This mug cake is an ACTUAL. GAME CHANGER. I used to get borderline depressed because the only chocolate cake that satisfies me is from Garibaldi, which is Gabe's and my Valentine's Day restaurant, and one cannot just go get that cake for no reason, because IT MUST RETAIN ITS SPECIALNESS.
But I found a way to cheat the system. I give you, a mug cake so delicious it borders on miraculous:
Ingredients:
- 1/4 cup of flour (you can also do 1/8 and fill the rest with protein powder and it works fine)
- a generous 1/4 cup of sugar
- a generous 2 tablespoons of unsweetened coco powder
- 1/8 teaspoon of salt
- 1/4 cup of water
- 1 tablespoon of olive oil
- 1 tablespoon of butter
- 1/8 teaspoon of vanilla
- mini chocolate chips (I dunno, like half a tablespoon?)
Method:
- Mix the dry ingredients all together. I use a fork.
- Mix in the wet ingredients. Stir til smooth.
- Add in the mini chocolate chips.
- Microwave for about 1 minute and 5 seconds, give or take.
- Top with syrup if you're an outrageous chocoholic like myself.*
Macros (not counting chocolate syrup, not using protein powder)
Calories: 588
Carbs: 80.5g
Fat: 29.5g
Protein: 5g
Is this good for you? Absolutely not. Is it good? Absolutely.
~Stephanie
* This is "one serving," but is actually too much for me to enjoy. I like to either half everything, share with Gabe, or eat it anyway and then regret being born for the next hour.
- NaNo = NaNoWriMo = National Novel Writing Month = Write 50,000 words in November.
- My NaNo diet has two extremes: 1) I eat 3,000 calories of candy corn, 2) the only thing I eat all day is a can of tuna.
- It's Monday, November 11, 7:15pm as I'm drafting this. I can't even tell you how much I don't want to crank out 1,667 words right now. In fact, I'm avoiding it so hard that I'm blogging here instead.
- There is clean laundry from four days ago that I haven't folded.
- Sometimes I try to write on the couch while Gabe plays video games with his headphones one, but I get distracted by the flashing lights and pictures, so I put on a baseball cap and pull it really far down so that I can't see.
- My Google search history is getting very “serial killer” lately. In the past couple of days, I’ve looked up “face burn scar,” “how long take die of burning,” “punch head unconscious,” and “do mermaids lay eggs” (which is actually thanks to Disney+/The Little Mermaid, not NaNo).
- During NaNo, I pay closer attention to how I read. I am one of those people who sees a chunk of description tucked between paragraphs of dialogue and immediately skip the description, only reading the dialogue. As a writer, I'm offended at my own self. However, as a reader, it's making me write less useless description. I find that even with skipping descriptions, I never feel like I'm wandering around in the dark. My mind supplies what it need to "see" the story. You say "sparse bedroom" and I'm fine; I don't need to know the color of the walls or how many pieces of furniture are in there or any number of other details I'm tempted to bludgeon my readers with. (Of course, for the sake of #WordCount, I may leave some in for now XD)
- I was so preoccupied today (Saturday, November 16) that I started making lunch, including frying meat and making rice, only to notice that it was actually only 10:26am.
- Last Saturday I retrieved the "original" (fourth draft, but still VERY close to the original original) Fire Fairy Story from my room at my parents' house. Reading it now, 30,000+ words into my latest rewrite, feels weird. It feels kind of like reading the book (the original version of the FF story) after seeing the movie (the years-removed version I'm currently writing). I keep face-palming like, "Oh. THAT'S why he/she/they did that. That makes way more sense than the contrived, garbage explanation I've shoe-horned in now." There's something really beautiful and transparent and helpful about the early version that I believe will help me write the final version one day.
- Last Saturday I also went to bed the angriest I've been in a long time.
"What's wrong?" Gabe asked.
"It's my characters," I said, trying not to swear or cry. "I don't know WHY he said that. It literally makes no sense. I can't connect the dots. What's his problem?!"
"Can I help?"
"I don't know. Here's what happened. They were playing Counsel [a Furierite game] and Coal revealed something really harmful about Flare. Out of NOWHERE. Why would he do that?! And then Ember revealed something about him to get even, and he just denied it and got away with it."
Gabe thought for a few moments. "It sounds like he really hates that game."
"Oh," I said softly, anger melting. "You're right. He would hate that game. It's making a mockery of everything he stands for." Tears of relief prickled my nose. "Thank you."
Writers out there: Get you a Gabe.
~ Stephanie
P.S. 35,301 words.
Ugh, it's happening again. I'm feeling Changes.
However, it's almost more like a return, a reversion.
For a few months there, I was feeling kind of serene and mature. I was using reusable bags, keeping my apartment clean, and stretching before bed.
I'm still doing those things, but they no longer feel like A Big Deal or something I really care to blog about. If more, similar self-improvements descend upon me, I'm sure I'll post about them, but right now my mind is in a more...sarcastic? dark? edgy? place. It's not my FAVORITE version of myself (I really liked feeling serene and mature), but it is—at least historically—more ME, and that is what this blog is supposed to be about: becoming me, whoever that turns out to be.
It might've started with reading Mistborn, getting back into the Fire Fairy Story, and now doing NaNoWriMo.
Pretty soon after those things, my friend Aaron-in-Texas (as he's known to my family) reminded me that Breaking Benjamin exists. Right away I created a Spotify playlist called "Highschool" and filled it with Breaking Ben, Evanescence, Linkin Park, As I Lay Dying, Shinedown, Flyleaf, Skillet, and some random outlier songs like Natalia Kills's "Zombie," Adam Lambert's "Whataya Want from Me" (which is murder to try to spell for Spotify), and a few Globus songs. (Thank you, I did have eclectic taste.)
Then, I injured my right shoulder somehow. I can't do bicep curls, lat pulldowns, or anything shoulder-y. Despite still being able to do cardio, legs, abs, and left arm exercises, this injury has utterly shot my gym motivation. I went from going 4–5 times a week to going 2–3 times. I was supposed to lift legs today [Tuesday, November 5], but it's 5:30pm as I type this and I know full well I'm not going to. I'm still macro counting, but my MyFitnessPal pie chart looks ridiculous because I'm barely trying to stick to my goals.
[Okay, NOW, it's Friday, November 8, and with the help of Gabe, I've been to the gym three days in a row and am starting to feel better about this aspect of my current self. It is amazing how much exercise can affect your mood and mental health. It's so easy (at least for me) to "fall off the wagon" and then just kind of lay there, unable to get up without a lot of help/external motivation.]
On the whole I'm feeling more familiar to myself these days, and I cannot figure out how to put that into words. I'm feeling darker, but not heavier; sharper, but not meaner. I'm feeling more like my "high school self," but minus the angst and drama (I mean, if there IS any high school self left after those are subtracted).
I'm feeling more this,
and less this:
More this,
and less this:
I'm not complaining and I'm not concerned. I'm not looking for reassurance that "it's ALL me, just different parts of me." I know that. I guess I'm just fascinated by the phases. Maybe I'll always be this way, vacillating between new and old, light and dark, peaceful and sarcastic. I recognize that both versions are me, it's just going to be interesting to watch the Old/Dark/Sarcastic I feel returning try to coexist with the New/Light/Peaceful I've been cultivating.
~Stephanie
It came on rather suddenly.
I was sitting on the couch, reading Mistborn (for the first time, and I'm still not done, and if you spoil anything about it for me, I will seriously not be your friend anymore), and it hit me, the same way it always used to:
I had to write.
I've said this other places before, but writing inspiration feels kind of like wetting your pants: sudden, urgent, and embarrassing, because I stop being able to human until I either 1) write, or 2) lose the inspiration, which is sad.
Luckily, when the inspiration hit, I was at home with Gabe, and he is excellent at not butting in on things. I got up, got my laptop, and started writing The Fire Fairy Story.
What is The Fire Fairy Story?
The Short Answer:
A story based on my friends and I that I started writing when I was twelve.
The Longer Answer:
It was July 6, 2006. Jesse had a sleepover birthday party and invited me, my sister Sarah, Ellie, a girl named Zoie, and a girl named H...Hailey? Haley? Hayley? I don't know how to spell it, but you get the idea.
We were all AVID imaginers and pretenders. Almost all we did when we got together was play pretend, whether that was with dollhouse or our actual bodies, most often the latter. This birthday party was no different.
I believe it started with the sparklers. As we played with them in Jesse's front yard, we began play fighting with them.
"When I say 'duck,' you duck, okay?"
"Okay."
*dance around, wave sparkler—*
"DUCK!"
*playmate ducks dramatically as the yeller whips her sparkler over the space previously occupied by the ducker*
Pretty soon, play fighting with sparklers led to being creatures who could produce fireballs with their hands. The creatures were fire fairies.
Four of us were also dancers, and really enjoyed playing—try not to judge us too hard—slaves, orphans, and spies. Without any effort at all, The Fire Fairy Story, which incorporated all of those elements, was born.
We served an evil Fire Lord. We were forced to dance for him. Jesse's older brother became a character who was the Fire Lord's most trusted spy.
We each came up with a fire fairy name for ourselves. Mine was Ember. (A dance class friend, Karlye, is the one who introduced me to "Ember" as a potential name.)
We needed a name for the fire fairies' city. We asked Jesse's mom what the French word for "fire" was. She said she wasn't sure, but that it might be furier (FYOR-ee-air). It turns out it's not; it's feu (fooh, kind of with the "oo" in "cook"), but the city is named Furier to this day.
I had a mood ring from The Greensboro Science Center gift shop that I wore ALL THE TIME. From this piece of jewelry came the idea of fire fairy eyes: they change color with the fairy's mood.
I started penning (well, penciling, with an orange mechanical pencil that had a blue eraser) The Fire Fairy Story, with TONS of help from these girls. Evenings, get-togethers, phone calls, any available moment.
I finished the story one night when I was the only kid who had tagged along with her parents to church band practice. I sat in the row of rough church chairs, feet on the back of the chair in front of me, and madly wrote the last scene. My eyes widened.
It was the first—and still only—story I'd ever finished.
What's Happened Since:
For the four best friends (me, Sarah, Ellie, Jesse), The FF Story became part of our identity. We know the world of Jeolotoe and its vocabulary in a way that can only take root in children.
October 2006: Sarah, Ellie, Jesse, and I fashioned fire fairy costumes out of Goodwill findings and poster-board wings and went as fire fairies to a fall festival.
2006–2007: I wrote three or four sequels/books of the series.
April 2007: My family went to Disney World for the first time and I got Ember engraved in a leather bracelet that I wore for years.
2008ish: My youth group did a series on making your dreams happen, so I slowly typed up The Fire Fairy Story (it ended up being maybe 60 pages) and gave it to a friend's mom who was in publishing. All she would say was that "it was very good," though in a tone that told me it was absolutely not and I had a long road ahead of me.
2009–2010: I left the story largely alone, though periodically rewrote it, reread it, started it again, changed things.
October 2011: We had a Fire Fairy Reunion (pictured below). We did another Goodwill trip for costumes and had a sleepover where we choreographed a dance, reminisced, and read over parts of the story (some in notebooks, some in thick, typed stacks held together with alligator clips).
November 2011: I "won" NaNoWriMo (wrote 50,000 words in the month of November) with The Fire Fairy Story.
2012–2019: I kept rewriting the story, rereading it, starting it again, changing things. There are probably 12–15 versions of Book 1 floating around in various notebooks, on various hard drives. This story will not leave me alone.
Today:
It sounds ridiculous, but I don't know how to explain the level of influence The FF Story has had on my life. I don't want to speak for the others, but my identity is inextricably bound to this story. When I posted my wedding photos just three years ago on another blog, I captioned the ones of Ellie and Jesse with "childhood best friend and fire fairy."
Ember isn't "me," but she's a deep part of me. If someone yelled "Ember!" across the room, I would turn. She's the bolder, braver, brasher part of me—and the me I might have stopped at if it weren't for Jesus and glowing up. (Recently took the Enneagram test for her, and she's an Eight too and that makes so much sense given her history.)
The Fire Fairy Story has never left me alone. For some reason, I guess I need to write this story.
So, I'm at it again*. I wrote 20k words in two weeks a little while ago. Then I read it over and was mildly appalled. It's not good. I'm not being down on myself, it's genuinely not there yet. But instead of feeling discouraged like I usually do, I'm feeling okay. So I only keep about 2,000 words of what I just wrote. (There are probably 200k words of the story I've written over the years that I'm not going to use.) If God wants me to write this story, it'll get written. If he doesn't, then I don't want to write it anyway.
Fun Facts For Ya:
A new neighborhood that my family eventually moved into matched the map of the world of Jeolotoe with forests, bodies of water, and appropriate houses/buildings in the exact places as the map drawn in my little red notebook of years before.
Two of the fire fairies' unconventional and unpredictable love stories have happened exactly as written in the story.
~Stephanie
* again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again.
Remember when I talked about Balance Athletica's Elevate U Challenge and said that "two of the habits I found surprisingly pleasant and beneficial"? One of them was the morning routine, and the other is "10 minutes of stretching before bed."
At first, this was the habit I completely forgot about or ignored, for a few reasons.
1) My entire nighttime routine didn't take 10 whole minutes; no way was I adding in something that long.
2) I didn't think stretching cold muscles could possibly have any effect.
3) 10 minutes sounded so long and boring.
But one night I decided to try it.
I started with my neck and shoulders, moved to arms, to lotsssss of legs and hips, then back up through everything, ending with neck and shoulders.
The first three minutes felt like an eternity. The last seven went by surprisingly quickly. I found that if I took my time, breathed deeply, and stretch thoroughly, I could easily use up 10 minutes.
I felt fresh and relaxed when I laid down and went to sleep. I might've slept better.
I discovered that 10 minutes of stretching didn't feel like "too long" at all. I liked the way it centered me. And then one day, I discovered a shocking change:
I'm getting more flexible.
To be honest, I'd assumed that I had maxed out my flexibility. As a dancer, I'd always been flexible, and I'd kept that by teaching dance and stretching after workouts. I wasn't trying to get any more flexible.
But one night, I breathed in, breathed out, and reached...and kept reaching...and was shocked at how comfortable I felt in the position I landed in.
Now, I don't stretch every night. For whatever reason it stopped relaxing me the way it did in the beginning, and in an effort to be kind, I don't force myself to keep up a nightly stretching streak. I still do it often though, and am so interested and encouraged by the increasing flexibility.
If you have trouble relaxing, want to grow in flexibility, or have joint pain/tightness, try stretching for 10 minutes before bed. It took me a couple of weeks to feel a difference, but I think it was a worthy experiment :)
~Stephanie
[Aside from this paragraph I'm typing right now, this post is, in fact, unedited from October 10th. I've re-read it and there are lots of things I would add/change/expand, but in the interest of keeping the title accurate, I'm not. I do plan to expand later.]
I don't know why I never saw it before. But maybe that's why I could never write it before?
The Fire Fairy Story is full of Christian imagery. Light. A master who is not perfect. Slavery.
The concept of perfection, of perfect being the only way to life.
We serve a God who knows we cannot be perfect, we cannot even get close. And instead of condemning us to death, he died in our place, as the only perfect being.
Christians are freed from the slavery of perfection. We have grace.
The Fire Fairy Story is what our lives without Christ are like. Fear. Slaving for a master (sin) we cannot satisfy, that may bring us pride or temporary happiness, but will only ever, EVER lead to death.
As Christians we serve this incredibly gracious and forgiving master, one who sees our IMPERFECTIONS and says "I love you anyway and I will help you."
God does not enslave us. He is recklessly committed to our true freedom. He is tearing down walls, lighting up shadows FOR US.
I always thought the Fire Fair Story didn't have a clear Christian moral. I always thought there wasn't a way for it to glorify God. That is one reason I never felt right about writing it. (Of course, had I been able to push through the writer's block in my own strength, I absolutely would've ignored this feeling and written it anyway. But for some reason I've never been able.)
As I texted Melissa, I told her that I was a little embarrassed that I was still on this fire fairy thing, thirteen years after its conception. Why could I not let this story go?
She said that it must be a story that needs to be told, and maybe the reason I've never been able to in the past is because I needed something first that I hadn't gotten yet or didn't know yet.
I cannot help but wonder if this is "it." God needed to have an absolute GRIP on my heart and mind first. I needed HIM first. Before anything else. First and most and biggest.
Maybe God DOES want me to tell this story, he just needed me to know why. And I've never listened before.
~Stephanie
I have an extreme/addictive/all-or-nothing personality. It's a blessing and a curse.
Blessing: When I love things, I love them. I can derive a level of joy from stuffed animals/words/fandoms/dancing/etc. that borders on concerning.
Curse: When I do things, my instinct is to do them 100% (or 0%).
Unfortunately, this doesn't translate to "doing lots of research" or something constructive like that. It translates to "If I get into the occult, I'll likely become a witch,"* "If I drink alcohol, I'll likely become an alcoholic," and "If I do NaNoWriMo, I'll likely shirk all other duties."
What is NaNoWriMo? It's short for National Novel Writing Month. Every year, millions of hopeful authors commit to writing 50,000 words in thirty days, from November 1 to November 30. I did this and "won" my senior year of high school (2011). I haven't tried since.
Until now. As I type this, it's lunch break on November 1 and I've written about 200 words of The Fire Fairy Story.** Given my personality, I know that it's important for me to set boundaries for myself that will help me win (*fingers crossed*) NaNo in a healthy, God-honoring way.
1) No writing until I've had genuine, non-rushed quiet time with God.
What does he want my day to look like? How can he fill me with the fruits of the spirit? How can I honor him? Can I take the time to pray and listen? Can I view the day as an opportunity to give him my best, or only as an opportunity to write 1,667 words?
In a way, this rule feels slightly...creepy, pedantic, and prosperity-gospel-ish. Am I using quiet time and my relationship with God to write a "good" novel? I know that my work is better when I'm rooted in God, so is my quest for relationship with him actually selfish? If I thought that remaining close to God would make me write worse, would I still desire it?
I'm wrestling with this. I am definitely concerned that I'm just leveraging my relationship with God.
However, in the end, spending time with God can only ever bring true good. If "good" is a bad novel or writer's block, I have committed myself to soldiering on with quiet time anyway. At the end of the month, if I don't have 50,000 words, I will at least have a stronger relationship with my heavenly father.
2) No writing during 9–5.
I work from home, so it would be very easy and very tempting to sneak in some writing during the day. Some days I don't even have a full eight hours of work; I could do six perfectly honorably and write for the other two. But how likely am I to be able to make that call responsibly, knowing my personality? By taking daytime writing off the table, I'm helping myself to work at my job "as unto the Lord." Plus, who knows, maybe giving myself a smaller writing window will concentrate the inspiration?
Anyway, I don't know how this month is going to go. I can genuinely see it goings lots of ways.
- I write 50,000 words. They're great, and I'm happier, healthier, and closer to God than I've ever been.
- I crank out 50,000 words and they're total crap. I never read them over or use them in whatever version of The FF Story ends up being final. My relationship with God is resentful and I've developed a check-the-box mentality.
- My relationship with God takes over my life. I don't write nearly 50,000 words, but I don't care because I'm so on fire for Christ.
- My relationship with God is healthy and strong. I only write about 30,000 words because I'm an adult now and I have things to do besides one hour of homework and write write write write.
- Some combination of the above.
I'm super nervous. I hate to fail, which is why I usually only try if I'm sure I'll succeed. I do not know if I will succeed with NaNo this year. But apparently I'm trying, because I'm putting it out on the internet, and if there's one thing I hate more than fizzling out privately, it's fizzling out publicly.
Whether I succeed or fail, it's official: I AM trying NaNoWriMo this year.
~Stephanie
* I believe that God is stronger than my sinful nature and that I have been saved by grace, so on some level, this isn't a huge fear of mine. I know I would come back to the truth (God) and I know that God is for me. Still, the way I'd pursue occult knowledge and power would feel dangerous, wrong, and gross to me.
** Post scheduled for Monday, November 11th.
