Finn Halsey was born on April 24th 2018 in Virginia, but was soon relocated to North Shore Animal League in Long Island, NY where he met his “fur-ever” family. On July 8th, my mother and I went out to North Shore to take a look at the puppies they had available for adoption, and that is where I first saw my baby boy, Finn. He was only 10 weeks and 5 days old, as I was told by the workers at the animal shelter, and was about 14 pounds.

My mother and I were allowed to hold him and get to know him a little bit before filling out the adoption paperwork. As I held him, my mom reached over to pet his face and he immediately wrapped his paws around her arm and laid his head on her hand, we new immediately that this was the pup we would be bringing home.

We filled out the required paperwork and waited to see if we were approved. After a few hours, we were told that we would be able to take him home and were given his veterinary information that provided us with details regarding his shots and when he would need to go back to the vet for boosters, then we were ready to pack him up in the car to go home.

The entire way back to Queens, Finn sat in my lap and chewed on my fingers with his sharp puppy teeth. We had brought a box and a few small toys for him to play with on the way home, (we were hopeful that we would be adopting a puppy that day and came prepared) but he was much more interested in chewing on my hands.

When we got back home, Finn was able to meet my dad for the first time, and at last our new little family was complete. Before he was housebroken, we decided that he would be confined to the kitchen using a baby gate, but soon realized that he would do everything in his power to climb over it the second we turned our backs, so for his safety we took it down.

For his first night in our home, I decided that I would sleep downstairs with him so that he wouldn’t be lonely (yes, I am that crazy dog person). Even though he had started off the night on a makeshift dog bed in the kitchen, he ended up staying with me on the pull-out couch in our living room. Every night that I am home now, instead of on campus, he still spends at least part of the night snuggling with me.

Finn is now a happy and healthy almost-two-year old who is still very attached to his family members. His favorite activities are barking at the local cats when they walk past our home, barking at any and all delivery people, and barking at other dogs that walk down our street.

One of my goals for this month is to get into a more regular blog-posting schedule, so hopefully I will be updating Shannon Marie Claire more frequently. I have made a few changes to the website itself, so please feel free to click around and enjoy. A lot has happened in these past few months and in due time I will get up to speed, but in the mean time I figured it may be fun to revive this blog where I last left off with and update March 2020 “To Be Read” List (or TBR)

1. The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

I am almost done with this novel, a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale and I absolutely love it so far! The story is told from three different perspectives, several years after Offred’s time in Gilead and shows how the society has changed as a new generation has grown up knowing nothing but Gilead customs. 

2. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

I have not started this yet, it will be the next novel we cover in my “Margaret Atwood’s Dystopias” class and brings us into the MaddAddam trilogy. 

3. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

I read this book before, in January of 2019 but now I am reading it in the context of a class that is focusing solely on the works of Ernest Hemingway (and later some F. Scott Fitzgerald). We are currently around half way through, but will be finishing by the end of the week. 

4. “Indecent” by Paula Vogel

This is a  play for my “Activism in American Drama” class, and is bringing us into our new unit about LGBT representation and messages in American theatre; this play is about the outrage caused by a play that features a love scene between two women. 

5. “Indian Camp,” “The Killers,” “The End of Something,” “The Three Day Blow,” and “A Way You’ll Never Be,” by Ernest Hemingway 

These are all of the short stories we will be reading in the Hemingway class this month, after we finish The Sun Also Rises. 

Hopefully I will also be able to do some of my own reading this month as well, I have been wanting to catch up on Cassandra Clare’s books now that The Dark Artifices trilogy has been completed and she released the first book in her spin off trilogy following Magnus Bane and Alec.

This June, I am taking summer courses online through my university, and three English classes equates to a lot of books. On top of that, I also have the books that I would like to read for my own personal enjoyment and for the times that I don’t want to think about schoolwork. The classes I am enrolled in pertain to Literature, Science, and Technology, 20th Century Literature, and 19th Century Female Authors, so I am looking at a lot of different books and even more short stories and poems over the next few weeks.

1. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
2. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
3. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
4. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
5. Machinal by Sophie Treadwill
6. The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle
7. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
8. The American Dream by Edward Albee
9. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
10. You by Caroline Kepnes
11. Again, But Better by Christine Riccio

This list may seem pretty ambitious, but I am super excited about most of these books (and no, I don’t typically read 11 books in one month).

What are you guys reading this summer? Are you enrolled in summer classes? Have you read any of these books?

When I first began writing for the Odyssey Online, I had a lot of trouble figuring out whether or not I could call myself “a writer.” Oftentimes I would opt for “I write for the Odyssey Online” or whatever platform I was working on at that time. I eventually came to the conclusion that I was, in fact, a writer when I had started getting asked to provide pieces for websites instead of seeking them out on my own all of the time. Looking back, I feel like it would be appropriate for me to have said I was a writer once I had been published for the first time, but there were so many milestones that I passed that also could be applicable. I can still remember staying up all night once watching the numbers on my article going up by the minute, and ending up with thousands of views and hundreds of comments on the company Facebook page. However, there have been some negative milestones that also made me start to feel like a writer. That same article, about anxiety self-diagnosis, also received a lot of negative feedback from people who disagreed, some of which contained some colorful language. I remember telling my boyfriend that I was actually happy because “all press is good press” and it was the first time my engagement numbers had been that high.

I still consider myself to be a beginner at content creating, and see my own website/ blog as a good way of starting out with my own personal brand of writing. I have recently started branching out to paid writing positions, and I am hoping to get a job writing for a publication.

For those of you out there who write, when did you first consider yourself a writer? Was it after your first piece was published, or did it take you awhile to get used to the idea?