Saturday, January 21, 2012

Successful Stories

Lately I've been thinking a lot about creating success for yourself. One of my favorite Sarah Dessen quotes says, "Sometimes you have to manufacture your own history. Give fate a push, so to speak. You know?" I have that quote on my wall above my bed. In my Publishing Children's Literature class we've had a bunch of fantastic speakers come. This week we had five authors, all of which I love. The biggest thing I got from them was to persevere and stick with it. Even if books get rejected, keep trying. Be proud of finishing a novel even if it doesn't get published. Basically, they've been really motivating. And then this article showed up in our school paper and I was like, "Yay you guys!" They had a dream and they made it happen. So I'm going to start giving my fate a push and making things happen. There's a publishing fair on campus this week, wish me luck!

"Don't be scared to have a dream and go after it. The world has enough cowards."

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Service

Provo beats every other city in the country when it comes to service by 4.5%. That right there is a fact. I helped support this awesome statistic yesterday when I went to Provo's annual community service day in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. It was a huge event with hundreds of people. You could volunteer for whatever you wanted, and the choices were endless. You could participate in a blood drive, help clean and shelve library books, organize costumes at a local theater, dance with the elderly, write letters to soldiers, clean an animal shelter, build with Habitat for Humanity...the list goes on and on. Me and my group of friends decided to build and paint toys for underprivileged children.

There were lots of different choices. I built a steam roller, and so did most of my friends. K built a castle and it had a little working drawbridge!

It was a lot of fun! Plus it was service :)



Thursday, January 12, 2012

Book Review: The Princess and The Bear by Mette Ivie Harrison


This is the sequel to The Princess and The Hound. It was fantastic. The story of the animal magic continues with the hound and the bear from the first book. They are sent - now in human form - back in time to fight the unmagic. The unmagic is basically death and destruction. It sucks out not only the magic, but the life of any living thing that it touches. The hound takes on the name Chala and the bear becomes King Richon again - a life he has not enjoyed for 200 years. Together they travel through his kingdom, seeing all the sorrow his lack of appropriate ruling has brought. And King Richon resolves to be a better person - a king his people can look up to.

Once again, Harrison succeeded in writing a beautiful novel. The magic is still a bit tricky to understand and sometimes I felt like she rushed through parts of the story and it made the scene hard to take in. It was 100% clean. I really enjoyed this novel and I highly recommend it.

Monday, January 2, 2012

Make Life Better

I so wish I could take credit for all of these wonderful things, but I can't. But I can share them with you. Please read this inspiring article. Every single one of these ideas applied to me in some way. I am going to try to work on all of them. I'll even post updates on how I do. See? Now I'm motivated. :)

READ: 30 Things to Stop Doing to Yourself or 30 Things to Make Your Life Better.

Good Luck!