to say about this?

First off: PLANNERS DO NOT RUN YOUR LIFE. THEY ARE A WAY FOR YOU TO RUN YOUR LIFE. Making lists of your priorities, making to-do lists, getting things done: It should not dictate your every move. If there's something that isn't life or death (or the death of your grades) if you don't do it RIGHT NOW, if you aren't feeling it, don't do it. The world will not end. *Me, a Type A, breathes heavily into a paper bag*

Secondly: Organizing your life is NOT just for planning gurus and it doesn't take lots of time or lots of money. Buy a planner! Make a list! Check off each of the things! You don't need to have specific categories and you don't even need specific TIMES. Just put down that you're doing the things and then? During the day? DO THE THINGS.

Thirdly: you can do it, mate. Get in there and make a system that works for you. It doesn't have to look anything like mine--I know Passion Planners and bullet journals are super popular, but a simple little pad of paper and a pen can work too if that's all you want. You may have to try several different systems. I've had a different planner almost every school year. But if you give it a shot and you do your best: You can do it.

I hope you enjoyed this post! Do you use a planner? What are YOUR tips for getting things done? Is my system ridiculously complicated? Let me know in the comments!

Note: This post is adapted from my graduation speech...

High school has been a journey. It hasn’t just been academics, and it hasn’t just been life, but the two mingle together and I want to talk a little about both. Because these years were such a big deal to me, here are some highlights.
Freshman year. Ninth grade, 14 years old. A year of upheaval. I took nine classes because I thought it would be cool. I realized I had no idea how to be friends with girls my age. Medical scares. My first heartbreak. It was a year marked by loss, and yet full of growth. A year God used for good, even though at the time it was like walking through the valley of the shadow.
Sophomore year. 15 years old, and the easiest year comparatively. I don’t think any of you want the gory details about the time I spent crying in the bathroom that year, so I won’t share any *insert laugh* but let’s just say… I cried, a lot. I questioned, a lot. I ached. I bled. But I also laughed, and I realized that life was beautiful. I made friends. I started a blog. I started to grow in spirit, even though that was the point I stopped growing upward. And now here I am, stuck at 5’1”. *long sigh*
Junior year. 16 years old—first job, first college classes. I spent most of that year hunched over my computer. I learned how to manage my time and how to get up in the morning and how to make do on six hours of sleep. Still haven’t mastered making do on less than that, but don’t worry—college is around the corner. *laugh* I made more coffees than any person here could possibly drink in their lifetime, and I discovered, at age 16, an outpouring of something that would become the greatest love of my life so far—storytelling.
And now… senior year. I went into it declaring that it was my easy year. My year to grab a few credits I didn’t need, sack out, and make money. The first semester went off without a hitch. But then 2020 hit, and I don’t think I need to talk about the dumpster fire that has been 2020. Even without the outside trials, though, this would’ve been a hard enough year. Friendships shaken, some of my surest foundations ripped away, the weight of stress and decisions and money money money placed on my shoulders.
It’s been a year.

But here is the truth: God is good. In the midst of all this, God is good. Throughout high school, more even than the Pythagorean theorem or the square root of c or how to craft a thesis, that’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned. That’s what will stick with me: He is good. Always.
I love my family. I love my friends. Thank you to the blogging community and to everyone who's touched my life. It's been beautiful and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Senior Year Playlist on Spotify
MY LIFE IN MEMES

I've been sitting on this news for MONTHS and now here it is: My Havok story The Devil Tries Again isn't just in the print anthology, it's in AUDIO!!!!

I'm so excited to share this news with all of you--Havok's narrator did an absolutely BRILLIANT job with my little Southern spaceport sci-fi duel, and I hope you enjoy listening! It's on Spotify, and I'll drop the links below:

https://gohavok.com/

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3JtereSSBQD5sDH93bmynb

Give it a listen!!! I hope you enjoy :D

Hello everyone! We have reached the END of this series (who else can't believe how quickly five months went by? They were five months of utter insanity, but HEY, they're done now, thank God). And today it's time for the fifth and final love language: the art of GIFT-GIVING!

I feel like this is something that doesn't show up often enough in fiction, so finding examples of someone whose primary love language is the giving of gifts is kind of a difficult feat. I want to consider two different kinds of gifts: the big, massive gift; and the smaller, more down-to-earth, but constant kind of gift.

First: the BIG GIFT. The sort of thing that ends up being a MacGuffin or a story-driving device or something absolutely crucial. The first to come to mind is the Mockingjay pin of The Hunger Games. Another might be the mithril coat that Thorin gives to Bilbo in The Hobbit--remember that thought, because I'll be coming back to it. In The Fault in our Stars, August and Hazel give each other the mutual gift of a favorite book--and August gives Hazel his Make-A-Wish trip to fulfill one of her greatest dreams.

A quick side trail here would be the idea of a gift given by the villain, something sinister BUT that hides its sinister-ness (a word?) behind a guise of something innocent. Jennifer Nielsen employs this masterfully in The Deceiver's Heart, where the main villain, Lord Endrick, gives the main girl, Kestra, a necklace as a gift--seemingly harmless, but every time she tries to take it off, it causes her excruciating pain and ends up becoming a major part of the plot. Every gift that Madoc gives Jude in The Cruel Prince helps her survive in a harsh world--and yet it's all a reminder that he is not her true father, but an abusive man who hurt her and her sisters. In the Caraval series, every bit of help that one buys must be paid for in the most unconventional way--by sleeping for days, giving up a year of life, or giving up something beloved. (Faerie bargains, my dudes. One of my most favorite things).

We could probably go on this way for a very long time, but I think you get the idea. There are a LOT of stories that are set into motion or aided by the gift of something very valuable, very sacrificial, or very rare. This is truly a way to show the love between two people: we talked about sacrificing one's life last week as an act of service, but I think the gift of one's life--not dying for someone, but living for them--would also fall under this category.

Now I want to deal with the second category of gift giving, the one my friend Nicki Chapelway described as a "magpie" instinct--the kind of gift giving where someone sees something shiny and just immediately wants to GIVE IT to someone. This is something that I feel doesn't show up enough in literature, and we need to remedy that.

Going back to my comments on Thorin: I would say he's the first example to come to mind of a "gift giver", as well as the entire Hobbit culture in Lord of the Rings. Honestly, I think Tolkien himself was probably a gift giver, with the amount of that which happens in the series. Throin gives away gold and gems, gives people titles, and even offers one-fourteenth of the treasure in the Lonely Mountain to each quester (before, of course, the gold goes to his head). The Hobbits give each other presents on their own birthdays. We have so many examples of this love language in Tolkien--it's a shame more stories don't emulate this.

As I edit Holding Up the Sky, I'm working on incorporating the love language of gift giving more. The character who could likely be described as the true protagonist of the story, Daverby, is not a toucher, not smooth with affirmation, not good at telling anyone how he feels or doing anything nice for them--but he loves his girlfriend, Em, and wants to do things for her that she will like. His solution? He gives her things. Worthless things--at one point, he picks a weed off the road and puts it in her hair. He gives her his coat when she's cold. He gives her a home, safety, provides for her, and puts her needs above his own countless times. Dave's way of proving his love? Through little tiny gifts. And the reason that this matters is that when he buys her flowers, he pays for it with his own currency. Dave is a thief. He could steal all the money he wants to pay for this stuff--he could even steal the gifts themselves. But instead, he pays out of his pocket.

Daverby let go of her hand suddenly and ducked down on the path to pluck a flower that happened to be growing there. Its yellow blossom was larger than Emery might have expected from a common weed. Bowing low, he extended his hand and proffered it to her. “For the lady.”
She wrinkled her nose. “A weed.”
“Only the finest for you, baby.” He quirked his eyebrow.
Butterflies whirled through her stomach, but she kept her face hard. “You’re giving me a flower that you found in the middle of the road.”
He reached for her, and she offered no resistance as he tucked it behind her ear, stroking her hair back too. “The road doesn’t deserve to be adorned with a flower so beautiful. Only the most lovely woman alive deserves that.”

How much of this is true? I asked once.