Welcome to October!!!: What's Been Going On? (2)

Hello there, and welcome to Loving the Language of Literacy, if this is your first time here.... welcome to the crazy, random, ramblings of a teenager blogger, reader, and aspiring writer. This is my second "What's Been Going On?" post where I give you lovely readers a general update on all things happening with Sofia Li in her personal life, blogging, and reading. She has a lot of thinks to update and tell you about that she is QUITE bursting to say - per usual. She is now talking in third person.

Don't worry, speaking in third person is normal around here :)

The Leap Across the Blogging Chasm to BookTube is Commencing!

The most exciting thing that I am doing this month on the interwebs, at least in my opinion, is making the large leap to BookTube! 

What is this world coming to?

That's right folks, by the end of this month, I would like to consider myself a newbie vlogger. I hope to have my first vlog - which is an intro to the channel and general Q&A video (where I ask myself questions, of course) - uploaded on my channel this weekend (please, feel free to hold me accountable on this statement) as well as other videos this month such as writing updates, book talks, discussions, tags, and SO MUCH MORE!!! 

It will be a lot to adjust to.... 

You're going to see me in person, that's an epic occasion in and of itself.

In all seriousness, things will be a bit crazy around here, there may not be as many posts because I now have to split my blogging time with vlogging and editing (do you know how gosh darn long this process is?), so until I find a solid balance, just know that this is the reason why. Blogging will always be my first love in the bookish community, and I'm just dipping my toes into this ENTIRELY NEW medium, trying to see if I like it and if it suits my personality. 

I am in now way saying that you should feel obligated to do anything, but I would appreciate it so much if you subscribed to my channel with is eponymous to my blog name aka. the same thing.

Loving the Language of Litearcy

Time Management is Getting Harder as the Years Go On.... She's Getting Old

We're back to the 3rd person thing. Joy! Anyway, I must admit that time management/having time at all to do activities outside of school, such as reading, vlogging, blogging, running, etc have become increasingly more difficult as the school year drags on because of ONE factor and one factor only.

I'm lookin' at you!

The other night, I started working on homework AS SOON as I got home (3:30) and only took a break for dinner. By 10, I was too tired to continue, and went on to wake up at 5 in the morning in order to finish. On some nights I'm drowning in it and on others, I appear to float. On those nights, all I honestly want to do is crawl into bed with some hot tea, watch some tv for a few minutes, then collapse into a sleeping beauty-worthy slumber.

Honestly, if you were to ask me to check my sanity when you see that I am adding BookTubing and NaNoWriMo-ing to my daily repertoire, I will respond saying that I am insane. I don't know what demon is possessing me or what hallucination is telling me that I actually have time to add all of this to my plate. I know there will be a lot of days when I can't do what I want to do, and I will have to accept those, but I'm going to try my best and that's all that can be asked of me (according to my parents when it comes to academics, at least) so I ask that you please bear with me.

NaNoWriMo! OhNo!

AKA. Yet another opportunity for you to question my sanity. Yes, I will admit it, I am attempting NaNoWriMo in November. My experience with Camp NaNoWriMo didn't go as planned (check out my last "What's Been Going On?" post for more information) but I will persevere. I picked myself up, dusted my over-achieving ego off and attempting this again. 

Feel free to add me as a buddy {sslluvsbooks}

In preparation for NaNoWriMo, I am participating in #NaNoPrep which is basically when a lot of NaNo-ers outline, plot, sketch characters, and generally hate themselves for deciding to sign up for this program. Fun times! I have a personal goal of writing 500 words a day every day in October. This is not to add extra stress to my plate, but merely a way to ensure I slip into the NaNoWriMo mode easily, so instead of going from 0-60, I got from 500-1667 words a day. Do you see what I did there? I'm generally doing a lot of info-dumping that I will intersperse throughout my NaNoWriMo novel and a lot of prompted writing to get those creative juices exercised and flowing.

We're all crazy around here :) *grins evily*

From now until the beginning of December, prepare to see a large flux/wave of posts about NaNoWriMo outlining, excerpts, backstories, and general posts about writing. Loving the Language of Literacy has never solely been a book review blog. While reviews are a good percentage of the posts coming from here, this blog has to do will all things bookish and basically whatever I want it to be since I'm in control *cue maniacal laugh* I hope you don't mind and will enjoy the change in scenery.

How personal do you want bloggers to be in posts?

This brings me to my last and extremely relevant topic. How personal do you want me to be in posts? That last paragraph was a segue into this topic. I will write what I see fit to (obviously) but I would still like to know what you like to see. Would you like a completely random post recapping a funny/sad/ interesting thing that happened during my week, posts about writing, posts about my favorite television shows? I would honestly like to know if you would like to know more about me, a kind of "Meet the Blogger" post, I'm willing to write them all. I just want to know if those are the kinds of things you would be interested in or whether you would like me to talk just about books, which I am perfectly fine with doing as well.

Thank you so much if you got the end of this post, I hope you have a great day, and I will see you soon with another bookish post. 

A Few Changes Around Here and Life in General: What's Been Going On? (1)

I know, I know. The title of this post is uncharacteristically vague for Sofia. This post is divided into 2 parts. Part One is the full explanation of what's been going on in my life, and an explanation as to why I went dark from social media and my blog from July 31 - August 5. Part Two is how these changes in my personal life will affect my blog and general activity in the interwebs. You can read one or the other, both of that's what tickles your fancy. I have just had all of you blog readers for almost 8 months (shocking) and want to let you know. 

On Tuesday, July 29, 2014, my mom passed away after an almost two year long fight against esophageal cancer. I have only briefly talked about this once before in my book review of Me Since You by Laura Wiess when I was comparing my situation and the main character's in the story. My lack of posts this summer has been because of the level of care my mother had required. (Trust me, I had wanted a heck of a lot more drafted and scheduled) Truth be told, I had never thought I would hear the phrase "She's out of pain now and gone to a better place" or something like that EVER. I don't really want to divulge into the nitty gritty details of everything in this post, but what I will say is that her passing was extremely fast and unexpected. 

When I could wrap my head around the entire situation, as well as try to evaluate how I was still going to blog at this time of my life, I knew that I wanted to somehow make a tribute to her on Loving the Language of Literacy, and I hope you don't mind. Instead of going on a very long tangent about how great of a mom she was, I have decided to post her obituary - written by yours truly- with personal information taken out for obvious privacy issues. On another note, the obituary is extremely non traditional, in the sense that I tried my best to make it interesting, and not a random list of facts nobody wants to read. 

World Traveler. Huntington Gardens's Lover. Firm Believer of Living in the Moment. Turn of the Century Fanatic. Nutri-Bullet Endorser. Netflix Enthusiast. 

Sandra passed away due to esophageal cancer on Tuesday, July 29, 2014. Sandy was born in Washington DC on October 2, 1952, aka "the olden days", to Angela Harwood and Walter Gabler.  In her life, she had had a number of professions including English instructor in Europe, nanny, sugar cane cutter, an editor for Bon Appetit magazine, a TWA (Trans World Airline) worker, and of course, a teacher. Her biggest love was gallivanting around the world, and in her life, she had gone to six out of the seven continents (for some reason, she didn't want to march with the penguins), her favorite being Europe because of its rich history, culture, and (duh) food. She is survived by her daughter, Sofia, who had dragged her to art and history museums all around the world, made her drink more organic fruit and veggie smoothies than she could count, and instilled in her a love of reading. Whereever she is right now, she is somewhere with beautiful gardens, perhaps growing organic, non GMO food, having annoying songs stuck in her head such as "Radioactive," and "Let It Go," reading murder mysteries, and finally getting to see Season 5 of her favorite TV show White Collar (which hadn't been uploaded to Netflix yet).     

In case you were wondering, I am still a minor. This brings on a whole other slew of issues because I have had to pack up and move to another city in order to live with the family friends who are in the process of becoming my legal guardians. There have also been a ton of other little things such as getting a library card from the library in my new city, getting released from the school district for my last year at my current school, grieving, and plain getting adjusted to everything. This is the reason for my sudden move (mentioned briefly on twitter) and the reason why I have gotten a new book case (something I am very excited about)  

***What's Been Going On? Is a self-explanatory (hopefully not used very much) feature on Loving the Language of Literacy where I will explain what has happened in my blog absence, why the absence happened, and any changes because of it. Because of the events in recent months, with my mom's passing as well as all of the business that comes with school and student council, I think there will be times when I will need to use this feature. And I just want to be completely honest and open with all of you, so you know why I disappeared off the face of the earth. 

There are quite a number of changes that are going to be made around here. As you may know, I'm pretty strict with myself when it comes to my hobbies, especially blogging because real people actually read what I write (that number of people is like four, but it still counts). I would like you to know that I am extremely dedicated to my blog and do everything in my power to put up new content as frequently as I can. With that said, I know there is no possible way I can keep up the habit of posting nearly every day. There has been so much going on in my life, and there are so many things that need to be done. If you look on my Goodreads, you will see how long it is taking me to finish books -because of lack of time for reading- let along blogging. 

• I will try my hardest to post AT LEAST 4 times a week or 16 times a month.