The desk set-up. Spotify and comfy headphones are a must.

Don't have a clue.

Hello! I have been very bad at keeping this blog updated in the last few months. I've been desperately trying to keep up with my reading (which has mega stepped up this term) and nursing a burgeoning addiction to Dragon Age games. My computer physically can't run Inquisition but am I looking at sale prices?? Of course. Also, I rediscovered Sims 4 this week. WHAT am I doing.

So my exams in January went fine (which isn't what I wanted, but technically I'm doing great) and I'm sticking to a similar routine this time around. Which is - writing up all my lectures and seminars and making note packs for all my texts. This time I'm hoping to take that one step further and learn some quotes. Will this work?? Will I get bored and stop revising some time this week?? Because it's me, yes probably. Ugh.

I hate revising. I hate exams and spending months going over the same information again and again so that you can spend 3 (YES, THREE WHOLE) hours in the same room at an uncomfortable desk fighting nausea and trying to remember something that you had memorised to a tee last week. Lucky for me, my coursework makes up only 1/3 of my overall mark for my modules.

(This term my coursework has picked right up!! Yay!! I had 58, 60 and 68 last term and so far I've got 63 and 65 this term. Phew)

But as a seasoned exam-taker (ten GCSEs, 4 AS's and 3 A-Levels in my pocket) I thought I'd share what has somewhat helped me survive the brutal showdowns that my university exams, at least, have been.

Choosing the right music to revise to

This may not work for everyone as I know some people like silence while working. I myself dabble in a quiet working minute. I think the trick is listening to old music (as opposed to brand new music). Music you know and love is both comforting and functional as background noise. You don't need to really engage yourself with the music if you know it well enough so you can properly concentrate on what you're looking at. It also works as background noise that drowns out any other distractions like people talking or car alarms or drilling or whatever. Plus it makes revising a little less of a drag.

Materials

This is truly up to you but it's not rocket science to know that you need pens, pens and more pens. Paper, paper, paper. Or infinite Microsoft Word documents. Highlighters, sticky notes. Those arrow-shaped fluorescent things that I own myself but can't name.

Then you make notes. My method is to write up your lectures and seminars (making sure to catch up on anything missed, even if it is just taking notes from a powerpoint if you can't get a recording of the lecture or someone else's notes) and then condense these notes and your annotations on the texts (which you will be making if you're an English student. I got over my fear of annotating in pen this year - it's quite liberating) as well as secondary literature into big sets of notes.

The notes work in themes or topics. This is the easiest way of doing this that I've found. Look at your lecture notes and find themes or topics that were significant for those texts. Use these for headings and subheadings in your notes. This is much easier to do on a computer as you can copy notes over in any order you want. Include quotes and page/line numbers. Then make flashcards or whatever to try and remember some of it.

Small comforts - hand cream, lip balm and my dad's Nespresso machine.

Know your texts

This means rereading. I'm going to sit down and do this soon (there are a few texts I actually need to finish off from this term :S). If you know your texts well you'll be able to think more quickly in the exam about what texts to use and how to use them. Know the plot, the themes, the characters, the form, the imagery. Once you have this down everything gets a lot easier.

Have your own ideas

This means making sure your own notes and annotations are included in your revision. Lectures and seminars are intended as springboards and originality will help you in the exam. Hopefully, as you reread your texts more ideas will pop out at you. Make a note of them and add them to your note packs. Your own thoughts about the texts are always supported by what you're reading.

Past papers

You can time yourself and answer the questions properly but I had a lecturer who told us not to bother. I think it's actually more beneficial to look at the questions and see if you can allocate texts and themes, and then start penning a plan. If you can make a fairly elaborate plan with examples and structure then your revision is going well. If not, back to the notes! Use past papers to measure the success of your revision.

I decided not to include the mountain of poetry anthologies and novels in my photos.

Don't burn yourself out

I have learnt that crafting revision timetables is absolutely pointless. Setting yourself very specific and many targets to complete each day may work if you are disciplined. But if you, like me, struggle with revision and sustaining it this is about the worst thing you can do. LITTLE AND OFTEN. Obviously there needs to be some substantial work done on as many days as possible, but don't give yourself loads to do, exhaust yourself on the first day and then give up on revising altogether. Set yourself vague targets, like just a text to look at on a specific day. No timeframes. Just, for example, Paradise Lost on Tuesday. Make a list of texts you want to revise (not all of them!!) and tick them off as you go. Don't put unnecessary pressure on yourself. Get your shit done, but give yourself a break too. You can't be as thorough as you need to be if you're too bored and tired of working to care about it.

That's pretty much it. I'll let you all know how everything works out in May!

Lots of love,
Catherine

Have a blurry view of Paris from the Eiffel Tower! Thanks Charlie for a highlight of 2014 <3

Happy New Year! I hope you've all had a lovely festive period. And I hope you're all still desperately clinging onto it like I am.

Frankly, though, I am glad to see the back of 2014. This year has been quite tumultuous emotionally. Some bits have been basically awful. Some bits have been okay. Some bits have been just neutral. It's been a weird year.

My anxiety and emetephobia got really bad this year. I've never had anxiety attacks before and they gripped me this year (particularly over summer). As a consequence I've stopped drinking and stopped going out - they weren't major or essential parts of my life but I like wine and house parties and dance music. Also I can't dance in clubs without some alcohol in me, so sober nights out are a bit rubbish. I think I've decided that my emetephobia was the reason behind my sudden increase in anxiety. I've always had a bit of a weird wariness about sickness and vomiting (above the normal) but I went with my dad to see my grandad in hospital (before he died - we'll get on to that) and suddenly I began to have these anxiety attacks every single day. I had no idea they were anxiety attacks - I just felt like I was going to be sick.

My mind just focused on a particular phobia and everything became a billion times more difficult. People have literally vomited in front of me before and I've been mostly fine, but just hearing about someone being sick now makes me feel anxious.

So there's that. Good news though - I've been booked in for a CBT appointment in the next couple of weeks. I'm really hoping it's going to work, and I've heard good things so far. Fingers crossed!

Also, my grandad died this year. That was pretty awful. I did write a post about it and I don't really know what else to say about it now, so. I miss him very much and I wish he hadn't gone the way he did.

On the other hand, I finally found motivation to work this year. Something clicked in September - this counts. This matters. My essay marks didn't necessarily reflect my new work ethic, which was really annoying, but I finally know how to write a university level essay! I think! Success. Also, I've actually been revising for my exams and I'm managing to fit in a few hours of Dragon Age: Origins, which I am shamelessly playing on Easy mode.

I think I discovered that there are more hours in the day than you at first perceive. I used to write off the whole day because I had plans with a friend for lunch. You have time to see a friend and get some work done. Plus, my Future Self is currently sitting in an exam and I want her brain to be full of things to say when I catch up.

Oh, and I'm thinking about postgraduate study, and I need a first. They say you can get in with a 2:1 but I need a first. I'm thinking about Cambridge (gasp). I have some ideas, but shh. Save them for the dissertation.

Also, Paris. Which was far too hot but majorly beautiful and I got to tick it off my bucket list. And I got to spend time with a really good friend (she knows who she is). I will be back, Paris - when you cool down.

So 2014's been kind of weird and a bit disappointing and rubbish. But I got through that. To satisfy my emetephobic self - I thought I was going to vomit probably at least once every day since mid-March but I didn't. I am strong enough to deal with bereavement and my own personal demons and still have motivation and dreams and goals and a social life.

I don't really have any resolutions but I have goals. I want 2015 to be a year where I make progress with my anxiety, where I let go of things, where I write up my lecture notes every day, where I once again prove to myself that I am strong and durable.

I wish you all a happy 2015.
Lots of love,
Catherine
xx

Source

Before I write this I will say that beauty bloggers are very important; or at least, they represent an important element of female voices in today's media. Indeed, I myself have dabbled. Beauty bloggers celebrate stereotypical femininity as something that is not only professional and skilled but also interesting. It is OK to be a girly-girl. It's also OK to not be a girly-girl. We must celebrate femininity. Something that is traditionally female-dominated, or cultivated for a female audience, is often seen as shallow, unimportant and, frankly, a joke. The success of beauty bloggers, such as Zoella, not only show a prioritisation of a young female audience but also lets women be proud to be female. To summarise, beauty bloggers remove the shame of traditional femininity (which, obviously, not all women feel themselves in. I just mean that there's a stigma around being 'girly' and beauty bloggers help get rid of that).

Recently Zoella took a step away from her usual interests in beauty and fashion and released a novel. I myself have not read it. But I have seen bits from it. And it's not that good. And also she didn't even write it, or most of it. And we should have known, really, because she frequently vlogged during 2014 and never mentioned hours of writing, in contrast to other YouTubers like Fleur DeForce who often speaks about deadlines she has to meet for her writing in her vlogs. Obviously ghost writers aren't anything new and most celebrities who 'write books' use them, but as YouTube is often considered a breeding ground for 'normal' or 'home-grown' famous people it's understandable that some of Zoe's fans are a little peeved. Zoe said she wrote a book - she didn't.

This whole discussion led me to consider the thing about YouTubers and books these days. To date, I can name Shay Carl, Grace Helbig, Michelle Phan, Zoella, Tanya Burr, Mamrie Hart and Fleur DeForce as some of the many YouTubers who are becoming authors. It does remind me of the days where Disney actors would suddenly announce singing careers. However, I haven't read any of the books that YouTubers are putting out (I own Grace Helbig's, but I've been too busy to read it this semester), so I can't really say that they're probably all awful. But Zoella's has set a standard.

I think it's the mechanics of it all that I want to discuss. Essentially, book deals for YouTubers could spell an end to original, home-grown content. Of course YouTubers rely on advertising and brand deals to stay afloat, but only recently have they had to explicitly state when their content is sponsored (see Oreo debacle). This is where the insincerity begins - YouTubers sneakily including links to free Audible downloads that they know their followers will utilise. These companies that approach YouTubers assume (correctly) that the fan culture will guarantee them fast money. Zoella's book broke debut sales records - she has over 6 million YouTube subscribers and she only needed 80,000 of them to buy her book to do so. Companies like Penguin rely on devoted fanbases just like hers to get them their money.

And YouTubers let them.

There's a manipulation here, and in the case of Girl Online there's a manipulation of teenage girls. Zoella's book is not well-written - it is quite literally a self-insert of differently named characters into Zoe's life with an added GBF and a best-friend-turned-mean-girl to boot. The book ticks every young adult fiction cliché box. With Zoe's very honest approach to her own anxiety and her eagerness to help others suffering with it (she works with charity Mind), I was disappointed to hear that the main character repeatedly calls herself 'demented' when she has an anxiety attack; if there was a fight to understand and improve her mental health, rather than the depressingly repetitive motif of teenage girls' lives revolving around the possibility of a boyfriend I wouldn't mind. To be fair - there's a sequel lined up. Maybe that's explored more there.

As someone who has considered the publishing industry a potential career, this whole thing is really quite tedious. I would hope that publishing companies would hope to make money via talented writers, rather than approaching famous people who may or may not be good writers to ensure high sales. It's all very deceptive and depressing.

I also think this is where the lines between celebrities and YouTubers blur. With book deals YouTubers stop being just YouTubers and they become famous individuals. The appeal of YouTube is innovative individuals who spend hours filming and editing original and creative content. Viewers associate them with their content - that's why they found them in the first place. If YouTubers really are talented writers - great! Of course many YouTubers are gifted singers and actors, and they get well-deserved record deals and cameos in films. But when they move into a field that they physically can't (and don't) navigate, there are problems. Girl Online is not Zoe's content, but she's trying to present it as hers.

Is YouTube the same with brands? Is it just TV but on a smaller screen? Is this YouTubers' faults at all? Has old media found a way to jump on the back of new media like YouTube?

I do think that Zoe Sugg is a genuinely lovely lady, and up until now I never would have doubted her integrity. And this isn't meant to be hurtful towards her or attacking her personally. But this whole thing has made me a little wary of her and her content, and that makes me very sad.