Signed book copies

A while ago, I learned that Good Choice Reading has virtual signings of books and the release of the next book from my favorite series is coming! Tower of Dawn is the 6th book in Throne of Glass series and The Assassin’s Blade is the prequel. They also offer Empire of Storms (#5) but I already have that one in my bookshelf.

Both of those two books, personally signed to me for only $55. And shipping is included! Shipping to Sweden would have been $84 but since my mom has this amazing work buddy in Philadelphia who comes to Sweden twice a year, she was so kind and told me that she could bring them if I ordered them to her place. She has helped me a lot previously as well, like Advils (not even comparable to similar aspirins here in Sweden, costwise) or candies that I miss. Super super sweet woman!

I can’t wait for October when she gets here!

A big help

Today I got my first real constructive criticism and it was so inspiring! One of my mom’s friends has taken many writing classes and knows what makes a text a good one. She read chapter 1 and 2 and gave me a lot of tips that I will think about in my writing from now on. I did already feel that chapter 1 and 2 were very different from at least 4 and forward, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. She helped me to understand what it was and the biggest thing is that I have only used descriptions in those two chapters, not “gestaltning” as she called it. That is best explained as when you are writing events as they are happening, rather than describing them. It is hard to understand, but as soon as she said it I totally understood what she meant, and I will rewrite some in those two chapters. On the other hand it is a nice progression from only backward-looking descriptions in the beginning to more descriptions of actual events as they happen and I think that progression is going very smoothly, like the introduction of the book is slowly turning into the actual book, if that makes any sense.

She also told me the importance of good environment descriptions and how to use them. I have good descriptions, but she told me that I can use some of them in the future when the character is looking back at something for example. That is good advice. It is no fun reading and not leaving anything mysterious for the reader to think about.

It was extremely helpful and I am so grateful that I got some real help with my writing. She also told me that it is very well-written and that I write better than some that she has taken writing classes with. That felt good to hear and a perfect spurr for me to continue. Today, after meeting her, I wrote almost 1 000 words! I think I finished chapter 6! Go me!

She was also super nice and lent me three books about writing. Stephen King’s memoir, a course book she had for one of the courses she took and a book about fantasy “Thousand Years of Fantasy” with descriptions of fantasy through the ages. I am not going to write high fantasy with dragons, unicorns or dwarfs, but I am sure I can learn a lot from it anyway! I compare my book with Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses the most. It will be a feel-good fantasy story.

A big big shoutout to Helena. Thank you!!

Spontaneous book purchase

Yesterday Jesper and I went to my favorite store, Science Fiction Bokhandeln (~The Science Fiction bookstore). I think it actually might be his too, since he always wants to go there. I have a long list of my favorite books that I want to have on my shelf (I have most of my library in the .epub-format), and yesterday I ticked one whole series off. Throne of Glass, one of my favorite series of all time. Next on my shopping list is Silo by Hugh Howey.

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The book bag also contained the main game of Munchkin. So we are prepared for game nights at our place from now on. A funny thing happened later when mom came over to pick up the keys (so she can feed our cats when we are away at my grandma’s for the weekend). She also brought the game of Munchkin since her group of friends couldn’t figure out (or was it something else? Can’t remember) how to play it, so I was promised it. What are the odds that she brings it over on the same day we decide to buy it? I really like coincidences, they are fun! Anyway, so now we have to return the oen we bought, and get another version instead so we have twice as many cards. I think Jesper wants to get the Zombie version. No surprise there.

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My Year in Books 2016

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The year has come to an end and I managed to reach my goal on Goodreads, 46 out of 25 books read in a year (I am about a third in in Metro 2034, but I won’t finish it before the challenge resets tomorrow at midnight unfortunately). Not too bad if I may say so myself. Many of them were very short, and my to-read-list right now only includes long books, so I won’t take 50 for next year’s challenge, but 40. I hope that I will reach all the way to 50 and beat my all time high of 47 which I had in 2013. No wonder I read so much that year, I was living in San Diego and it was obligatory to always read when at the beach, which I was all the time!

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Books read vs. pages read during the years.

My Year in Books 2016.

An early Christmas gift

Christmas came early this year when I the other day got a package in the mail. Earlier this week, Massolit Publisher had a contest on Instagram where you could win the whole Stjärnklart series signed by the author if you knew the name of the third book in the series. The contest was over before I even saw the post, bummer. But I tried contacting them anyway, the contact person was the one I had been in contact with when writing my reviews. She replied very quickly that they were already on their way to me, sent from the auhor himself. So cool!

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They are now an important part of my bookshelf! Thank you, Lars Wilderäng!

Spontaneous book purchase

img_20161208_191832It was not my intention to go to Science Fiction bokhandeln (Sci-fi bookstore), but I tagged a long when my boyfriend wanted to go there. I ended up buying Siri Pettersen’s book Odinsbarn, the first in the trilogy called Ravneringene. It was originally written in Norwegian in 2013 and has a pretty high rating on Goodreads. I have also heard a lot of good words from people and reviews, so I am really excited to read it soon.

 

Other than that, my life is a mess right now. The end of the quarter is coming up and I really feel like I am done with school now. I have been enrolled at Chalmers since 2010. I am ready to move on. It just feels rotten that I don’t enjoy the end of my last two classes ever because both of them are group projects. One is going fine and we are on schedule. The other one though, the really fun one is not going so well. We have to send it in on Wednesday and we are not close to done. I am done with my part, so next step is to put our four different files together and create the space between the houses, and make the presentation for Thursday. We don’t really have time and I feel stressed. The project is to create a neighborhood in Revit, a 3D CAD program. It is really fun and I have learned a lot. But it is sad that my experience in this class falls on other people. It is also sad that I had limited time so I couldn’t do everything the way I wanted. Much of this took so long, and I would have loved to make it better. I might continue to make it better after it is done.

1This is what my part for the project looks like. This is not a rendered picture so the materials aren’t really visible. Maybe I will do one of those tomorrow and post it. The  ground was almost black today for some reason, maybe it was some setting on that specific computer, I don’t know.

I haven’t posted any pictures of my cats lately, so here’s two cute ones!

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And I finish this post with a picture from work last weekend. Liseberg might not be as fun as it was before, but it sure is pretty!

Book review copies

The main reason why I am writing book reviews now, are because of my friend Elin (tickmicks bokblog) whom I know from Liseberg. She is as crazy as I am about books. Okay, she is probably more crazy honestly. But she inspired me and made me realize that I could contribute to the world about the experience and enjoyment I get from reading books. Now in hindsight, I wish I did this a long time ago. I have had this blog for almost four years now and I have read tons of books since then. They were a big part of my life in California and on my travels and have made me associate make books with great memories.

Anyway, Elin and I talk every now and then about books and she keeps telling me that she gets recex, which is short for recensionsexemplar, which I guess translates to review copy (=revco?). It basically means that you get books for free to write reviews on them. I decided to try this out for myself since I am actually writing reviews now. So I contacted a publisher a few days ago, and today I got it emails with links to download .epubs of the whole “Stjärnklart”-series. Unfortunately for you who don’t speak/understand Swedish: the books are in Swedish and there are no translations yet, that I know of. But if you like the review (which will be up in about a couple of weeks I guess, or sooner depending on how awesome it is) and think that the books sounds interesting, I am sure they will be translated soon enough, they are a huge success in the postapocalyptic dystopia category here in Sweden right now.

I am at the point in my blogging that I can ask publishers for review copies, but I am still waiting for authors to contact me. But on the other hand, this way I can ask for books that I really want to read, so it’s not too bad. I think I will go and lie on the couch now and start reading Stjärnklart (or should I continue with Resan till Ljuset?).

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New job

I think I have written something about this new job that I would get this fall. Well, three days have passed already with preparing for the upcoming school year. I feel rather confident with the role as a teacher that I will have. We are three brand new teachers (who never ever worked as teachers before) and we all got the teacher education (which is normally 5-6 years) in 2 days. The other teachers there are very helpful, but when it comes to the planning of my 3 courses I am pretty much on my own. I have read the course syllables and they feel strict, but at the same time I can do whatever as long as I go through all the points in the central contents and test the students on the grade requirements. I am glad my classes don’t start until August 31st. That gives me 2 week to prepare. I am surprised that 3 full classes are only 30% work. It feels like a lot.

The school anyway is a small computer game developing high school where I will have one course in each year. Basic engineering for the first-years, CAD for the second-years, and Construction for the third-years.

This week is full time with preparations, next week the students are arriving and I will there to greet the new ones on Monday and then I have 2 days off (after 8 straight days of work) to prepare and I think my own studies start that same week. I will only take 2 classes this fall since I can transfer the 3 German classes I took in California. That will be so nice, study 50% and work the rest and make more money and make my debt smaller. I just hope that UCSD will be able to send my transcript to Chalmers and that it will work out, otherwise I am pretty screwd since I have now only applied for two classes and 50% loans. Otherwise I have to take one more class before getting my Master of Science.

 

I think it will be a fun fall. I will probably play less Pokemon Go (I am halfway to lvl 25) when it gets colder, and that will probably make me play more Guild Wars 2 (one of my new co-workers play as well, so that’s awesome!) and read more. I am almost finished with the last book in the Unfortunate Events series, but before I write my first book review I need to come up with a template that I will follow. Maybe I will do that now. I am too tired to keep doing the school planning now, there’s another day tomorrow.

Tsambika

This post used to contain pictures, but due to new storage limitations from WordPress, I had to fix the problem and decided to create a new blog that works as an archive for all the posts from my travels. This full post can be found here.

I had written so much text, and then my computer crashes and this one time, Word doesn’t give me the option to open an unsaved document. Stupid computer!!

I won’t write all that again, but will do a short summary since it is really late and I am tired and have to get up super early tomorrow.

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I am bad at doing relaxing vacations, I am tired, so today we spent the whole day at Tsambika where we lay on the beach, reading all day. It was warm, so we spent a lot of time in the water. We snorkeled only once since the water was rougher today than it has been. We found a cave, but didn’t go in because we didn’t want to rip us up when the waves would have pushed us against the sharp rocks.

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I finished the last book in I am Number Four Series “United as One” and I feel sad. 7 books and 15 companion books are over. Because of this I decided today to expand my blog and make a travel/book review blog.

We had dinner at a restaurant here at the hotel. Fancy pancy Asian food which was delicious.

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Now it is late, so no pictures from yesterday will be posted today, but will be uploaded tomorrow (it takes time to go through lots of photos, especially from a dive).

Goodnight for the last time from Rhodes.

Kite Beach and a bad taxi driver

This post used to contain pictures, but due to new storage limitations from WordPress, I had to fix the problem and decided to create a new blog that works as an archive for all the posts from my travels. This full post can be found here.

Today was exactly yesterday, except that we stayed on the beach until sunset. It was warmer than yesterday, and not as windy. A really nice day. I also finished the 9th book in the Tales from Shadowhunter Academy series.

We then tried to find a cab, and the one we found turned out to be ridiculously expensive. We were going to Oasis Center because a few days ago it said that there was a Max Hamburger restaurant there, but when we got there it had closed down. Bummer. We spent 50 AED to go to a stupid shopping mall where they didn’t even have the thing we were looking for. So we bought some candy and donuts to have while watching a movie tonight. We got a taxi quickly at the mall, but that was a mistake. First of all, this guy was young, had an extreme lisp and we could not understand what he said with his accent. Then he didn’t know where we were going, had to put it in his phone GPS (no one here so far has used the GPS), and then he insulted me asking me if I was Jesper’s mom! And then he said it was a joke. Why would a taxi driver make a joke like that? And also I don’t think he was joking because later he asked if he had permission to speak something, and then said that he suggested me to dress in black to look younger. What an asshole!! Then he was in a car accident while we were in the car and had to stop right on the freeway. He drove into the car in front of us, nothing really happened but he told us he talked his way out of calling the police, and then he explained why. I think it was something about that he had to pay a huge fine because he was a taxi driver and also pay out of his own pocket if the car got damaged. He said we would get the ride for free because of this delay and that money wasn’t everything. After that he drove extremely recklessly, he was driving fast and very carelessly. He said he was 21 but his passport said 37 because you can’t be a taxi driver here unless you are 25. We left the taxi when we finally got to the hotel, he honked at us and asked us to pay. I was so angry at that point that I gave him a 20 instead of 30, and then borrowed the phone at the hotel to file a complaint. It took a while, but they took me seriously and I will learn what they did about it before January 31. Worst taxi experience ever.

Good thing we have another day tomorrow, I think I would hate this place if I left after tonight. Stupid fuckface!

Tomorrow anyway is our last day here and we are spending half the day at the beach and the other half on a desert safari. That will be fun. Too bad we won’t have time for Max before we leave. We might have time tomorrow  between the beach and the safari, but we will have to see.

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