Time Management

I read The Important Habit of Just Starting by Jory Mackay and How to Beat Procrastination by Caroline Webb. I picked these two articles because I have a major procrastination problem. I always say I'm going to start working on projects days or weeks in advance, and then end up doing the entire thing the night before it's due. Both of these articles went into the psychological reasons behind procrastination and gave advice on how to get over it. It was mostly advice I'd read before, which says less about the articles and more about my habit of looking up tips to stop procrastinating as a method of procrastinating. At least for this semester, all of my classes with large projects have built in schedules that will force me to work on them long before the due dates.

                                                        
                                                             (Procrastinators unite. flickr.)

Technology

I've never used most of the technology tools listed before. I was surprised to see Tumblr listed as an option for setting up our project websites, because I've alway used and thought of it more as a social media platform. However, now that I think about it I can see how its setup would work pretty well for the types of projects we looked at. I don't know if I'll use Tumblr since I'm already familiar with it, or one of the other website options so I can learn how to use them.

                                             
                                                                 (Technology. Source.)

Assignments

I'm looking forward to the storytelling assignments for this class. I'm in a novel writing class this semester, and I think it will be nice to take a break from that and work on smaller writing assignments, especially if they're stories inspired by reading different myths. It will also be a good opportunity to practice with story telling styles that won't work in my novel class. I'm intrigued by the Wikipedia Trails extra credit assignment. I sometimes click through random links on Wikipedia articles anyway, so it will be cool to get class credit for doing it.

                                            
                                                                 (Frog. Source.)

Growth Mindset Response

I had never heard of Carol Dweck or growth mindset before, or at least not referred to as such. I have seen some of the ideas she spoke about in the video before, mostly on Tumblr post where people talked about how always being praised as the "smart kid" growing up for getting good grades had made them unable to deal with difficult classes when they were older, and caused them to view their own intelligence and self worth as being dependant on getting good grades. They talked about how they wished they had been working hard rather than doing well. I can really relate to a lot of these experiences. The first time I had a class that didn't come easily to me was when I took a college level chemistry class in high school. I cried at almost every homework assignment and test and spent the entire school year thinking that I had somehow lost whatever it was that made me smart. As far as academics go, I still have a pretty fixed mindset, although I've been trying to change that. I would say I have more of a growth mindset when it comes to music. I played the trombone all through middle and high school, and I always found songs with super easy base lines to be mind-numbingly dull. I went to almost every honor band audition and solo competition offered in the area, and those required playing pieces that were much more challenging than anything we ever played in class. I won't  say I never got frustrated with these more difficult  pieces, because that would be a lie, but I always persevered through them and was proud and excited by my improvement when I could play them well.

                                         
                                                         (Drawing by Bryan Mathers)

Introduction to Emily

Hi everyone, I'm Emily. I'm a professional writing major. Professional writing is part of Gaylord College and focuses on writing and marketing genre fiction. I'm minoring in religious studies because I've always found learning about different religions to be fascinating. I also think knowing about these different beliefs and practices could be helpful for world building in fantasy writing. I want to write fantasy novels, mainly urban fantasy. I prefer stories that integrate magic into modern society over the vaguely European, medieval-ish kingdoms of high fantasy. The best class I took last semester was Writing the Short Story. I learned a lot about how to plot and execute a good story and got some good feedback from my teacher and classmates. It also forced me to actually finish some stories rather than starting and abandoning a bunch of works in progress. I'm currently reading It Devours, the second Welcome to Night Vale novel by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor. I'm enjoying it so far, but I liked the first one better. It had less of a romance subplot. My favorite book is probably Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. There's a BBC series being made of it starring David Tennant that I'm excited for.

                                                      
                                    (It Devours: A Welcome to Night Vale Novel. Amazon.)
        My copy has this cover--> 
                                                                (Good Omens. Amazon.)

I have two cats and two dogs, but my grandma has recently come to live with us and brought her dogs with her, so we currently have four in the house. They all get along pretty well, so it's mostly been okay, but it is a bit more than we're used to taking care of. My dogs are a Labrador mix of some kind (possibly part grey hound?) named Fiona and a Schnauzer named Tinkerbell (my dad insists it's just Tink, but it's Tinkerbell). My cats are named Han Solo and Scruffy. Solo is especially my cat, because I've been his favorite person ever since he was a kitten.
                                                       
                                                                       (Fiona as a puppy)

                                                       
                                                                       (Han Solo the cat)

Storybook Favorites

Death's Final Story

I was drawn to this storybook because I generally really like stories featuring a personification of Death, especially when that personification is something of a protagonist or narrator rather than something to be feared. I found the structure, with Death speaking directly to the reader in the form of giving advice to a successor to his job, very interesting, as it was not something I had seen done before. The introduction drew me immediately with the statement that Death also dies. Most Death personification stories I have read or seen before state the exact opposite, so I was intrigued to see how the storybook would resolve this statement.

Selkies in Celtic Folk Lore

I've always been a fan of Celtic stories, and I was familiar with the idea of selkies, although I didn't previously know any specific stories about them, so I was curious to read this storybook. I really liked the way it was set up as a mother telling a series of stories to her daughter. It allowed for an introduction and reaction to each story without disrupting the flow of the stories themselves. It was also interesting to see these stories from the perspective of the selkies instead of a human perspective, and the way this shift in viewpoint gave them the appearance of cautionary tales. I felt that the picture of the statue in the last story really communicated the longing and pain of the selkies in this storybook.
                                                     
                           (Statue of the Little Mermaid. Alena's Daughter, Selkies in Celtic Folk Lore)

Ghost Stories

Honestly, who doesn't love a good ghost story? I wasn't familiar with any of the specific stories that where used for inspiration in this one, but I did recognize elements of each one from various urban legends and scary movies. The way it was framed as an investigation was a good way of building suspense by limiting the amount of information both the reader and the narrator herself had access to at any given time in the story. I was clear from the introduction that the storybook was going to focus on investigating the haunted house and retelling the experiences of previous residents, but I didn't expect the level of sympathy given to the ghost. I also really didn't see the end coming.

My Favorite Place-Devil's Den State Park

There isn't a lot to do in the corner of Kansas where I grew up, so my family used go on short road trips into neighboring states on the weekends. One place we went frequently and my personal favorite was Devil's Den State Park in Arkansas. The park has a lot of different trails to hike. As much as I'm normally an indoorsy type of person, I actually really love hiking in wooded areas. I like the way the light filters through the leaves and creates shifting patterns when the wind blows and the possibility of spotting different animals among the trees. There's something about walking over an uneven dirt hiking trail that's just more satisfying than walking down the sidewalk, especially if there are rocks you have to climb over to stay on that trail.

                                              
                                       (Trail at Devil's Den State Park Wikimedia Commons)

However, the best part of these trips wasn't the trail itself. It was the cave at the end of the trail. The cave is closed to the public now to protect the bat population that roosts there in the winter, but back when I went with my family people were allowed to walk through. The cave isn't the easiest to get navigate. The floor is uneven and at times you have to climb up or down to keep going, it's extremely narrow most of the way, and I remember my parents having to duck frequently, although I was short enough to just walk through. The ground was always wet and you have to carry a flashlight because it's pitch dark inside. My sister never wanted to go to far into it because she was (irrationally, in my opinion) afraid of it collapsing, but I always loved caves and liked this one even more for its familiarity.

                                         
                                (Cave entrance Devil's Den State Park Wikimedia Commons)