10 Day Challenge - Day 10

1 Picture of Yourself

Okay, well, that's easy.

Here's a picture of me riding an elephant at the

Kansas City Renaissance Festival in 2009:

10 Day Challenge - Day 9

2 Songs

Only two songs? Dude, that's really frickin' hard to just pick 2! Oh well, here goes:

1. Aria by Chris Spheeris

This song is not only awesome, but it really did change my life. The first time I heard this song my brain overloaded with images and after listening to it about 20-30 more times I sorted the images into a basic storyline that then became the opening montage of the Destiny movie. I feel like that song lead directly to Destiny which lead to so many other things including making movies, TV shows, meeting friends, even where I went to college. Before I started making movies I was planning to major in Mythology and Folklore at Indiana University, but I chose to go to SIUC to study film (didn't get that degree, but that's okay - I like what I ended up with) and if I hadn't gone there I wouldn't have met some of the fabulous people I'm friends with now. It may be strange to say a song what "life changing" but it really kind of was.

2. To The Sky by Owl City

This is one of my current favorite songs. It's from the movie Legend of the Guardians: THe Owls of Ga'Hoole, and it's a beautiful, light, and uplifting song that includes inspiring lyrics and mythical themes (surprise surprise). I like to listen to it to start my day because it puts me in a good, positive mood.

10 Day Challenge - Day 8

3 Films

1. Megamind

This is my new favorite movie of all time. I love villains, so a villain who ends up as the hero is a movie custom made for me! It answers this very simple question: What if the supervillain actually achieved his goal of killing the superhero? It's a fantastic exploration of the "what if" scenario and I adore it!

2. 2012

I'm a disaster movie junkie -- I totally am -- and this is the Super-Mega-Mondo-King-Daddy of all disaster epics! It's got everything - tornados, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions in Yellowstone Park - but more than that it uses mythical concepts and deep seated human fears to create a compelling story that highlights the best and the worst of humanity. Just don't watch if you have a heart problem, cause you'd die at least three time while watching it.

3. Love Actually

This is always in my top five movie lists because it looks at all angles of love in a way that most movies don't. Most movies deal with romance or familial bonds, but this movie shows every kind of love there is - parents and children, newly weds, a couple on the verge of divorce, siblings, even love overcoming the limitations of language. It was an ambitious project. as is any movie that follows multiple characters in multiple story lines. But unlike a lot of other movies that try it and fail this succeeds beautifully. I watch it every year at Christmas and any time I feel depressed by the greed and maliciousness of human society.

10 Day Challenge - Day 7

4 BOOKS

1. The Epic of Gilgamesh by some long dead Sumerian dudes

This is my favorite book because it really is the original epic adventure and pretty much contains examples of all the major universal themes found in mythology.

2. The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler

Best book ever for helping a writer figure out plot structure, characters, and the general story arc. It draws mostly on The Hero of a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, but it's a LOT easier to read and uses examples from movies to explain each element discussed. Awesome book! Every writer needs to read this!

3. A Wizard in Bedlam by Christopher Stasheff

One of my favorite books of all time, and not just because it's written by my dad. It introduces a complex world that mixes sci-fi and fantasy perfectly and best of all it's an epic adventure with great characters and a heavy mixture of symbolism and mythological concepts and ideas. Fantastic book!

4. Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters

I was surprised to discover that not everyone read this in school or on their own considering it's one of most interesting and linguistically accessible books of prose poetry out there. It contains over two hundred monologues "spoken" by people who have died and now lie buried in the fictional town graveyard of Spoon River. It's a beautiful and thought provoking book, easy to read, and it completely destroys the myth of happiness and joy in "Small Town", America.

10 Day Challenge - Day 6

5 FOODS

1. Pumpkin Pie

2. Tomato Soup

3. Watermelon

4. Chocolate!

5. Tuna fish salad sandwich

10 Day Challenge - Day 5

6 PLACES YOU WANT TO GO

1. Pompeii & Herculaneum in Italy

2. Alaska to see the Aurora Borealis

3. England (especially London and Bath)

4. Teotihuacan, Mexico

5. Ireland

6. Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas

10 Day Challenge - Day 2 & 3

Oops! I missed yesterday, so here's Day 2 and 3 together.

9 LOVES

1. My nieces and nephews

2. My family and friends

3. My two cats

4. Costumes! (especially my boyfriend: Balthazar Costume)

5. Sine Fine Films

6. All the various characters and universes I've created

7. Southern Illinois including Fort De Chartres, Fort Massac, and Fort Defiance Park

8. George Rogers Clark

9. Pumpkin Pie

8 FEARS

1. Never getting another full-time job

2. Losing a loved one

3. Heights!

4. Spiders! (and other multi-legged bugs)

5. Losing control of my BPD

6. Losing my creativity

7. Losing my sight or hearing

8. That there is nothing after death, no life, just enough of a conciousness to know there's nothing else there. (does that make sense?)

10 Day Challenge - Day 1

Day 1 - 10 Secrets

Um...I'm not sure I have 10 secrets. I'm a pretty open person so there's not much about my life that I keep secret. I should probably list 10 things that could be a secret but are not.

10 Secrets:

1. I love kids, but can't have then and even if I could I wouldn't because I know I could never bea full time mother because of my bipolar disorder

2. I really want to be an actor, but don't have the courage to try

3. I'm worried that I'll never get a full time editing job and so I am constantly wondering if it's too late to switch careers and if I do what kind of career could I go into?

4. The only reason I haven't tried to sell Destiny (part 1 which is really a whole book by itself) is cause I can't get the first freaking chapter right! Damn you Ordinary World!!

5. The closest I've ever come to being in love was with a con-artist (doh!)

6. Despite my insistance that I'm costisexual, I am in fact heterosexual, I just have weird taste in men, and most of the guys I've had a crush on in my life have turned out to be gay.

7. I don't really have an interest in dating or getting married because I really like having my free time to myself. The idea of sharing all my time with someone who isn't related to me is just weird.

8. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have grown up being thin. How would I be different?

9. I can't stand my oldest sister and I'm not sure how I can get past my feelings against her in order to keep harmony in the family (not that there is right now). There's a part of me that is still secretly afraid of her because of the number of times I saw her hit everyone else in the family when I was a teenager.

10. My most embarassing secret: I sometimes read fan fiction. *gasp*

Let's Try Something Else

So obviously I didn't keep up on the 25 Day Challenge, so I'm gonna try a different one and get back to that one later when i have more time to whittle down my views on Death and Religion (Day 2 and 3) to something less than 20 pages. This week I'll be trying the 10 Day meme suggested by my friend Kate. Thanks!

Here's the 10 Day Challenge:

10 Secrets

9 Loves

8 Fears

7 Wants

6 Places you want to go

5 Foods

4 Books

3 Films

2 Songs

1 Picture of Yourself