Under the Skin

“Wrongly chosen, wrongly slain, A hero Valhalla cannot contain. Nine days hence the sun must go east, Ere Sword of Summer unbinds the beast.”  The National Novel Writing Month website has a year-round forum for writers.  On this forum, writers can ask fact-check questions of other people, brainstorm through plot-holes, get advice on characterizations and more.  I love this forum, but there is one thing that bothers me on there.  The mythology questions.  "I want a mythological character who can be my villain.  Does anyone know of any mythological characters associated with ice and death who didn't like humans?"; "I'm writing a Greek myth spin-off.  Does anyone know of a mythological character who could be their guide?"  When I read these kinds of posts, I struggle with some charity.  On the one hand, the theme of NaNoWriMo is that everyone has a story to write, and everyone is welcome to write those stories.  Whether they...

"Take her to the moon for me, okay?" I don't frequent movie theaters that much, and when I do, I generally have the movie review as a "to-do" on my blog list for so long that it ceases to be relevant.  However, I find it is still worth it to review it.  Today's review: Inside Out ! I know that this movie has been out for a long time, but I still recommend it for that one person who hasn't seen it. Here's all I can say:  Pixar, you've done it again!  I like Disney movies, but I generally wouldn't call them fine art.  A lot of the time, I can quite freely call Pixar movies pure art, and Inside Out upholds a long tradition of just pure quality art coming out of Pixar. The story revolves around the emotions that live in the mind of an eleven-year-old girl named Riley.  As Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Anger and Fear help Riley navigate life, everything is thrown into a mess when her family moves to California.  It is up to them to help Riley l...

I wrote my book list for elementary school girls, elementary school boys, and teen boys, but I forgot to write my book list for teen girls!  How could I?  So, without further ado, Hannah's Book List for Teen Girls. As I said while writing the teen boy books, teen books are harder, because the carry-over from gender to gender is huge.  As always, these books are not meant to be exclusively for one gender or the other, and I don't believe in strictly "boy books" and "girl books," but I do believe that different books appeal to one gender more than the other.  As I also said before, I tend to like "boy books" more, even though I'm a girl.  And there is a lot of carry-over.  I cannot stress that enough. Also as I said with the teen boy books, with teen books I will include parental warnings.  Disclaimer:  It is up to you to decide whether or not these books are appropriate for your teen, and I bear no responsibility if you give this book to y...

I've kind of been looking forward to writing this review.  Because this series was SO bad, that it's fun to write the reviews. This was a random-off-the-library-shelf.  Like I've said, this can go very badly, or very wonderfully.  Unfortunately, this was of the very badly variety.  The first book, Wither , wasn't the worst book I've ever read, but I wasn't greatly impressed either.  It was dystopia that missed the point of dystopia, the science of it wasn't really that well considered, and there were a lot of things about the world-building that just didn't make sense.  Add a heroine that I just couldn't like, and a sloppy, overly-dramatic, I-think-I'm-James-Joyce-but-I'm-not writing style, and it wasn't a winner.  But, I'm a completist, so I read the next one, Fever . It was even worse.  The story went from making little sense to making almost no sense, and made me care about no characters at all.  The couple had no chemistry...

“Sometimtes you don't even know what you really want until you get what you thought you wanted.”  Goodreads.com (one of my favorite sites), has a book recommendation function.  Based on other books you've liked, it tells you other books you may like.  This function is what introduced me to the Sweet Seasons' series. It's probably a good thing that this happened, because I would have never picked this book up on my own.  Marketed as Christian, teen, chicklit, it is not what I would usually think, "YES!"  Even though I am a Christian, Christian lit is usually for evangelical Christians, for starters.  And let's just say that Evangelical Christians have left a bad taste in my mouth after elementary school in Colorado Springs.  I have gotten over my feelings for them as people, but their media, thanks to Focus on the Family, still has bad associations in my mind.  Let's just say there was some Anti-Mormon protesting and vandalism involved in that...

(It's been too long since we had scripture posts; so we get two in a row--if you call the last post a scripture post) I remember a day at a hemophilia camp where I was sitting with a young hemophiliac in pain from a bleed, while the rest of his cabin got to go run and play.  I tried to console him, but also hoped to use it as a learning opportunity:  "And if you had infused three hours ago when [other counselor] and I had suggested, would we be doing this right now?"  He wouldn't admit it--because that was his personality--but he knew that I was right.  He had waited until the crisis to do something about it, when he should have taken action at the first moment of trouble (or been smart and prevented it in the first place).  This experience came back to me as I was reading the scriptures and thinking about this concept.  I was reading in Psalms 107.  As you all know, the psalms are poems.  Back in my IB days, I had to do a lot of poetry analys...

I enjoy family history.  With that in mind, I've come to seek out where my family really came from, and have learned a lot about where the Russells came from. I also learned that they didn't come to the United States completely of their own volition.  The Russells were Norman conquerors who, after landing in Scotland shortly after 1066, decided to start wearing kilts.  So, they were Scottish for all points and purposes.  They left Scotland post-Culloden-Jacobite-Rising and all that.  Not of their own choice. So, every culture has a stereotype, right?  The Irish are fiery.  The Germans are strict, etc.  The Scottish stereotype is that they're hard-working and thrifty.  It's true.  That's why it's called Scotch tape.  I once heard that the Irish have collective PTSD (a concept that I love).  I guess you could say that the Scottish have a collective, extremely productive form of ADHD.  And I can see this impulse in the Russel...

Luckily, most of the books that I've read recently have been parts of series and so I don't have to feel bad that I'm building my list of books that I haven't read while I attempt to catch up.  Here's a book that I just picked up off the library shelf, and was a little bit oh-no when I opened it.  But it turned out to be really good. Why was I oh-no?  It was poetry.  And not just poetry, but poetry that had all the possible earmarks of being pretentious.  I think that's why I don't like poetry, really.  I find it extremely pretentious.  And this was a children's book--a novel in verse for children--where the perspective went back and forth and the poems were shaped to look like things and had different meter for the different characters that meant different things.  See?  All the earmarks of being pretentious. But, as we all know, there is a fine line between pretentious and art.  And this one fell on the art side.  Salt: ...