Rachel Alexander's Blog, page 339
February 12, 2018
February 4, 2018
January 29, 2018
miss-phengophobia:
They’ve arrived! A Christmas present rather...
They’ve arrived! A Christmas present rather than a birthday one, but a treat nonetheless. @therkalexander (Rachel Alexander’s) lovely books on Hades and Persephone, a story I had the pleasure of reading while it was still being published on fanfic sites… And is now in the works to become a tv series! How time flies! The language is amazing and the amount of details and research that went into these is worthy of praise. All the best to Rachel
"From my rotting body, flowers shall grow, and I am in them, and that is eternity."
- Edvard Munch (via leave-me-colourless)
January 23, 2018
yourbitchystudentwriter:
nicholewrites:
Writing your own world’s mythology sounds hard until you...
Writing your own world’s mythology sounds hard until you realize most mythologies are created on the “oh, haven’t you heard?” principle
Some ancient Greek dude: hey why are you pregnant? You aren’t married
The lady about to come up with zeus: oh haven’t you heard?
January 20, 2018
irisbleufic:
theszechuan:
dust2dust34:
deadcatwithaflamethrower:
thebibliosphere:
When I was...
When I was nine, possibly ten, an author came to our school to talk about writing. His name was Hugh Scott, and I doubt he’s known outside of Scotland. And even then I haven’t seen him on many shelves in recent years in Scotland either. But he wrote wonderfully creepy children’s stories, where the supernatural was scary, but it was the mundane that was truly terrifying. At least to little ten year old me. It was Scooby Doo meets Paranormal Activity with a bonny braw Scottish-ness to it that I’d never experienced before.
I remember him as a gangling man with a wiry beard that made him look older than he probably was, and he carried a leather bag filled with paper. He had a pen too that was shaped like a carrot, and he used it to scribble down notes between answering our (frankly disinterested) questions. We had no idea who he was you see, no one had made an effort to introduce us to his books. We were simply told one morning, ‘class 1b, there is an author here to talk to you about writing’, and this you see was our introduction to creative writing. We’d surpassed finger painting and macaroni collages. It was time to attempt Words That Were Untrue.
You could tell from the look on Mrs M’s face she thought it was a waste of time. I remember her sitting off to one side marking papers while this tall man sat down on our ridiculously short chairs, and tried to talk to us about what it meant to tell a story. She wasn’t big on telling stories, Mrs M. She was also one of the teachers who used to take my books away from me because they were “too complicated” for me, despite the fact that I was reading them with both interest and ease. When dad found out he hit the roof. It’s the one and only time he ever showed up to the school when it wasn’t parents night or the school play. After that she just left me alone, but she made it clear to my parents that she resented the fact that a ten year old used words like ‘ubiquitous’ in their essays. Presumably because she had to look it up.
Anyway, Mr Scott, was doing his best to talk to us while Mrs M made scoffing noises from her corner every so often, and you could just tell he was deflating faster than a bouncy castle at a knife sharpening party, so when he asked if any of us had any further questions and no one put their hand up I felt awful. I knew this was not only insulting but also humiliating, even if we were only little children. So I did the only thing I could think of, put my hand up and said “Why do you write?”
I’d always read about characters blinking owlishly, but I’d never actually seen it before. But that’s what he did, peering down at me from behind his wire rim spectacles and dragging tired fingers through his curly beard. I don’t think he expected anyone to ask why he wrote stories. What he wrote about, and where he got his ideas from maybe, and certainly why he wrote about ghosts and other creepy things, but probably not why do you write. And I think he thought perhaps he could have got away with “because it’s fun, and learning is fun, right kids?!”, but part of me will always remember the way the world shifted ever so slightly as it does when something important is about to happen, and this tall streak of a man looked down at me, narrowed his eyes in an assessing manner and said, “Because people told me not to, and words are important.”
I nodded, very seriously in the way children do, and knew this to be a truth. In my limited experience at that point, I knew certain people (with a sidelong glance to Mrs M who was in turn looking at me as though she’d just known it’d be me that type of question) didn’t like fiction. At least certain types of fiction. I knew for instance that Mrs M liked to read Pride and Prejudice on her lunch break but only because it was sensible fiction, about people that could conceivably be real. The idea that one could not relate to a character simply because they had pointy ears or a jet pack had never occurred to me, and the fact that it’s now twenty years later and people are still arguing about the validity of genre fiction is beyond me, but right there in that little moment, I knew something important had just transpired, with my teacher glaring at me, and this man who told stories to live beginning to smile. After that the audience turned into a two person conversation, with gradually more and more of my classmates joining in because suddenly it was fun. Mrs M was pissed and this bedraggled looking man who might have been Santa after some serious dieting, was starting to enjoy himself. As it turned out we had all of his books in our tiny corner library, and in the words of my friend Andrew “hey there’s a giant spider fighting a ghost on this cover! neat!” and the presentation devolved into chaos as we all began reading different books at once and asking questions about each one. “Does she live?”— “What about the talking trees” —“is the ghost evil?” —“can I go to the bathroom, Miss?” —“Wow neat, more spiders!”
After that we were supposed to sit down, quietly (glare glare) and write a short story to show what we had learned from listening to Mr Scott. I wont pretend I wrote anything remotely good, I was ten and all I could come up with was a story about a magic carrot that made you see words in the dark, but Mr Scott seemed to like it. In fact he seemed to like all of them, probably because they were done with such vibrant enthusiasm in defiance of the people who didn’t want us to.
The following year, when I’d moved into Mrs H’s class—the kind of woman that didn’t take away books from children who loved to read and let them write nonsense in the back of their journals provided they got all their work done—a letter arrived to the school, carefully wedged between several copies of a book which was unheard of at the time, by a new author known as J.K. Rowling. Mrs H remarked that it was strange that an author would send copies of books that weren’t even his to a school, but I knew why he’d done it. I knew before Mrs H even read the letter.
Because words are important. Words are magical. They’re powerful. And that power ought to be shared. There’s no petty rivalry between story tellers, although there’s plenty who try to insinuate it. There’s plenty who try to say some words are more valuable than others, that somehow their meaning is more important because of when it was written and by whom. Those are the same people who laud Shakespeare from the heavens but refuse to acknowledge that the quote “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them“ is a dick joke.
And although Mr Scott seems to have faded from public literary consumption, I still think about him. I think about his stories, I think about how he recommended another author and sent copies of her books because he knew our school was a puritan shithole that fought against the Wrong Type of Wordes and would never buy them into the library otherwise. But mostly I think about how he looked at a ten year old like an equal and told her words and important, and people will try to keep you from writing them—so write them anyway.
*sobs for like the umpteenth time this day and reblogs the fuck out of this*
this is it:
“Because people told me not to, and words are important.”
…yeah, my mother told me when I was 13 or 14 (right around the time I started writing both poetry and fanfiction) that I shouldn’t write so much. Why? Because she’d dug into the desk in my room, gone through my recent handwritten journals, and told me that what I was writing was too dark. Too emotional. It would make people wonder about me. Those were her exact words.
If someone tells you not to write? Write like your life depends on it.
January 18, 2018
miss-phengophobia:
They’ve arrived! A Christmas present rather...
They’ve arrived! A Christmas present rather than a birthday one, but a treat nonetheless. @therkalexander (Rachel Alexander’s) lovely books on Hades and Persephone, a story I had the pleasure of reading while it was still being published on fanfic sites… And is now in the works to become a tv series! How time flies! The language is amazing and the amount of details and research that went into these is worthy of praise. All the best to Rachel
bisexualchristianravenclaw:
thelegalfangirl:
Lord of the Souls...
Lord of the Souls + Tumblr Text Posts (a.k.a the post that will sent me to Tartarus).
I think I just summed up Aidon’s emotion roller coaster throughout the 86 chapters of Receiver of Many…
[Credits: All the fanarts belong to asphodelon, except the 4th pic which is a painting by Simone Pignoni, c. 1650. The text posts belong to their respective owners which are shown in the picture with the exception of the 9th pic coz I took it from another text post meme, whose maker did not credit it (if you do know, let me know as well so I can edit it). The edits are made by me. Receiver of Many is a fan fiction by kata-chthonia]
I’ve read a sample of Receiver of Many by @therkalexander and my very soul aches to get my hands on a complete copy. Hades and Persephone are my favorite couple (other than my husband and me, because he’s my best friend and lover, and we are marriage goals), and I love any and all stories that portray the beautiful team they make. I’m disappointed that I’ve just now discovered this book. But pleased to know there is a sequel and pending tv series.
