Nicole Field's Blog, page 34
December 12, 2015
Just a simple PSA
Cannon = thing that goes boom
Canon = an event that occurs within a published story
they both destroy ships tho
Did you just
December 10, 2015
“Alex and I. Is it ok with you if we keep us separate? It makes...
“Alex and I. Is it ok with you if we keep us separate? It makes more sense.”
A little under a week ago, I posted about Golden Boy by Abigail Tarttelin.
I thought my little soap box on diversity–with particular regard to books about intersex teens–was over. However, this morning I cracked open this book by Australian writer Alyssa Brugman.
Holy hell, I did not know what I was getting into with this book. And, you know what? I can’t think of a more fantastic ride!
Alex is introduced to us in the first page as a girl who’s gone off her medication and is about to be given a Clinique makeover at Myers. We are then also introduced to other Alex who is male. It’s pretty clear, even from this point, that the two of them either share a body or a mind.
It’s the former. I can’t believe that a year ago I didn’t even know what intersex was. And, despite the fact that my autocorrect attempts to correct the word, I have no gone from reading Golden Boy, which I knew going in was about an intersex teen, to stumbling into this novel knowing only that it was GLBT friendly.
I HAVE NO REGRETS.
The opening blog post we get from Alex’s mother is heart breaking, telling the story of parents and doctors who didn’t know what they were doing and don’t know how to handle this ‘different’ child. It’s pretty clear even from my small amounts of reading on the subject that intersex children are a huge curiosity to doctors. And how hard that curiosity is on the families concerned. Subsequent ones make me want to smack her, which is also accurate in so far as these matters tend to end up, sadly.
I often find, when I read two books with similar themes, that one seems a lot like the other or else falls short in some way. Not so with Alex As Well. There is not a word in here that isn’t original and engaging!
I got this amazing text message the other day from @katsoph. It...
I got this amazing text message the other day from @katsoph. It was a picture of the above book cover, followed by, ‘Do you have a copy of this yet? I can grab it for you and bring it to the picnic.’
It’s a copy of book 3 of Cat Valente’s Fairyland books, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two, sent to me due to our shared love of this author.
After I finished squeeing, this got me to pull out my second book in this series, which then had be trawling through my photos during the last time I read the first book, and from these pictures it turns out I seem to have a favourite character in the books: The Wyverary, part wyvern and part library :D:D
And yet…
“Oh, September, you mustn’t look at me like that,” he sighed. “I know I am not your Ell–I haven’t big blue eyes or a fiery orange stripe on my chest. I haven’t a smile that just makes you want to hug me. But I have been your Ell’s shadow all his life. I lay there on the grass below him when you met, and on the Briary grounds when we found Saturday in his cage, and on the muffin-streets in the Autumn Provinces when you got so sick. I worried with him for you. I lay on the cold stones in the Lonely Gaol, and I was there at the end when you rescued us. I have always been there, and I love you just the same as he did. My father was a Library’s shadow, and I also know all the things that begin with A-Through-L. I could be just as good to you as he was, if you can overlook the fact that I am not really him at all, which I admit is a hurdle.”
Okay, so maybe two favourite characters! These books have just the right amount of whimsy matched with lyrical prose. I am so, so glad for an excuse to pick them up again.
December 7, 2015
December Write-Up
NaNo Season is now over.
I’m spending more time reading again and today I went back to the FutureLearn courses that were basically ignored while I wildly tried to write down words.
Suddenly an ice-cold wind went through the vast hall, and the blind mother could feel that Death had arrived.
‘How have you been able to find your way here?’ he asked, 'how have you been able to get here faster than I have?’
'I’m a mother,“ she said.
Where I left off in my Hans Christian Anderson course were the analyses of his “The Story of a Mother” and my most beloved “Snow Queen” fairy tales.
There was just something about the former–an incredibly short tale, only a couple of pages long–about a mother’s struggle against Death for her child that grabbed me. These lines in particular, and the simplicity of just ‘I’m a mother’, caught me. That, on further analysis, the story is also about the passage through grief made me realise just how clever Anderson was even in very few words.
Anyone who knows “The Snow Queen”, however, knows that this is, by contrast, just about the longest fairytale. Told in seven parts, it’s a story of Gerda’s journey to find her beloved Kay who has been stolen away by the Snow Queen through shards of the queen’s mirror in his heart and eye.
“The Snow Queen” addresses or confronts the kind of world we inhabit today, where we know that chance to a great extent rules our lives and where we do not believe that things happen according to any divine scheme or plan. This is quite remarkable.
Still, Gerda manages to make sense out of everything that happens to her, from incident to incident and from story to story, by integrating it into her story. Thus, Gerda’s story in a certain sense generates itself, but not without all the faith, she invests in it.
I first read this story when I was under ten years of age, and it’s not till now, seeing this analysis, that I realise just how much “The Snow Queen” and stories like it have shaped the way I view the world and the way I narrate my way through it.
FutureLearn is such an amazing resource for those who want to pad out their resume with qualifications, or just study for study’s own sake. It’s free unless you pay for the certificate of completion. In short: go ahead and just do it!
bookscatsandprettythings:
I commissioned the super-talented...
I commissioned the super-talented Monika (Moishpain) to paint Karou from Laini Taylor’s “Daughter of Smoke and Bone” series. Doesn’t the finished painting look amazing?
Oh, and that wishbone necklace…
"Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And..."
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, into which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.”
-
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
From an upcoming class I have on FutureLearn, this is an amazing commentary of the “weight of too much liberty” in life.
I also find its message on the discipline of writing sonnets relevant to the self-discipline required in days set aside for writing more generally.
December 6, 2015
doktorbedlam:
katanaxd:
amsayy:
liamhunny:
zaynmalikleft:
th...
this commercial changed me as a person
they……. they didnt have to do all that i-…., i cant belieb my ass is sobbing over a fucking gum commercial
*sobs*
Are they advertising gum or true love
I’m not crying, you’re crying. What the fuck how does a commercial for FUCKING GUM DO THIS TO A PERSON
Because there’s a very good storyteller in their media team who understands the importance of narrative.
December 4, 2015
Holy crap, I feel like no one accurately portrayed how long...
Holy crap, I feel like no one accurately portrayed how long Marissa Meyer’s last book of The Lunar Chronicles was before now. No *wonder* it took so long for it to be released!
Looking at this, it’s like The Deathly Hallows all over again.
Here is Winter pictured against Rainbow Rowell’s Attachments, also known as Today’s Library Stash, being added to my already near overflowing shelf of Things I Have Borrowed From The Library And Need To Read Through And Return Within Three Weeks.
Oh god, why me? #suchwonderfulproblems
“I mean, why do we have two sexes if we aren’t actually all part...
“I mean, why do we have two sexes if we aren’t actually all part of the two sexes?”
Golden Boy is such an important narrative about an intersex teen who identifies as male. After Max is raped by a boy he grew up with–and the only person his own age who knows his secret–it brings up various repercussions over his identity, sexuality and also family and social dynamics.
This book is important also, because of:
Archie: Abigail Tarttelin was so smart to have chapters of this novel written from Dr Archie Verma’s perspective. Through Max’s doctor, the reader is introduced to the medical side of intersex, as well as some of the history relating to the term and the science of it through the 90s and 00s. Archie works as a bit of a Giles character who does her research and then gets to educate the rest of the cast.
Daniel: Max’s little brother, and the one who’s quite adamant–along with Max, I’ll add–that he wants a big brother, not a big sister. Because of the age gap between these two, Daniel’s understanding of what’s going on around him is patchy at best. Most of the chapters from him are from a purely emotional and reactionary side of things.
Steve: Max’s father. Although we don’t get any chapters written from his perspective, a picture begins to form on the kind of man he is, both from medical records and Max’s mother’s recollections. He is the one who’s adamant that Max doesn’t have to choose a gender and wouldn’t permit surgery to be done before Max was of an age to consent. “Idealogical differences” I believe is the term that’s used.
I’m only halfway through this novel, and I just can’t put it down. I’m so honoured that I’m going to be published with Abigail next year!
