Update: Epic Reading Quest

ETA: There are yet again links in this post that my theme swallows up for whatever reason. Anything italicised contains a link.

As some of you may remember, last year I embarked upon the Epic Reading Quest in order to cut down on my backlog of books. It's been a little over a year since I set upon this quest, so it's a good time as any to give a little update on how I'm going. To those of you who have visited my blog frequently over the past year, you would've possibly seen the "currently reading" books in my Goodreads page, shown in the gadget type thing on the right, changing over this past year.

You may also have seen a million "want to read" books popping up, but we don't talk about those.

Since the beginning of this quest in late August 2011 (though I didn't make the blog post on it until a month later), I've read 17 different books, of which almost all of these, excepting two, were in series of some sort. The unfortunate thing about this is that only four of these books were books that I have never read before!

Imagine that -- I somehow managed to turn a quest to cut down on my "not yet read" list to a "ooh I haven't read this book in a while and I remember how much I loved it"-fest. Oops?

Besides this, five of these books were even books that weren't on the list at all, but somehow managed to wrangle their way in, partially courtesy to my significant other and partially courtesy to my own short attention span.

13 of these books were in English, and four in Finnish.

Additionally, there are two books on this list that I began reading but couldn't finish (they're not listed in the totals, because that's hardly the point). One of these is Suzanne Collins' Mockingjay. I liked The Hunger Games, and I survived Catching Fire, though this survival was with considerable difficulty. By the time I got to Mockingjay, I just couldn't inflict that upon myself anymore -- not when there are better and more interesting books on my list. I won't lie -- it did grate on me a little to give up on a series when I got so, so close to the end; but that's my perfectionism speaking, and my love of lists, instead of any real desire to read that book. The other book that I began but couldn't get through was Robin Hobb's Fool's Errand, the first book in The Tawny Man trilogy. I've read this trilogy before, so not getting through this one wasn't a particularly huge tragedy when it comes to the Epic Reading Quest. I was a bit surprised not to get through it, though, because years ago, I loved these books. This time, I just felt annoyed and deflated by Fitz's constant angst, and in the end, decided to put the book down.

Tastes change, huh?

I'm currently reading Tolkien's The Hobbit in preparation for the upcoming film. After that, I'm yet again deviating from my list of upcoming books on my Epic Reading Quest to read Raymond E. Feist's Silverthorn. I blame my significant other for this -- we made a deal that involved him reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy if I read The Riftwar trilogy. It was a fruitful deal, and I'm hooked.

Perhaps after this, I will actually go back to my actual Epic Reading Quest list. I think that I'm going to have to clean it up a bit, perhaps taking some old favourites out and adding a few more new arrivals in, ones that were left out from the initial list. After I clean it up, I might post the list on here in its entirety, and maybe that will finally encourage me not to deviate from it overmuch.

Overall, I'm very satisfied with my progress. True, I haven't managed to read that many new books in this year. However, I've managed to establish to myself that I can read almost 20 books a year, even with university and work and all of those other things that take up my time nowadays. I've gotten used to reading again, and I think that's more important than anything else at this point. Besides, it's not like I've been buying more books, which is part of the pact that I made with myself until I finish this quest. I'm happy.

Covering new developments

Remember that novel I posted about a few days ago that had evolved rather radically over the course of a week? Well, the planning and brainstorming for that novel continues, and recent developments include conspiracies inside conspiracies inside conspiracies, as well as angels and demons. At one point, I was actually worried that the plot that I was creating was going to displace the entire romance that I was building it around, but I'm relatively certain that I'm going to be able to keep it as it is.

The only interesting thing about it is going to be that the guy gets the girl before the main plot of the novel even starts. That's going to be kinda tough to pull off, but since the conflict after that point is going to involve this fact rather heavily, I reckon it'll be alright. In either case, at least I don't have to worry that I'm pandering to any sort of cliché, eh?
Not that that would actually worry me in the least. I'm not one to be worried about writing clichéd things. I think that if you're true to your own voice and your own style, you can make any ol' cliché appear as interesting as anything else you could come up with that hasn't been done yet.

That plot is going to keep on evolving on its own, and for once, I'm going to let it run as very crazy as I want it to. I don't feel an obligation to a specific, rigid concept as I usually do when I begin a novel, and it's actually a wonderfully liberating experience for me. Not being tied down to just one thing that has to happen or has to be told in the course of this novel, I'm free to let it run free in my imagination. It's a therapeutic experience, really; I haven't had this much of an effortless time creating anything in a very long time.

Either way, it's going to keep evolving and changing, and I'll just enjoy the ride and see what I end up with in the end. I'm very excited.

Now, you know how news segments have that um... mood-y-lift-y-upp-y thingy (I AM A WRITER CAN YOU TELL) usually involving puppies at the end of it? Well, I have something just like that for you! Inspired by my tweep Alison (@_budgie on twitter), I have devised a cover for my novel. Feast your eyes and enjoy.

p.s. I feel no remorse
p.p.s. Except for the terrible pun in the title of this post. I am so very sorry you had to bear that. I truly am.

Chasing genres

Well, it's getting to NaNoWriMo season again. For those of you who have mercifully forgotten what that means, it means that sometime during November, I'm going to have a mental breakdown regarding how I cannot possibly write anymore, am absolutely terrible at creative writing and why would anyone want to do this to oneself anyway, perhaps accompanied by a list of reasons as to why I couldn't possibly expected reach the goal of 50,000 words or a huffy declaration of "I QUIT."

In reality, National Novel Writing Month is an absolutely fantastic experience, but it has its ups and downs. Everyone, even seasoned veterans, are often brought down by a bout of "I suck". Additionally, it can be fairly brutal when combined with an exam period which spans half of November. This year, my exam period is going to be much lighter than last year, what with one of my units not having an exam, and another of my units not actually teaching us anything at all and then expecting us to sit an exam on it (in short: either it'll be very easy or we'll all fail, so why worry).

Core units. Gotta love 'em.

As such, I can tentatively say at this point that this is the first year since 2009 when I'm actually going to be trying this out again for real -- for real in that I'm going to be aiming to win.

I have had plans for my novel for about a week now. During this week, they have... well, let's just say that my plans are quite fluid and keep changing. Radically. Let me run you through on the timeline of my past week.

How the idea for Silbena's NaNovel of 2012 has evolved to date

Seven days ago: Silbena decides that she is going to participate in NaNoWriMo again this year. She begins brainstorming for ideas.

Three days ago: Silbena decides that since she hasn't done any substantial creative writing since her failed NaNoWriMo in 2011, she is going to write something relatively light on plot that would just get her writing something down before attempting anything involving more planning and world development.
Two minutes later: Silbena decides to write erotica.

Two days ago: Silbena realises that she wants to write something with a little more plot than erotica. She also admits to herself that she would probably not show her writing to anyone at all, and that she really wants to be able to show her writing to as many willing people as possible. Silbena decides not to write erotica, but to develop something out of the story ideas she has already had.
Fifteen minutes later: Silbena is frustrated by her story ideas and remembers why she decided to write erotica instead. Knowing that it can be basically erotica with some more plot, she decides to write romance.

Yesterday: Silbena has created a romance plot with a definitive beginning that is just advancing toward the middle. She is satisfied with her beginning, and begins thinking about the middle.
Two hours later: Silbena realises that she solved the only conflict she had in her story by the end of the beginning. She has character development and the development of the characters' relationship that will serve to fill the middle, but she realises that because there is no real substance to the middle, there is going to be no clear indication for the end, either.
Twenty seconds later: Silbena begins brainstorming about circumstances that would create additional conflict for the middle of her current plot.
Half an hour later: Silbena realises that the setting that she has created for the book allows for no more plot development. Frustrated, she begins brainstorming about ways to fit more plot around the plot she already has. She posts about this on the NaNoWriMo forums, but doesn't actually heed any of the advice anyone there has (oops).

Today: Silbena has an epiphany and decides to write a steampunky mystery-driven adventure novel which is fitted around the romance she created previously.

In other news: YAY AIRSHIPS

Tutorial: Make-up for busy people

For whatever reason (probably because tumblr), I stumbled upon some make-up tutorials today. This gave me an acute reminder of how very complicated make-up is, and how unlikely it is that I, a poor, busy, glass-wearing nerdy girl (disclaimer: nerdy girls can wear make-up. This is not a statement about stereotypes. This ia a statement about facts about me. K? K.) me will ever truly properly understand how to use make-up. To illustrate this, I decided to give a tutorial of how I use make-up.

How to be a busy science* student and wear make-up

* Or other discipline requiring an inordinate amount of work

Step 1: Wash your face. If it's before 9 am in the morning, use cold water to shock your system to alertness. If it is after 9 am, you're probably still tired, so use cold water anyway.

Step 2: Dab a little bit of skin-coloured make-up (it doesn't matter whether it's foundation, some sort of powder, blush, concealer or whatever a primer is, as long as it's the colour of your skin) onto any blemishes or discolorations on your immediate facial area. If you wear glasses, don't worry about the bruises and bags under your eyes. Most glasses cover those up just by existing.

Step 3: If you wear glasses like me and people tend to remark on your glasses more than on your eyes, you might like to use some dark-coloured eyeliner (the dry, pencil kind, because you'd just smear the wet kind all over your face this early in the morning anyway) to highlight your eyes. Hell, you might even get adventurous and use some mascara. Just try to not get it all over your eyelids, because you're going to be late to your morning class if you spend too much time trying to clean it off.

In these three steps, you will manage a tired university student look in absolutely no time at all -- which is handy, because then you can spend more time on drinking coffee in the morning!

Note: if you're a chemistry major (like moi), don't bother with nail polish. You're just going to end up spilling acetone all over yourself anyway.

The Correct Dosage of Education

"It's actually a little bit more complicated than that, but at this point you only really need to understand this much."

My beloved readers, I can't begin to express how frustrated I am with consistently having to listen to these words. This is an almost exact word-to-word quote that I could attribute to any of the at least 10 lecturers I have had in the past four semesters. Every single class, without fail, a lecturer will feel the need to both remind us that we are lowly undergraduates whose understanding of the world is severely lacking, and that their field is much more interesting and/or complicated than they lead us to believe.

There's nothing wrong with starting with the basics. In fact, there would be something severely wrong if the basics were completely ignored and more advanced things taught out of the blue. It's difficult to understand a concept you have no founding knowledge in (which is a completely different problem I may return to later). However, when every single lecturer in our undergraduate course can be heard saying this, there has to be something wrong, hasn't there?

Again, I understand that a lot of the concepts that we study could be studied in much greater detail (but if you go down that path, you'd require everyone to have PhD's in everything, which would be an interesting thing in itself). I understand that especially processes related to the biogeochemical cycle have a million different variables and are just as complicated as the almost-nonsense name would let you believe. I understand that there are plenty of things in science that are poorly understood. I still believe that when I am taught something, especially in a science course, I shouldn't have to take it on face value; I should be allowed to understand where and how and why this concept has come into being -- and I don't mean the tedious lesson on the history of this and that technique that every lecturer feels the need to include in their lectures.

I'm not saying it's not interesting. It's just that it's hardly ever examinable, and I've got too much examinable material to worry about in order to be able to fully appreciate some interesting non-examinable material.

Now, you could say that this is an avenue for independent study and that it is my responsibility as the student to go and find out more information on it. Unfortunately, this solution is a bit of a would-if-I-could, can't-so-I-won't type of affair.

You see, I complain a lot about how many assignments I have due and how much work I have and all the other complaints that you've heard all about by now. Usually it's not the assignments that gets to me -- homework isn't a foreign thing to me -- but it's the sheer volume of knowledge that I'm supposed to ingest and then digest during the course of the shortest of the short 12 weeks we call a semester. It's a bit ridiculous when you think about it: in a total of 72 weeks involving lectures, tutorials and labs, I am supposed to be eligible to graduate with a Bachelor of Science. That's 72 weeks of tertiary education. That's it.

Sometimes I don't even wonder why graduates aren't employed without significant work experience.

In that amount of time, it is impossible for both lecturers and some students (because I know there are those people out there who aren't massive nerds and are happy to get by with the smallest amount of work possible) to go into the amount of detail that they would like. I have heard this complaint from two lecturers already this semester -- that they may choose either to cover as much breadth as they possibly can by compromising the detail of some more complicated concepts, or they can sacrifice the breadth of our education for some more detail.

That's a situation I'm not particularly happy with. Sometimes I wish that our semesters were longer than just 12 weeks -- that our weeks were freer, that there were fewer assignments (or the same number spread over a larger amount of time) and more time to digest all of the information we are given.

I feel like university -- where I initially came to gladly to continue my education, since I have always loved academia -- as it currently stands, is destroying my love in science. And that, my friends, really sucks.

Sometimes I suspect that some of the world has yet to be convinced of how much of a dork I am. In such moments, I get a burning desire to reveal to everyone that I am, in fact, the dorkiest person you will ever meet. Here, and today, my friends, I present you the evidence!

You're welcome.

In seriousness, mounting tiredness and an ever-growing pile of assignments makes you do strange things.

No masks, no clever titles

It's difficult, being a nerdy young person, and running a blog.

Your relationships and your attitude, as well as other specifics of your life, keep changing so rapidly over such small periods of time that it's sometimes difficult to keep up with which way is up at any given moment. It sometimes feels like a majority of my day is spent trying to figure out what I'm doing and how I'm doing it rather than actually doing whatever seemingly superficial thing it is that I should be doing. The easy solution to that, the one that plenty of adults keep on trying to feed us, is the ages-old carpe diem: you don't have to always have what you're doing figured out; if you enjoy it, just keep doing it, it'll work itself out in the end.

As always, since I can barely speak for myself out of the dimensional confusion I was talking about earlier (I'm moderately convinced that "up" is where my ceiling is), I most certainly can't speak for any other generalised category of people, but I'm guessing this is another one of those things where we don't benefit for being this specific breed of nerdy. We relish, as we always have, with facing the world in the morning and asking "why". This is something I benefit from in my endeavor to become a scientist, since not only does it make studying easier by limiting the need for rote memorisation due to a deeper understanding of certain concepts, but it also deepens my delight in whatever I learn, since it gains a context, and thus does not remain a disjointed concept I am learning for the sake of good grades. However, in my personal life, it's something that consistently brings me down.

In the end, it's my definition of myself that cops the biggest blow. I still hazily remember a time when I was able to confidently and proudly describe myself in a few lines, mostly by the things that I enjoyed, the activities I partook in, the people I knew. I've never had this much trouble describing myself in my entire life, not even when I hit my teens. From ten to fifteen, any change that I underwent was a sort of linear event: it was clear what circumstance changed and how it changed me.

Since fifteen, I can confidently state that everything in my life has changed. I live in a different country and culture, I am surrounded by different people, my hobbies have been forgotten, my attitude to my education has changed, and even my family is in a different role in my life than ever before. All of this is not the product of a single, simple change, but instead a culmination of at least three major events in my life in the last few years. And this magnitude of change has left me, and my concept of self reeling.

I'm not sure this would be as much of a problem if my obsession with asking "why" weren't so well established. I've been uprooted, tossed around and plugged back into the ground, and instead of accepting and adjusting, my inner self is constantly attempting to analyse what has changed. The only issue with this is that the change is so complete that I have completely lost touch with any reference point -- there is literally no way for me to tell how I was before and therefore how I am now different. There is no way for me to trace back the reasons for certain emotions and certain behaviors. In other words, there is no way for me to quantify and qualify the change. And as a budding scientist, that drives me mad.

As always, the easy solution, the solution that so many people in my life advocate, is to sit back and enjoy and let life figure itself out. But if I know one single thing about myself, it is that this is something I simply can't do. It manifests itself in this blog. If you've read even one or two of my previous posts, you would discover that there's some half-hearted purpose and connectivity behind some of them. Writing, perhaps, or science, or reading. But a majority of the posts are less like a conceptual discussion and more like a diary: concerned only with what is happening at any given time in my life, if only to give reason for not posting more about anything else. Whenever I post one of these posts, I think that I'm simply too busy to write anything else, and that I want to apologise for not being able to. On hindsight, I look at the proportion of these posts compared to any with actual content (not to mention the generally poor quality of the content), and I wonder whether those posts are only motivated by the lack of time. Perhaps some of them are motivated by the fact that a majority of my life is now concerned with trying to find purpose in being busy: concentrating so fully on each task so as to make it the purpose of my life for that fleeting instant. This, too, is why I become so very stressed, throwing myself 110% at a task, devastated if it does not work out as planned, or never content with it, since everything may always be in need of improvement.

Either way, I don't win. Either I can sit down and constantly question myself who I am and what I'm doing here and what I want out of life and how I view my relationships and what I like doing, driving myself mad in the need of any sort of reference point, or I can throw myself at meaningless tasks and let that make me stressed and unhappy.

I feel caught in an endless race, where every now and then the location of the goal changes, except that no announcement is made, and you can never be sure whether you're running toward it or away.

The One Thing

During the course of this semester, one of my units has a decreased number of contact hours on the condition that we post lecture-related blog entries on the unit website during the semester. I just finished writing my first blog entry (two days into the semester. I'm a bit of an eager beaver). I looked at it for a while, shrugged, and figured I could post it here as well. Be warned: the blog entry is on the subject of science, it takes a slightly more formal tone than I usually write in, and it's aimed toward people who study science and are likely to end up being scientists at the end of their education. I would also give this specific one a "WARNING: SWEEPING GENERALISATIONS AHEAD" sticker if I had one.

Still, the sentiment at the end is warm and fuzzy. Hope you enjoy it!

The question of what I would teach the world if I could teach them just one thing about science has been plaguing me ever since the question was raised. To me, there is an obvious answer in the scientific method, which we understand to be the philosophy and the heart of science. Clearly, the scientific method is the key to understanding the practice of science, and possibly a further gateway to critical thinking. For some reason, however, this answer just didn't seem to fit the bill. No matter how long I thought about it, and no matter how many times I came to the conclusion that this was it, this had to be it, I couldn't manage to convince myself that I had the answer.

At length, I realised that this is because such a lesson is unlikely to make any sort of impact. Having gone to a high school with many art and music-centric students, my experience is this: unless a given person studies science, has at some point studied and/or enjoyed science or has some other external influence (such as a parent or sibling) which pushes them to science, there is very little general interest in science, how it works or why it is great. Were people like this given the lesson on the scientific method, I am almost certain that, while some of them may even find it interesting, they would at some length shrug it off as irrelevant. Though I firmly believe that it is important for the general population to understand and appreciate the pursuits of science, I also believe that teaching someone who does not want to be taught is only going to be a waste of time. It is frustrating for both the teacher and student.

In my experience, the reason for this disinterest is found in a perception of what science is. Those who have little or no science education tend to perceive science as formulaic, tedious and boring, studied from large, dusty tomes, far removed from the exciting, imaginative world of books, movies and art.

My answer to the conundrum is this: teach the world something about the vast creativity it takes to understand and practice science. Emphasise the lengths to which one has to stretch one’s imagination to even begin to relate processes occurring in the world around us to each other or to create laws which bind together all objects in the universe. Illustrate the magic of the moment when the experiment and theory come together perfectly. Perhaps this lesson would require some elaboration on the history of science, and on those remarkable people who have literally dreamt up all the theories (or foundations thereof) that now live in those large, dusty tomes.

Perhaps if we can successfully stimulate the imagination of those who write science off as formulaic or boring, they could be inspired to learn more about science and its methods by themselves. There is nothing that I would like more than to share the love, passion and enjoyment I know so many scientists have for their fields with every person in the world, so that they, too, might actually care about it when someone next talks to them about the scientific method.

Those stickers I mentioned at the start are totally the greatest idea ever. I'd stick them on everything for shits and giggles. Who knows how to make stickers?

Oh no

Well, crap.

You guys, I did it again.

That thing where I get on a looong holiday and completely ignore absolutely everything I do on the internet, you ask? Yeah. That thing. Except this time, the holiday ended and I didn't come back.

You know, it's almost interesting how I seem to do it every single time. How come, when I actually DO have some free time and sometimes would even have interesting things to talk about, I don't seem to be able to muster up the motivation to get up on here and blather on about things. Then, just when I'm inundated with other things that urgently require my attention (as of now: sleep), I seem to turn up again?

Really, someone should do some sort of psychological study on me. And then lock me in a lab forever because nothing I do makes any sense and trying to puzzle out the logic in my (even if I say so myself) pretty little head might just crack a puzzle or two to do with the human condition.