Amaranthine Forever

Hi! I'm in denial about New Years. Far be it from me to further inundate you with cliches about how fast the year has gone....but I'm going to anyway. The year has sped by so fast I can't believe it. It seemed like yesterday I was posting LAST year's complaint about how fast the time passed, and now...ahhh. I had a great trip! The highlights were going to visit Google's headquarters(THAT PLACE IS SURREAL. Free awesome food, free big park with climbing ropes/track/soccer field, swimming pool, bowling alley, free yellow/green/blue bikes. Android beanbags and life-sized smartphone, and a google maps room with a nearly-360 google earth panorama on like ten flat screen tvs placed horizontally.) and seeing Les Mis with cousins. And I'm leaving again to go skiing! Yay! Anyways, new years. This past year has been insane. This year, I went on a mission trip, saw my blog traffic grow(and drop, and grow) experienced everything with my TLF sisters, and read bad seq

  December is always my favorite month of the year, and now that most of the stressful things are out of the way,  I can see why. I like cold weather. But because I live in Southern California, we never really get to see it for a while. Summer lasted a really long time this year. It didn't start to get cold until about two weeks ago. I'm pretty excited for this Christmas! We've never had Christmas away from home before, but this year we're going to my cousin's house up near the bay area.  I really love their house. My city is very planned and clean and boring and suburban with houses that all look the same, but their house is in the middle of an epic pine forest and has lots of old interesting houses. One of their neighbors has a llama. A legit llama just hanging in the backyard. This past month has been super busy for me! I'm applying to several super-exclusive summer programs, and the applications are almost like college applications. I'm apply

People get confused when I tell them that writing makes me tired. And it does. After writing any sort of narrative(aka school essays don't count) for a long time, my head spins and I get really cranky. It was hard to explain why writing had that effect on me. Why does something that I love drain me so much? Then I saw this passage by Roald Dahl in his memoir Boy, and I thought it was summed up perfectly: "The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn't go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally di

I'm super excited about this article published by Entertainment Weekly yesterday, which includes this still of Harrison Ford and Asa Butterfield and some army.   It looks ah-mazing, but I'm still a little troubled. Because even though OSC SAID that almost none of the scenes of the movie were in the book, and vice versa, it's still scary. As in, in Ender's Game Graff never visits the barracks. O.O Also, the article says "He’s facing off with the imposing Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford) over whether his emails to home are being blocked."  In the book, it's a given that they're blocked. And when did he write any emails to home anyway? >.> In the comments of this and other articles, you can find many an outraged fan ranting over the stools next to the desks, the socks(!!) and the not one, but two girls you can find if you click on the entire picture  here . Also, I wasn't too terribly upset about Major Anderson's cha