Michelle Athy's Blog, page 9

Making up royalty

As a rule, I like dead royals more than living ones. Dead royals are history. Dead royals lived in historical times of yesteryear when I feel like one family or one person ruling an entire nation or empire was more acceptable. I need to make up one such family for my FrankenIdea. Also as a rule, I don't actually like it when historical novels have fake royals ruling fake nation-states in them.

Hey, whatcha reading?

I am inaugurating a new (hopefully regular, as in monthly) feature on The Sunflower's Scribbles, called Hey, whatcha reading? I'm literally just going to ask people what they're currently reading. It's pretty simple :-) For the first installment, I pestered my best friend Nali because she's always reading an interesting book. 1. What book are you currently reading? I'm currently reading

Garden of Ravens release post!

Title: Garden of Ravens Author: Krystal Jane Ruin Genre: Dark Poetry Release Date: August 13, 2019 A collection of dark poetry that journeys through folklore, twisted tales, mental breakdowns, and depression.  We hide in shadows We wither under layers Sunlight is for beautiful people Darkness is for us a Rafflecopter giveaway

Oklahoma!

First of all, how many of y'all have seen Oklahoma!? Do you know where I can see a filmed version of the musical because after seeing this version of Oklahoma! tonight, I am unsettled and endlessly curious.  A few months ago, I watched The Tony Awards and the cast of Oklahoma! did their performance. Now, I've seen bits of Oklahoma! performed on TV before and it always seemed...I don't know

2019 Reading Challenge: 10 Books!

Well, finally, I have hit the halfway mark of my reading goal for this year--10 books! Here they are: 1. Becoming by Michelle Obama. 5 stars. Nonfiction/Autobiography/ Memoir. 2. Midnight Riot (Rivers of London, #1) by Ben Aaronovitch. 3 stars. Fiction/Fantasy/Urban Fantasy/Mystery/British. 3. Her Royal Spyness (Her Royal Spyness #1) by Rhys Bowen. 3 stars. Fiction/Historical/

RWA's Literacy Signing!

This year, Romance Writers of America had their annual conference in New York City! And the coolest thing is, every year, RWA does a massive author signing, open to the public and the book sales benefit literacy programs! Last time RWA had their conference in NYC, I hadn't branched out in my romance reading--I was only reading a few specific authors here and there and didn't totally own my

A Field Trip to New York Public Library's Performing Arts Library

Rainy, damp Lincoln Center Emerging out of a nightmare heatwave this past weekend--it was so unbearably humid, guys, plus there were a lot of power outages around--Monday has brought more humidity and now rain, storms, and flooding. But today, my Archives class took a field trip--to the New York Public Library's Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center! I've been to Lincoln Center a few

Alternate History

Sometimes, history sucks. Or it's not interesting. Or it's enormously interesting, but Writer Brain is like, "But what if it happened this way instead?" According to Wikipedia, alternate history is basically speculative fiction, because the writer is speculating on a "what if?" idea and changing real, documented history into something else. Also, sometimes, time slip and time travel is involved.

Bodyguard + When They See Us

As usual, I was late to these Netflix series--I watched Bodyguard first, because Richard Madden. I saw him play a total bastard in Rocketman, remembered that he'd won a Golden Globe for Bodyguard, and my friend had already watched it and told me it was good, so I watched it. Hooked from the first scene, guys. It's a tense thriller sort of thing, where David Budd, an ex-British Army solider

Classification Systems

This June, I've been taking an online course for my library science degree--Introduction to Classification, which covers the tedious world of library classification systems aka how they keep track of all the books. I'm most familiar with Dewey--it's the most widely used system. It's numbers based. So first, you have to figure out which class the discipline of the book best corresponds to. 000