Sarah E. Morin's Blog, page 11
July 2, 2015
Leap Second’s Ruinous Effect on Cinderella
Image courtesy of Mister GC at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
So this week I celebrated my first Leap Second. It short and sweet, and pretty exhilarating while it lasted.
In case you missed it, Leap Second is like the extra day in Leap Year, a tiny correction to make our position in space/time match our clocks and calendars. I think of it as February 29 for the social media age—readjusted to suit our ever-decreasing attention spans.
You can read one of the numerous articles about it here.
The extra second was craftily inserted right before midnight, between June 30 and July 1. Yes, I actually stayed up that long to observe it. But no worries – I had a full 1 second to sleep in the next morning.
One of the youth I work with actually reset his clocks.
Leap Second has several advantages over other adjustments we funny humans make to pretend we control time. First, unlike Feb 29, you can throw your whole being into the entire observance. It is not that hard to keep your focus and party attitude on full throttle for 1 second. And unlike Daylight Saving Time, it doesn’t mess with your sleep schedule. In fact, if you forget the whole thing, there are absolutely no repercussions.
The difficulty in observing this holiday—er—holisecond—is that it is extremely hard to celebrate with anyone else. I made plans to think of a special someone on Leap Second, and then found out my clock was a minute off his. Well now, doesn’t that kill the mood?
There is something mystical and very sci fi about Leap Second. It is an extra blink of free time out of nowhere. Like a fairy produced it out of her wand. And it happens at midnight, when fairy tale magic occurs.
I dunno, maybe Leap Second could ruin a good fairy tale.
What do you think would happen if Leap Second occurred the same night as Cinderella’s ball? Picture this: she’s running down the palace stairs. She hears the clock strike. Just then she hesitates, and her shoe starts to come loose. Knowing she has an extra second before the magic wears off, would she seize the moment to put the dagnab slipper back on? And thus Prince Charming has no forensic evidence to find her?
What do you think would happen?
June 17, 2015
So you want to be a fairy godparent?
I’m going home, I’m going home! Yup, I’ll be in my hometown, Shelbyville IN, for a Waking Beauty signing and fun fairy festivities this Saturday. I’m jazzed because I’ve heard some of my childhood teachers are coming. I wonder if they’ll look at my 480-page tome and say, “Well, we tried to teach you how to stay within word count, not our fault.”
Hope you can come to:
Fairy Godparent Training
Saturday, June 20
2-3pm
Three Sisters Bookstore
7 Public Square, Shelbyville, IN
Book signing to follow, 3-4pm
Do you have what it takes to be a fairy godparent?
Find out at Fairy Godparent Training, where you’ll:
Learn about famous (and infamous) fairy godparents, from Waking Beauty and other fairy tales.
Choose your fairy name.
Make wings.
Earn your wand.
Participate in a crazy mad-lib skit of Sleeping Beauty (overacting encouraged).
Sarah E. Morin writes unruly fairy tales. She returns to her hometown to share the secrets she learned about fairy godparents while writing her new fantasy novel, Waking Beauty. The book poses the question, “What if Sleeping Beauty refused to wake up?”
The book is intended for ages 12+, but Fairy Godparent Training is appropriate fun for the whole family.
June 10, 2015
NICE New Project – for artists inspired by classic literature
One of the things writing Waking Beauty and joining various writing groups has taught me is how much I enjoy the company of my fellow/sister creative artists. Cross-pollination, between artists and types of art, is so energizing.
One of my favorite new partners in crime is Alys Caviness-Gober. We’ve collaborated together on some ekphrastic pieces (poetry inspired by art, or vice versa). About a month ago, we sat down at a local coffee house for a chat. We both love to read great classics, and find ourselves haunted by certain memorable passages. Wouldn’t it be fun, we decided, to invite the community to create art based on a few of those great works of literature, from Pride and Prejudice to Frankenstein? Then we’d host a couple evenings for local artists to share their work.
image by Apolonia at freedigitalphotos.net
And so…NICE was born.
(Yes, we love puns. How could you tell?)
We created NICE (Noblesville Interdisciplinary Creativity Expo) for 2 reasons:
To breathe new life into literature by encouraging creative artists of ALL media to reinterpret key passages. How do the classics inspire you?
To provide artists high-school age and up, but of any experience level, a safe and positive place to experiment and share their work. Our expo is not a contest, but rather a place to show and receive encouragement from local creative artists and art fans. There are enough talent shows with buzzers and cutting comments—we’re “NICE” people who want you to grow as a creative artist.
Our first annual expo will be:
Friday, Oct 2 AND Saturday, Oct 3
6:30-7pm (Open Viewing)
7-9pm (Live Presentations)
Logan Street Sanctuary
1274 Logan St, Noblesville, IN 46060
http://loganstreetsanctuary.org/
We’ve started a Facebook page and separate website with callout information. Check it out, then get creating! You don’t have to be from Noblesville, IN, to participate, as long as you can either attend or appoint someone else to present your work at the event. (I can read your short story or poem if you live in Alaska.)
And we DO mean it’s open to artists of any medium: jewelry, dance, music, paint, glass, poetry, drama, textiles, yodeling, miming, you name it. I SO want someone to bake a Pride and Prejudice cake. We already have a “Pemberley Christmas bracelet.”
June 8, 2015
7 Inspirational YA Books for $.99 – TOTAL
Passing along the good book deals of the day! Some great authors are I know are partnering to throw a Facebook party tonight.
Click on the banner to learn more and join the party!
I have not read every one of these books but I can attest the $.99 for Failstate is worth it alone. What a steal! See my review of Failstate and interview with John Otte.
June 4, 2015
Curiosity Fair and Author Appearances at Conner Prairie June 13
Conner Prairie Interactive History Park is one of my favorite places in the world! Of course, I am biased because I work there, but I still think many of you would enjoy coming out to visit us June 13. We’ll have not only our normal extensive historic grounds open (animals, costumed interpreters, Civil War, spinning, etc), but a science-based Curiosity Fair, and an author event. Fun for the family all day long!
The following authors will be there June 13 to chat and sign books, all with history/local connections:
11a-4p Madalyn S. Kinsey Book: “The Ghost of Cheeney Creek”
2p-4:30p Sarah E. Morin Book: “Waking Beauty”
11a-4p Pamela Jackson Book: “Genius Summer”
11a-4p Katie Andrews Potter Books: “Going Over Home”
and “Going Over Jordan”
11a-4p Jennifer Jensen Book: “Through the Shimmer of Time”
Bios:
Madalyn S. Kinsey:
Madalyn Kinsey was raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, in an extended family of numerous aunts, uncles, and cousins. She frequently visited them on the family farm near Fishers, IN, where ghost hunting, exploring abandoned houses, sleeping in the woods, fishing, and other kinds of do-it-yourself fun took place. Her cousins were never at a loss to cook up fun and adventure, much of it centered around investigating the Civil War-era graveyard located only a few yards behind the family home they occupied. This book is a fond memory of those visits, as well as the pop culture of the 1960’s during which the occurred.
Jennifer Jensen:
Jennifer Jensen is a former freelance journalist who wouldn’t be without her computer or smart phone, but still dreams of living in the olden days. Until someone invents a working time machine , she lives in Indiana with her family, her secret chocolate vine and many happy hours at Conner Prairie, the inspiration for the setting of Through the Shimmer of Time.
Pamela Woods-Jackson:
Pamela Woods-Jackson is a former high school English Teacher and longtime Conner Prairie employee (former interpreter and current Guest Services Representative). She is the author of “Confessions of a Teenage Psychic” (the Wild Rose Press, 2010), which was a 2011 Epic E book Contest finalist, and the soon-to be-released ”Certainly Sensible” with the same publisher.
Sarah E. Morin:
Sarah E. Morin has three great passions in life: God, books, and working with young people. She has written articles and poetry for local publications and international periodicals in the museum field. Her dramatic works range from a musical about Susan B. Anthony to fairy tale poetry. Sarah E. serves as Youth Experience Manager (kid wrangler) at an interactive history park. Her 100 youth volunteers are her best consultants in the fields of humor, teenage angst, and spinning wheels (which, they assure her, are not hazardous to anyone but Sleeping Beauty). Her first novel, Waking Beauty, poses the question, “What if Sleeping Beauty refused to wake up?”
Katie Andrews Potter:
Katie Andrews Potter grew up in Carmel, Indiana and at an early age grew interested in her family history. She would (and still does) spend hours looking through old books and records searching for one more branch to her family tree.” Going Over Home” and “Going Over Jordan”, are the first two books in the Wayfaring Sisters series.
May 28, 2015
Book Review: Princess Academy
Shannon Hale
YA Fantasy
Newbery Honor Book
If the title puts you off, don’t let it.
I was expecting such a book to follow more familiar formulas of what defines a YA princess. A school for fantasy princesses? Sure, let’s cover the usual academic standards of Deportment, Grace, Manners, Geography, Dancing. Let’s have our heroine view the system with a blend admiration and disdain. Let’s have some good old teenage girl cattiness. And let’s have our prince be both shocked and attracted by our heroine’s mastery of a select few of these princessly subjects, but also by her nonconformity.
And yup, these elements are present in the story.
But hey, it’s Shannon Hale we’re dealing with. There’s something familiar about her subjects, but she sees them through a sharper pair of glasses.
And the big silver Newbury Honor medallion slapped on the cover ought to have been a clue.
My first surprise was how the setting is nothing remotely princessly, just remote. We begin in a village that makes Smallville look small, high up in Mt. Eskel. A place so cold people bring their goats into their houses from warmth, and so everyone smells like goat. A place where the only export is linder, a special type of stone, and everyone grows up to work in the quarry.
Everyone except our scrawny heroine. Miri’s dad treats her like a fragile flower. Miri worries she’ll never grow big enough or skilled enough for her father to trust her in the quarry. And if she doesn’t mine linder like everyone else in the town, well, she really has no place there. There’s already things about the community she can’t take part in, like the mysterious “quarry-speech.” (This mind-to-mind communication becomes a key part of the plot later, as well as a telling commentary on what defines and builds a community.)
Miri sees herself as a useless burden. She tries to make up for it by making her few friends laugh. Friends like the village boy Peder.
Everything changes when an official from the kingdom’s capital rides into town with an announcement. Tradition states that the priests will predict the province where the prince will pick his future bride. This time, the lucky girl will come from Mt. Eskel.
Normally, the eligible girls ages 12-17 would gather for a few days and a ball, and the prince would make his choice right away. But the territory of Mt Eskel is so uneducated and backwoodsy that the officials decide to train up all the likely candidates for a year before letting the prince choose.
It never occurs to anyone that some of the applicants won’t want to apply for the job of princess.
Hale depicts the academy, as extraordinary as the circumstances are, as having the kind of school dynamics young readers can relate to. Miri is a wonderful heroine. At various stages Miri is (in modern terms) class clown, rebel, reject, teacher’s pet, Miss Popular, honor student, activist, and student council member. The fact she can play all these roles is not a sign of her inconsistency, but rather the complexity of a bright young person learning who she is and how she fits into her culture.
Indeed, nearly every character in the book shows complexity. Anyone who has been to school knows how quickly standings within a group of young people can change. All the students, including Miri, show flaws now and then. And I was delighted when students besides Miri got to be the heroines from time to time, each girl playing to her own strength. This book was not only about Miri’s development, but the development of the group itself.
Indeed, the question not only of what shapes an individual, but what shapes a community, is one of Hale’s strongest themes, and what sets the book apart from others of its kind. Mt. Eskel may be Smallville, but it’s a vibrant community in its own right. The writing does not gloss over the poverty, nor does it make it the town’s defining feature. Hale does wonderful world-building in her description of quarry life, with its unique speech patterns and songs. Linder, the special rock they mine, is nearly a character itself.
Just as Miri as a person must decide where she fits into the world, she helps her community decide where it fits into the larger world. It’s a touching and oddly realistic tribute to the thousands of economically-poor-but-culturally-rich people groups in the world today.
Oh, and did I mention the side plots with cute boys are filled with a sweet innocence and awkwardness that is perfect for the age group?
If this book had a formula, what would it be?
image by khunaspix at freedigitalimages.com
Disney princess
+ The Bachelor
+ Any of the Harry-Potter-style Boarding Schools for Extraordinary Careers
+ Social Activism
= Princess Academy?
And still I don’t think I’ve pinpointed the ingredients that give this book its depth as a coming-of-age story.
Maybe, like a great cook, Hale adds a pinch of a secret ingredient nobody can single out, but everyone senses is baked into the essence.
Princess Academy makes the grade. I give it 5 out of 5 linder blocks.
May 26, 2015
Last Day to Vote for Waking Beauty in Clash of the Titles
Which book would you read first? This is the last day to vote at Clash of the Titles. Waking Beauty is in the running. (I want to read all these books!)
Waking Beauty by Sarah E. Morin
When fairy-Gifted Princess Brierly opens her eyes after a century-long snooze and finds a guy hovering over her with puckered lips, can she trust he’s not just another dream? What if Sleeping Beauty refused to wake up?
Sedona Sunset by Tanya Stowe
Alexander Summers investigates art theft for UNESCO. His quest for the source of priceless pottery leads him on collision course with Lara Fallon’s search for answers, putting her heart and her life in danger.
Diamonds or Donuts by Lucie Ulrich
With her wedding put on hold, and her fiance halfway across the world, Sarah Alexander makes some much-needed changes. A new job in a new town are just what she needs to wait out her fiance’s absence, but what is she to do when a handsome policeman enters the picture?
Pesto & Potholes by Susan M. Baganz
Renata moves to escape the monsters of her past and finds refuge at a church in and in the friendship of Antonio. Savory pesto combine with the inevitable potholes in the process of healing define their journey to . . . love.
The Captive Imposter by Dawn Crandall
Sent away for protection, hotel heiress Estella Everstone is living under an assumed name in the awkward presence of her ex-fiance. However, as hotel manager Dexter Blakeley, slowly captures her heart, will the layers of family secrets and the knowledge of her true identity end up severing his love for her?
May 24, 2015
Book Review: Like a Flower in Bloom
Historical Fiction
Our heroine, Charlotte, is wildly entertaining. Author Siri Mitchell makes the humor really work by telling the story her Charlotte’s romantic entanglements from 1st person. Charlotte is book-smart—or shall I say plant-brilliant—as a botanist. But she’s clueless about the rules of society in 1850s England. She can’t dissemble at all to blend in, and when society doesn’t make sense to her, she says so. There are multiple times Charlotte prides herself on an interaction gone well, when I as a reader groaned and smiled because I saw how poorly it actually went when you read between the lines.
This combination of genius and total lack of comprehension both confound and draw in those around her. First, her well-meaning father and uncle, who have “neglected” her by allowing her to sit out the marriage market and study science, and now are shoving her forcibly into the social game. Then there is her new friend, the social butterfly Miss Templeton. It’s hard to tell just how smart Miss Templeton may be herself, because she is so much better at coyly hiding it, but she certainly can play the period ditz when she chooses. How to describe their friendship? Hm, imagine Cher from Clueless adopted Mary Bennet from Pride and Prejudice.
Of course the person who is most vexed and enthralled by our heroine is our hero, Mr. Trimble. And he’s an odd assembly of parts himself. Is he a New Zealand sheep farmer, botanist, secretary, runaway from a ne’er-do-well family, or what? And how does he know so much about high society that he feels he has the knowledge (and the gall) to lecture Charlotte not wear a dress with inkstains to a ball, or how to dance a waltz?
But the most insufferable part of this man is he took Charlotte’s job as her father’s assistant. I loved being in Charlotte’s mind as the highly frank and intellectual creature wrestled with having a new and traditional female role forced on her. She doesn’t take the loss of her scientific passions lying down. But her attempts to get her old position back by conniving to win suitors and make her father see how much he really needs her only land her in more trouble.
This book hinges on the question of the era, “What do women want?” And author Siri Mitchell does our two female characters the honor of recognizing it may be different for each woman. The men in our story all mean Charlotte well, but only some of them gradually become aware that by telling Charlotte what she wants instead of letting her decide, they may be trampling the flower in bloom instead.
Entertaining, good variation of pace, touches on themes both light and deep. I give it 5 stars. Or flowers.
Iris by Tina Phillips freedigitalphotos.net
May 20, 2015
Clash of the Titles – Which book would you read 1st?
Which of these new books would you read first? Waking Beauty is in the running! Vote early, vote often, at Clash of the Titles.
May 19, 2015
My 1st Author Interview
Well, I’m still not exactly famous, but it was sure fun answering all these interview questions for Relz Reviews!
http://relzreviewz.com/sarah-e-morin-discover-more/
What question would YOU want to be asked in an interview?
Image courtesy of num_skyman at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
