A.J. Race's Blog, page 3

Julep Maven January 2015 Box Review

I love nail polish almost as much as I love makeup in general, so when I found Julep, I was extremely excited. Of all the boxes I’ve personally sampled, Julep is the most expensive, but I feel like one of the best, because of their beautiful colors, you can customize it, and best of all all of their nail polishes come without several harmful chemicals like formaldehyde. Which… why was that in nail polish to begin with?!

I ended up getting a little carried away with my first official box… or… a lot carried away. But I like to think of it as a late Christmas present to myself so it was definitely worth it.

The Box:

Each box includes 3 items, based on your beauty profile, because mine is Bombshell I get 2 nail polishes and one full sized beauty item.

I really liked one of the initial colors I was offered, which was a purple, until I remembered that I already had about six or seven purple nail polishes. I decided to swap it out instead for a gorgeous blue color called Casey.

Casey (Boho Glam): A few years ago I became obsessed with Essie’s Hide and Go Chic, and I was determined to find a color that was similar, since at the time I couldn’t afford it, and ever since I haven’t seen it anywhere. Casey is the closest color I’ve seen so far to Hide and go Chic.

Initially my box also came with a second nail polish which I want to say was a bright yellow color that just wasn’t me. So I swapped it out with a Lip Pout lip crayon in Cardinal Red.

Lip Pout in Cardinal: I can’t get enough of lip crayons. I’m absolutely obsessed with the Revlon Lip Crayon which I picked up in matte a month or so ago, and so when I had the opportunity for a bright red through Julep I decided I had to take it and it’s just fabulous.

Luxe Lip Treatment: The final item from the original box was a Luxe Lip treatment which was originally in sheer Fig, which is like a brownish pink I want to say. It really wasn’t me, so I decided to pick it up instead in Sheer Magenta which I thought would be a lot more flattering. The Luxe Lip treatment is meant to be an ultra hydrating lip conditioner for those harsh winter days and though Winter is basically over where I live, I still love the luxe lip lipgloss.

The Add Ons:

Just for Yule Trio: This was the trio I had wanted to buy from day one… I’m really obsessed with the Green and Red and even though I thought I’d never have a need for white I’m actually really in love with it.

Myrtle—I have just one word for this red. BALENCIAGA!!!! (Any American Horror Story: Coven fans in the house?) I really wanted this red if for no other reason than to give myself the Louboutin manicure.

Emer–Now serving… Slytherin Green. I’m really living for Green a lot more lately so naturally I was thrilled for this color when I saw it in this trio. I think it’s probably the chief reason I picked up this trio, after the aforementioned Louboutin manicure.

Brigitte– While white is usually reserved for french manicures, I think I can find a few other uses for it.

Fa La La Trio: A beautiful New Years Eve trio that didn’t quite make it for New Years, but I still love.

Charisma– When I first saw this color online I could have sworn it was like magenta so I was really excited to have a color like that, but seeing it in person it’s actually more of a red with gold sparkles in it. I haven’t quite tried it yet, so although I’m disappointed it wasn’t magenta, I think I’m going to love it all the same.

Winnie & Margot– Both Winnie and Margot the Champagne-ish colors look almost identical, but Margo (pictured right) happens to be a bit more gold than champagne and also has a slight unmistakable crease in it’s bottle that makes it easier to spot. I wasn’t entirely sure about the colors until I tried Winnie out on one of my toes and really fell in love with that champagne shine. It’s actually really pretty and gives sort of a high fashion fall feel.

Top Coat Trio:

Oxygen Performance Top Coat
Silk Effect Top Coat
Freedom Polymer Top Coat

Of the three of them I’ve technically only tried the silk effect and the freedom polymer top coat and I love them both. Silk effect is like a mix of matte and gloss and the freedom polymer top coat is all gloss, and almost like a gel finish. It’s super gorgeous and by far one of the best top coats I’ve ever tried.

Night Shift Sleep Mask: I LIVE for Sleep masks so I was super excited to pick up the night shift sleep mask. It’s really thick and in it’s instructions tells you have to wash it off in the morning which I think is interesting but it feels so good on my skin.

The Freebies:

Metamorphic Top Coat: This month Julep introduced three metamorphic top coats of which Mavens would get a free one. The metamorphic top coat is so gorgeous, it adds this sort of iridescent sheen to the colors, so far I’ve applied it to my left hand and it really makes all the colors look fabulous, sparkly, and just fun.

Free January Maven Gift: Because I ordered 4 add ons I got a free gift. (I think you get one after three but I wanted the sleep mask).

GO BIG MASCARA!— OK so I’m actually super excited about this gift, it was a total mystery what I was going to get but I was secretly hoping for mascara because though I rarely use it, I really wanted to try out a new mascara.

Overall I really love Julep, it’s a gorgeous box and it’s definitely worth the money, however since I’m trying to save up money for a vacation this will probably be my last box for a while.

5 Smooches, January did not disappoint dolls!
Filed under: beauty, review Tagged: Julep, makeup, maven box, nailpolish, review [image error]

Reading Franzen Part III

Having read longer books than this in a shorter amount of time it’s almost mind boggling to me how long it’s taking me to get through a measly 568 page novel. What is it about this supposedly ‘darkly humorous’ novel that I’m just not getting? Why don’t I find any of this funny?

Oddly enough the title for this part is so appropriate it almost describes my feelings:

Part III the More He Thought About it the Angrier He Got

Thus far, part III is the adventures of the eldest son Gary who much like his father is a tyrant and who continues the list of unbelievably exhausting characters whom I hate. One of the biggest problems I continue to feel about this story is the fact that there is approximately one character who is even vaguely worth rooting for or caring about. How is it possible you could create a story and have so many characters that you could care less if they died in the next page? My frustration seems to stem from the fact that all of these characters aren’t just horrible they’re horribly boring. They’re so uninteresting that even stories that ought to be interesting are made mundane and tiresome and frankly, I feel like I’m wasting a lot of my time reading this godawful story when I should be editing my novel.

While a very small part of me is curious to see if they make it to dinner and if they can manage not to rip each other’s throats out in the process. Most of me is just waiting for the moment I can finally say I’m finished.

For those who are reading this wondering, why is she still reading it if it’s so awful, the truth is, I hate the idea of giving up on a personal challenge to myself. I don’t like to fail and I don’t want to let some stupid book get the better of me and so I’m determined to finish this book if it’s the last thing I do, and before January’s over if at all possible. But I still have editing to do, and for me that has to be my top priority.

I’m definitely giving myself some kind of prize for finishing this novel, that much I can say for sure.

Filed under: books, review Tagged: books, Jonathan Franzen, Literary fiction, Reading, review, The Corrections [image error]

Achievement Unlocked

I’m not a gamer. In total I’ve owned six game consoles with, at most a total of two games on each. Of the six, one, the Nintendo 64 I saw only at Christmas, then never again. Another the PlayStation 2 was purchased exclusively for the DVD capabilities. This compared to some of my friends who are serious gamers and have had just about every game console in existence at one time or another, who play religiously and beat every game they have ever played within a matter of hours. I’ve still never beaten Pokemon Blue on my original Gameboy color.  I mention all of this, because while I haven’t been much of a gamer, I do understand the concept of achievements in video games and I understand Pavlov’s behaviorism theory of positive reinforcement.

Recently I’ve detailed my struggles with editing my current work-in-progress, and getting something, anything written of the sequel which has become a major thorn in my ass (but which I’ve put on hold whilst editing). After several weeks with little progress in editing, I’ve finally managed to get some work done this week! YAAAY!

I’ve decided that I need to find ways to treat myself more for these achievements. I’ve never really celebrated the finishing of a novel. In ten or eleven novels and several hundred drafts, I think only once or twice have I ever celebrated the completion of a novel.

I haven’t quite decided yet what I’m going to give myself when I’ve completed the third draft of my current work-in-progress, but I have decided to give myself a deadline. An achievement to unlock if you will.

Finish the third draft by February 8th, 2015. This gives me exactly one month to complete the current draft and one month to figure out what my reward ought to be when I complete it.

How do you reward yourself when you complete a novel? Wine? Chocolates? More books than you can handle in your already overloaded TBR pile?

Filed under: books, editing, writing Tagged: deadline, drafts, editing, novels, positive reinforcement, video games, writing [image error]

Reading Franzen: Part II Cont’d

Summary: 

In part II: the Failure— we follow the miserable existence of Chip man-child as he picks up his parents from the airport, only to come home to find his married girlfriend leaving him possibly forever, if she’s smart. Then, in defiance of all writing conventions we are whisked away to Chip’s past, and how he came to be fired from his job as a professor at D— College (he slept with a student—also I’m guessing D stands for Dumb-ass?), and how he met his current girlfriend. All while occasionally slipping back to the present where Chip is nowhere to be found. Curiously, throughout this story Chip manages to continue not to take responsibility for his actions in spite of the ever increasing reality that it is in fact all his fault. More curiously is the fact that he basically lives off his sister for several months without any kind of self loathing at the fact that his existence and that of his girlfriend (whom he spends his sister’s money on with no remorse) is thanks entirely to several large loans his sister bestowed upon him.

Thoughts: 

I find it really fascinating how a character appears to have moments of genuine self awareness, and how inevitably this moment of self awareness is completely shut down by their own actions or words within the next paragraph. This is particularly true with Chip who it almost appears has the vague understanding that he is full of shit, but is perhaps so full of his own shit that it is impossible for him to see his way out of it.

Only in ‘literary fiction’ (the one true fiction worthy of any intellectual person’s time, naturally), is it acceptable to slip randomly into the past to explain the minutiae of Chip’s life that nobody asked for, including disturbing accounts of his sexual escapades. What is it specifically about literary fiction that seems to produce a great deal of sex scenes but ones there are discussed in such a distancing clinical way as to be so off putting it’s almost unreadable? Did I really need to read Chip sniff/fucking his chaise lounge? I don’t think so.

Throughout reading this particular section I found myself liking Chip less and less than I ever thought possible. Between leaching off his sister and his questionable morals, and his concern with the femininity of the woman he’s sleeping with lest he be seen as ‘queer’— puts him somewhere on the negative end of a scale of detestable characters, and don’t even get me started on his odd desire to be contradictory for contradictions sake.

Filed under: books, review Tagged: books, Jonathan Franzen, Literary fiction, Reading, review, The Corrections [image error]

Non-Resolutions

After years of attempting resolutions or as I liked to call them Wresolutions (writer resolutions) I’ve resolved this year, not to make any. Instead, this year I want to just make changes because they need to be made, not because I feel some obligation to a new year that most of us lose come January 2nd.

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

Part of my non-resolutions is to try not to sweat the small stuff. This can be easier said than done and everyone’s definition of ‘the small stuff’ is different. For me what it essentially boils down to is letting go of things that aren’t in your control. You can try to plan for everything, but eventually there are some things that you aren’t going to be able to plan for, and in those cases, you have to learn from your mistakes and try to do better in the future.

Lose Your Obsession with Perfection

I’ve written rather extensively with my perfection obsession, particularly when it comes to writing. One of the lessons that I’ve learned from blogging daily is that you have to put something out there. There’s a deadline that, doesn’t necessarily exist with writing a novel (unless you’re under contract). I can’t, post my entire novel on my blog in an effort to give myself a deadline, but I can find a way to self impose a deadline that’s going to allow me to get the work I need done and finally get this work-in-progress into a completed stage.

Be Kind to Yourself

After all is said and done, the final thing I really need to do this year, is finally let the story rest. I’ve spent a very long time on this story, and the one thing I’ve learned in all that time is that I’ve always tried to make it my idea of perfect, and I’ve never quite known what the hell that’s supposed to look like. Because for me that idea is always changing. It’s fleeting, and at some point I’m going to have to take the risk of putting it out there and letting the chips fall where they may.

Filed under: writing Tagged: books, new years, resolutions, writing [image error]

Reading Franzen Part II

Part II: The Failure

Were this, for any thing other than my blog and my own recent desire to read authors I would otherwise never touch with a ten foot pole (after all many writers suggest reading good and bad books to get a sense of what works and what doesn’t and why), I might have given up long ago. As it is, the story takes a bit longer than one would expect to get going and even though the introduction of Chip who is at best, a sad pathetic man-child, continues on the path of characters I loathe, I admit my feelings about this story are at an impasse. On the one hand, It’s still not interesting not really. It’s a character study, but the characters are well worn. Everyone knows people like these characters, they’re not wholly original in that sense (though who is?). Early in my notes of my thoughts on the book I wondered, vociferously if the world really needed another book about middle America and the dying of traditional family values, in that I’m still not sure where the author stands personally on. I suspect, given his views on the changing of literature and his insistence that serious literature is dying that perhaps he would also bemoan what some call the death of traditional family values, and what others would call, the end of staying together for the sake of keeping up appearances.

The story gets, it would be difficult to say more interesting, but perhaps slightly less dull, as the story gets further in. I’m curious though, were the author anyone else than the detestable to my mind, Mr. Franzen would I have enjoyed it? I suspect not, as I still find it difficult to get through a novel by an author whom I adore (the Casual Vacancy). Literary fiction is not for everyone, though at least Ms. Rowling’s slice of the small-town life feels almost more real than anything presented thus far by Mr. Franzen. Though I confess, no less awkwardly at times. (See: awkward sex scenes of the Casual Vacancy).

Filed under: books, review Tagged: books, Jonathan Franzen, novels, reviews, The Corrections [image error]

Siren Call

Where were you when you first got the itch to write? What were you doing? Did it come upon you suddenly like a cold or did it slowly creep upon you like an infection; so slowly that you weren’t aware of it’s existence until the fever began.

Or perhaps you heard the siren call of creativity for years, beaconing you towards the rocks. You never quite knew what it was but it was always there, silently waiting. What did it feel like the first time you put words to the page? Was it exhilarating? Enchanting? Or was it immediately terrifying?

Did you feel he weight of your predecessors, the many masters of the craft on your shoulders? Did you even know where to begin?

How we write and what we write may be different, but the why is the same. We have a story, just begging to be told.

What’s your story? And how did you get there?

 

Filed under: writing Tagged: books, novels, writing

The Pleasure of Longhand

More often than I have in a long time, I find myself with the desire to write things out by hand. One of the reasons I find myself loving it more and more is because there’s something rather freeing about writing something out longhand. In the virtual world of your computer, even with the best apps, there’s really a limited amount of ways in which to write something, but on paper, you have the freedom to write in the lines, in between the lines, sideways, upside down, all the way around the page. You really have complete and utter freedom, you can make notes to yourself in the margins or even make a little doodle.

Arguably one of the best parts, for me, about hand writing is the fact that you get a sort of two-for-one draft of anything you’re writing. You get whatever you hand wrote and then, as they generally do, things change during the process of typing it into the computer and so it offers you an opportunity to edit a story without actually getting seriously into editing and rewriting things in the major way one does during the editing process.

I’d like for 2015 to be the year I start hand writing more things, that’s why I began with this post. It is, admittedly completely off the rails from my original handwritten draft, but that’s part of the beauty of writing the ‘first/rough’ draft by hand. It allows for changes like this, for spontaneity.

Don’t get me wrong, I love writing things on the computer, I have often argued that I do an entirely different caliber of work on the computer versus when I’m writing long hand, but there’s something to be said about the mix of the two, of writing it out longhand, mostly to write out ideas and outlines, and then moving to the computer to really flesh everything out into a fully realized story.

Filed under: writing Tagged: books, creativity, longhand, technology, writing [image error]

Reading Franzen: Part I

Where do I begin with Jonathan Franzen? From not wanting to be on Oprah’s Book Club, to his rants about the internet and ‘serious literature’, I’ve made my thoughts on him abundantly clear over the years. But between his many literary awards, one has to wonder if there isn’t something to his writing, even if he is exhausting as a person. Writers aren’t often known for their fuzzy demeanors, and I wonder perhaps if this is not part of the problem here. In an effort to afford Mr. Franzen the benefit of this doubt, I’ve decided to read the Corrections. Arguably one of his most well known novels, published in 2001 the Corrections follows a family drama of an aging wife and mother as she attempts to bring her three children together for Christmas as their father suffers advancing Alzheimer’s disease.

Because it’s not really broken up in to chapters I’m going to be writing my thoughts and reviews of the parts with actual titles to them.

Part I St. Jude

Summary: 

Here we meet our main characters of Enid and Alfred Lambert (who vaguely remind me of Edith and Archie Bunker of All in the Family). Much is said of their home life, Enid’s obsession with finding a letter that she’s mostly keeping secret from her husband, his oppressive demeanor towards her, and by the end it starts to become clear that he is at least in the beginning stages of his disease, though it seems this is something he’s currently hiding from his wife.

Thoughts: 

While arguably the shortest part in the entire book, it’s clear only few pages in that Franzen likes to wax poetic about his characters, for someone who believes so heavily in the importance of ‘serious literature’ I find it curious that thus far it feels already as though he’s telling the reader more about the characters than he’s necessarily showing.

It seems curious the way in which the author attempts to make the most mundane things seem interesting, but perhaps since anything a reader might actually find interesting is thus far absent it would seem that the only thing one can really do is make an allusion that paying a bill is somehow like guerrilla warfare.

It’s quite clear that this woman the main character of Enid Lambert is in an abusive relationship, the authors insistent use of the oppressive government while an odd choice makes that abundantly clear. I would venture to guess that the author will find a way to make this pathos seem acceptable or even admirable, which I find problematic.

One thing I’ve noticed (beyond long-windedness and a tendency to wax poetic about everything is that it feels to me that Franzen’s metaphors are all over the place. He compares the marriage to a tyrannical government, then in explaining the house and the dust uses fantasy metaphors of magic and potion type bottles. Perhaps it is my newness to the literary genre, but I would imagine there would be a way to continue working in the war-torn tyrannical government metaphors into the explanation of the basement. In fact I imagine it would have worked better.

Filed under: books, review Tagged: book review, books, Jonathan Franzen, Part 1, The Corrections [image error]

Devillicious Book Club… of sorts

There are a lot of authors I’m not particularly a fan of, some of whom I’ve discussed more publicly than others. Some of these authors I dislike purely for their personalities, others because of their inexplicable popularity. But whatever the reason, I realize that in order to properly discuss these writers, I’m going to have to at least read one book.

This year, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I will be sharing a chapter by chapter summary of my thoughts on 12 such authors. I’m going to try and go about this as unbiased as I can.  I may even include live tweeting of my thoughts so if you don’t already follow @NarcissaDeville you should probably do that, because I think this is going to be exhausting  fun.  Each starting post will include my thoughts on the author before hand, and what book I chose.

For the first three months I already have some ideas in mind of what book I want to look at, however I’m completely open to suggestions.

January: Jonathan Franzen

February: Gillian Flynn

March: Stephanie Meyer

April: John Green

May: E.L. James

June: Amanda Hocking

July: Nicholas Sparks

August: Brett Easton Ellis

September: Kurt Vonnegut

October: Ernest Hemingway

November: John Grisham

December: James Patterson

Filed under: books Tagged: authors, books, novels, Reading