Sara Raasch's Blog, page 474
May 21, 2014
frozenblume:
I had a sudden burst of inspiration and decided to...
I had a sudden burst of inspiration and decided to doodle some jelsa kissing.
Jelsaaaaaaa
aghowardwrites:
The Ensnared cover reveal event is ON! On the...
The Ensnared cover reveal event is ON!
On the first stop, win a chance to try some exotic “fae” food + see the first puzzle piece!
SQUEEEEEEE
May 20, 2014
Want to win an ARC of SLA?
Follow/stalk me on Twitter (@seesarawrite) TOMORROW at 1PM EST for a giveaway!
yagameoftomes:
Recently – awesomely – there’s been a move away...
Recently – awesomely – there’s been a move away from the whole damsel in distress thing. No longer does Peach only exist for Mario to rescue, or Leia hang around in the Death Star because Obi Wan Kenobi is her only hope. Fantasy movies and books tend to have at least one female character, and she’s not always just there to get in trouble and be rescued.
But because we can’t have nice things, we’ve got a new trope instead. The Totally Kickass Strong Female Character TM. And what a badass she is. She has a sassy comeback for every occasion! She’s not like those other girls, all wimpy and girly and superficial. She’s 100% sexy, 100% fearless, 100% unfazed by everything around her. She doesn’t need no man, at least until her true love shows up and shows her what she’s missing! Sure, sometimes she looks like she might be getting a little chilly, but her lack of sensitivity to things like air temperature and armor requirements is one of the things that’s so badass about her.
Assassins are awesome. Pirate queens and sword-masters are AWESOME. But they need depth, including things like weaknesses and fears and weird character quirks and goals of their own. And “fighting badass” isn’t all that female characters should get to be. When we’re presented with shallow sexy assassin after shallow sexy assassin, it’s like the story is saying, “hey, look, no! We’re totally feminist! Look how NOT a damsel this female character is!”, while STILL using female characters as wish-fulfilment for male viewers/readers. In fact, sometimes this trope is worse than the damsel, because it pretends to be empowered, while suggesting that anything girly is bad and weak, but that some female characters can transcend their female-ness by being purely sexy, purely fearless, purely quippy badasses instead. And in the end, these anti-damsels often still need to be saved by the hero so they can become his true love.
The whole male gaze thing isn’t really a problem in YA (yay!), but the genre does have a lot of badasses. Often, these characters are interesting, compelling and well-developed – certainly more so than many seen in the realm of adult fantasy novels – and I love the Celaena Sardothiens of the book world. But we need MORE too.
Give me damsels who AREN’T in distress. Give me silver-tongued diplomats who talk themselves out of trouble, and quick-witted schemers who play the games of court. Give me naïve dreamers and stubborn pragmatists and reclusive academics who never have a clue what’s going on. Female characters who control the war room and female characters who are staunch pacifists, no matter the situation or cost. Give me princesses who fight for power in worlds where their voices are dismissed, and queens corrupted by the absolute control they possess. Give me dragon whisperers and sorcerers and mouse-like farmgirls suddenly burdened with saving the world. Give me girls who are friends and enemies and grudging allies, who have professional respect for one another, or are attracted to one another, or make one another totally ragey. Give me people who happen to be female. And then give them stories worthy of their awesomeness.
~ Rhiannon (rhiannonbooks.tumblr.com)
May 19, 2014
"Love your material. Nothing frightens the inner critic more than the writer who loves her work. The..."
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— Allegra Goodman (via ellenkushner)
Gosh; you never know when something you posted is gonna hit the big time.
(via ellenkushner)
That’s a good one.
(via hollyblack)
mcroosa:
Mommy teaching baby easier water drinking way because...
Mommy teaching baby easier water drinking way because drinking water is hard experience u get it in your nose. Jesus how she puts her paw on his head in the second one. Such concern and love.
This is basically what I get to see whenever I do my kitten volunteering and yes, yes it is 10000000x cuter in person.
"We have been called “a lost generation…[not] giving birth to anything new” and “too quiet, too..."
We have been called “a lost generation…[not] giving birth to anything new” and “too quiet, too online.” In fact the opposite is true. There is a deafening roar in cyberspace. If a presidential election can be won through the support of an online movement, if articles and ideas can reach tens of millions of people overnight, and create a four-thousand person discussion, if YouTube can receive 200,000 new videos a day, then being “too quiet” and “too online” is the opinion of someone who doesn’t understand what it means to be online. Not creating anything new and not being loud enough are not our problems. So why the disrespect from the famous 60s generation? Because we aren’t doing what they want us to do.
Most of us were born after the end of the Cold War or were too young to remember it. The political climate we grew up in was one of supreme hypocrisy. One President nearly got impeached for a superficial sex scandal and then another later broke international laws to preemptively start a war without UN support and was re-elected to serve 2 full terms without so much as a breath of legal retribution.
The problem my generation faces is inheriting a world that baffles us: a world of hypocrisy and crisis; a world on the brink of collapse yet at the height of human civilization.
Imagine for a moment being one of us. Taught in school that all people are created equal, that all countries are sovereign, that freedom, democracy, and capitalism are embraced by all people and nations because they are ultimate ideals that allow us to prosper and live as we choose in the pursuit of happiness. Old enough to read the New York Times online and blog on Huffington Post, we see a very different world. Equality? Not for the poor, not for LGBT. Capitalism? It appears to have been a house of cards recklessly constructed by greed for the benefit of a few. Sovereignty? Not for resource-poor or oil-rich countries. Ideals? Not for the media or our political and business leaders.
Now we must navigate a world where a concentration of power, wealth, and media often conflicts with every ideal the Western world is supposed to stand for. If you think we are too quiet and too online you should consider that we have two choices. One, to accept the values we were taught to believe in and totally redefine and reconstruct the way our government/economy/society works so that these ideals match reality. Or two, to accept the world we live in and think up a new set of values to justify our lives.
”- Your Generation of Hypocrisy Begat My Apathetic(?!) One. - Cameron Russell, 2009. (via particlecollisions)
Right after I enact some of the more unorthodox marketing ideas I come up with.
Panic.
Then acceptance. Or at the very least, resignation.
