Life of a Random

It has been an EON since I wrote up anything on this blog, so that should show you just how excited I am about a certain book called Love From A to Z . I'm the third stop on the blog tour/countdown courtesy of our very own Street Team, which means there are only FIVE GODBLESSED DAYS until it comes out! Graphic designed by the lovely Ara @Open Pages Like all my fellow posters, I have to thank @gildedwolves and @airyreads for putting this awesome street team together. It's been a really cool way to get back into doing bookish things and support a project I really love at the same time.  On my stop, I'm going to put together a playlist for Love From A to Z . I brainstormed so many ways of going about this, but I think I'm settling with taking the book title kind of quite literally and giving you 12 songs about love (not just the usual super sweet kind, though of course there'll be some of that too 😉) with names that start with each of the letters of...

It has been a ride  this semester let me tell you. I came back to school thinking that it would be a chill, not-relaxing-but-not-crazy last semester. A nice note to end on. My friends, it has been crazy, and this month was no exception. So this Friday is kind of a catch-up day for me. This morning I had work (👉 student worker 👈), after work I dropped my laptop off at a repair shop so they could finish installing a piece that I've been waiting for for a few weeks, and then I came home to my apartment and started cleaning and airing out because BOY does it need it. And it was finally nice weather! (It was snowy only a couple days ago. Tennessee is a mess.) Then I took a nap because, I mean, is an explanation ever necessary for a nap? No, but it's because I was exhausted and couldn't focus on doing any homework. 😂 That brings me to the point of this post which is a weekly meme, F is for Friday, hosted by Nomadic Worlds . I needed to decompress a little bit mo...

The beast raged; it punctured the air with its spite.  But the girl was fiercer. Tea is different from the other witches in her family. Her gift for  necromancy makes her a bone witch, who are feared and ostracized  in  t he kingdom.  For theirs is a powerful, elemental magic that  can reach beyond the boundaries of the living—and of the human. Great power comes at a price, forcing Tea to leave her homeland to  train under the guidance of an older, wiser bone witch. There, Tea puts  all  of her energy into becoming an asha, learning to control her  elemental magic and those beasts who will submit by no other force.  And Tea must be strong—stronger than she even believes possible.  Because war is brewing in the eight kingdoms, war that will threaten  the sovereignty of her homeland…and threaten the very survival  of those she loves. The Bone Witch has been a highly anticipated read for me for a wh...

There's this common insecurity in art (and life probably, at least in my case) that "perfection" is so unattainable that people just don't try to attain anything because they're so scared that their art won't live up to their expectations. I am very guilty of this. That's one of the reasons I'm thankful for art school, because it forces me to overcome this with very real consequences if I don't. *cough* grades, yes I'm a nerd *cough* More recently I've become a little more okay with not being perfect, with letting the paint lie where it accidentally splats, and with not obsessing over the tiniest detail in a design spread. Just a little though. It's a hard fight, and all I can say is that I win it more often than I used to. 😂 While looking through some of my old art pictures on Facebook and some of my paintings from Painting 1 (what probably will be my last required, graded paintings), I thought it'd be cool to compare...

Yes, this a play on words. Yes, I'm a senior. Yes, school has started. I'm fine. Recently, I was reading all of my blog posts about college life, which I really enjoyed, and I realized that I haven't written anything for senior year yet. Which I need to memorialize, because it's senior year. The wobbly stepping stone between adulthood and whatever the weird in-between phase college was. It's full of, you know, responsibilities that are just lurking around every corner. Every. corner. This year includes some semi-big changes like moving into my first apartment on my own, without a roommate--the same roommate that I've had for three years. I don't have super strong feelings about this. I never had one of those horrible roommate experiences that you hear about all the time when you're a freshman (and for the rest of college). We were in a very neutral, chill zone of friendship or maybe acquaintanceship that never quite reached close frien...

Yiiiikes, hey everybody. It's been two whole months since my last post. 😟 Woops. I have been staying really busy this summer, and it's been busyness with art or design type stuff as opposed to my other college summers where I stayed cooped up in my room and took online classes or studied for exams. I like the change of pace. If you're interested in finding out what the mysterious and vague "art or design type stuff" is, then I won't disappoint. Keep reading! Stay Bookish Zine I don't think I've talked about this on the blog (I HAVE on my twitter though, which is where you can keep up to date with it). The Stay Bookish Zine was started by Hazel Ureta of Stay Bookish. I think I randomly saw a tweet from another current staff member about an open application for staffing an e-magazine last winter. They needed graphic designers and I was like "aw yeah, a magazine that combines YA and design, like this is mah dream." So I applied...