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I promise to wait to rant about how the "Conveniently an Orphan" trope is used in far too many YA books, even ones I've enjoyed immensely.
As a mom, I'm beginning to resent all those dead parents.
In the meantime, let's generate a list of books where the protagonist's parents are dead, shall we?
Share titles in the comments section!
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Before I begin my latest rant, before the tittering starts and is drowned out by full on sniggering, I want to remind the hecklers in the crowd that the Twilight series and The Hunger Games trilogy are young adult (YA) fiction.
(No need for to be embarrassed, sweeties; even my huntin'-fishin'-tobacco-chewin' husband has read all of these.)
I read a great deal of YA fiction, particularly fantasy/paranormal/horror/SF titles, and believe some of the best new writing is being published under this designation. My reading pile for the month of March has, among other titles, included (in no particular order):
You know those stories who yank you under the current and keep you there until you reach the end, where you resurface, soaking wet and out of breath, feeling quite put out the book is over? That was reading Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke & Bone and Days of Blood & Starlight.
I just knew my son, Gryphon, would enjoy them, but when I showed the books to him, he rolled his eyes. Smitten with these books, I pressed on, and Gryphon informed me he would not be caught dead reading either book in public. Why? Because of their covers. Removing the dust jackets solved that issue, but that doesn't work for paperbacks, or library books. (Librarians frown on that sort of thing.)
Too many wonderful YA novels are hidden behind a covers that are unappealing to boys. The front of well-written books, page-turning, thrilling adventures with life or death consequences, whose characters are monsters, zombies or demons, will, strangely, be illustrated with a romance-novel type of image of a girl. (Even more puzzling, books with male protagonists will sometimes have this kind of cover.)
Chatting with some of my son's female friends about books I've been reading, I learned that they, too, find the covers of many books too embarrassing to choose. These smart, funny girls, who read avidly, and aspire to be writers, pass on reading fabulous stories because the covers make them feel uncomfortable.
Many YA fantasy covers are astonishingly reminiscent of bodice-rippers, often replete with the image of a sweet young thing in the strong arms of a sexy guy. I've taken books off the shelf, and put them right back, without reading so much as the front flap, because of the cover.
More than once, I have defended a YA book I've been reading, saying with reddened cheeks, "Oh, the story doesn't really isn't anything like what you see on the cover." The look I receive in return is of the "yeah, right" variety.
Yes, people could opt for the electronic versions, and then their choice of book would be a safe secret. But, you see, because of the cover, people aren't even bothering to find out what the book is about, much less consider downloading it onto their e-reader. Everyone gets that covers sell books. I'm perplexed; what is the deal with these YA covers?
The YA market has emerged as an area of the publishing market that is growing in popularity with adult readers:
"According to a new study, fully 55% of buyers of works that publishers designate for kids aged 12 to 17 -- known as YA books -- are 18 or older, with the largest segment aged 30 to 44, a group that alone accounted for 28% of YAsales. And adults aren’t just purchasing for others -- when asked about the intended recipient, they report that 78% of the time they are purchasing books for their own reading. The insights are courtesy of Understanding the Children’s Book Consumer in the Digital Age,an ongoing biannual study from Bowker Market Research that explores the changing nature of publishing for kids." (Publisher's Weekly article)
Publishers, want to sell even more YA fantasy novels? Make more of the covers less cringeworthy. Hoping consumers will follow the adage, "Don't judge a book by its cover," is not an effective marketing strategy.
Broaden your cover art to appeal to both boys and girls. Remain aware of your adult market when you brainstorm concepts for cover designs. You'll sell more books.
Pinky-swear.
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She's fearlessly beautiful; isn't she? I want to glue all that sass and confidence to her brilliant soul. (hard for me to believe she's ten.)
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a snap of WIP (works in progress) on the wall in my studio
Last year, I posted about some paintings that were works in progress. One painting did come close to completion, but I lost the groove and in the end, I ended up putting them both aside. Recently, I fished them out of the closet, blew off the metaphorical dust, and started working on them again.
I've gone from here:
to here:
The dress is the front half of an actual antique doll dress adhered to the canvas (now under many layers of paint, gesso, paint, pastel, pencil, paint.....) My original concept referenced a Mary Oliver poem called Sleeping in the Forest.
I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.
I just wasn't happy, so gesso-ed over much of the painting, and started again a couple weeks ago. I haven't worked on it in a week or so, as I needed to step back from the piece to let some things percolate. I can hear it's voice calling to me again, which is always good.
And for this one:
I liked the content, but the painting was too bottom heavy, not balanced.
Now, that one looks like this:
New and more layers, with places from which to move forward.
I also had adhered the back half of the same antique doll dress used in the first painting above to a canvas and had begun a painting that had petered out into nothingness.
Here's where I am with that one:
I actually have a couple of other pieces in progress. They are in that beginning phase where so much is unresolved. I like having multiple pieces going at once in my studio. When I have just one, I tend to not let things dry that really need to dry, or I keep working when I really need to step away.
Painting has always given me puzzles to be solved. The impulse, the need to make hooks us, and the puzzles, they reel us in. Paintings become mysteries we are compelled to investigate.
That's what the process of painting really is, isn't it?
While we paint, we look deeply, listen to our intuition, bring to bear our education, employ our skills. Each mark we make on the surface represents a single choice plucked from dozens of possibilities.
This is why our art is in the process of creation and not the final outcome.
This is why we can look at a painting, and realize the puzzle hasn't been solved, the mystery of getting what we wanted to say out onto the canvas hasn't concluded, and we sally forth with enthusiasm, making, creating, working, puzzling...
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Zoë is not dead! WOOT! Nick is. Go Zoë!! Love me a girl that can swing a bat like that!
She was killing zombies old school style - a la Woody Harrelson in Zombieland- “Time to nut up or shut up.”
But, notice how Woody remembers to double tap- even with a bat? (Rule #2 of Zombieland)
Aidan wakes up in a trash heap, fully clothed, but barefoot.
Apparently, he was sleep-walking?
Is this a side effect from his flu-virus- werewolf-blood-immunization or was he really just "backed up?"
Besides, Aidan sleeps in his leather jacket? really?
(He sleeps? The Twilight vampires never slept, but then again, they also sparkle...)
Stevie ATE the postman? Shut. up.
(you know how dogs hate the mailman...)
(and yes, Josh did very specifically, and rather oddly, refer to the departed mail carrier as a "United States Postal Worker." Perhaps Sam Huntington's mail is delivered by a woman?)
And, instead of the fridge, Stevie put his leftovers, the left arm, in the breadbox?
...and this little snort-out loud moment:
Stevie: I tried living on the street. It didn't take too long until I got scared. Then I remembered the lake house.
Sally: Keanu?
Josh: Sandy?
Stevie: What?
Sally: Nothing. Go on.
Josh: Nothing, just continue.
(The movie, The Lake House)
Remember, Trent's door looked just like Nick's and Stevie's.
What does the gold-painted seashell symbolize?
Or, does Donna just lack good door decorating taste?
The midwife left the dead baby in a burlap sack at the end of Susanna's bed? WTF?
Will Aidan's first human victim (he's gotta run out of chickens sometime), after returning home from the war, be the cruel and covetous Reverend? I sure as hell hope so.
Kat is rather taken with the surname, Waite, isn't she?
She shows Aidan a book printed by no other than Edmund Waite, Aidan's father, having remembered seeing it as the name of the printer at the bottom of a title page of an antique book she perused before she met Aidan? Hmmm.
Me thinks her vague resemblance to the fair Susanna and her interest in the Revolutionary War isn't coincidental.
I like her, though, and she'd rock as a vampire- brilliant and deadly! She'd wipe the floor with Blake.
Kat slept with that man? Jeff Weston. Yuck. They were definitely a Christie-Brinkley-and-Billy-Joel sort of couple. Maybe he rocked the casbah? Nah. Not a chance.
And then, we find that Aidan has eaten Professor Pedo without being conscious of doing so? (once again, Aidan awakes in an alley having been asleep in his leather jacket, but this time wearing shoes.)
This also means Aidan left Kat's in the middle of the night, after mad-passionate first-time-together sex .
Dude, sneaking off in the middle of the night after the first time you have sex with a woman you are dating in hopes of a relationship instead of just getting laid, is a serious post-coital etiquette faux pas. (even if you did kill her self-aggrandizing, bad-hair-having, co-ed screwing ex)
My advice: Don't run home. Head to the bakery for fresh pastries and good coffee, grab some fresh strawberries from the grocery, a bunch of tulips, maybe, and return, delivering food and morning nookie.
Why aren't the two ghost women that Aidan fed to Henry still pestering Aidan?
(I loved Sally's line in Episode 8: "Yeah, and you two look like human maxi-pads. Glass houses much?")
Still no Liam. What's our psychopathic lycanthrope been plotting?
See, I told you Aidan not mentioning Pete was gonna be a problem.
Oddly, the actor who played Pete turned up in last night's episode of Lost Girl, which airs immediately after Being Human, so we got to spend a little more time with Pete.
I liked Pete. He'd have been a great werewolf-father-figure for Josh. Plus, Pete kinda reminds me of George Bailey's guardian angel from It's a Wonderful Life, Clarence Odbody. You know, if you overlook Pete's dope-smoking, daisy-pooping, vegetarian werewolf-iness.
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I'll start at the beginning.
I have a pen I have had for about twenty years. yes. I really said twenty years. 20. years.
I used to be a fountain pen person, but while in grad school, I got tired of dealing with clogged pen nibs and smeared ink on my class notes and the side of my hand, so I replaced my Waterman fountain pen with a Waterman rollerball.
This one:
Ever since, I have had that pen in the zipper pocket of whatever backpack/purse/satchel I have owned. I haven't ever lost that pen. Now, I have other items I haven't lost. I'd actually be wearing my RayBan, tortoise shell, cat-eye sunglasses from the same time, but my youngest daughter destroyed them when she was wee. (which for the record means I had those sunglasses for over fifteen years.)
Last Sunday night, I opened my purse, unzipped the pocket, and reached in for my pen. My pen was not there. Now, I don't leave the house much (kids to and from school, grocery shopping, library- that's it.) so I knew I hadn't lost my pen somewhere else. I began a thorough and systematic search of my house. I couldn't find my pen. I was hoping my pen would turn up, since it had to be in the house somewhere.
Of course, I had searched my studio- floors, tables, places it might have rolled under; I searched. My studio is on the third floor, and I also have my clothing and dressing table up there. (our bedrooms lack usable closets, a common experience with houses built a hundred years ago.)
I probably go up and down the stairs to my studio forty times a day, at least. Between three children, needing to pee, get a drink, pee again, change the water in my brush bucket, switch laundry, start dinner, empty the dishwasher, and continue on working, I go up and down the stairs in my house all day long.
On Wednesday evening, after everyone was asleep, I went upstairs to my studio to print out a rough draft of a few pages, because I edit better on hard copy. I walked up those stairs for what would have been the hundredth time since losing my pen, minimum. I went into my studio and printed my stuff. I turned, and went to head back down the stairs.
There on the tippy-top step- you know that one that isn't really a step but the floor when you are done climbing the steps- but it is still wood like the steps? Dead-center, in the the middle, was my pen .Yep. Placed absolutely perpendicular to the stair edge. I was so thrilled- my pen! And then, I was a bit, um, puzzled-startled? (can't really find the right words...)
My pen certainly hadn't been there. At that moment, I was the only person awake, even my dogs were sound asleep. (Bella snores, loudly, btw.)
There's no place from where the pen could have rolled or fallen. I was in yoga pants and a t-shirt - pocket-less, and I had dressed in the basement. I've since tried to debunk the possibilities. Joe's tried to debunk the possibilities.
My pen is back; I sure wish it could talk.
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Trying to get back into the swing of blogging is much like being swimming along in a fast moving river and trying to climb aboard a boat also moving along in the quick current.
There's always so much that I had wanted to share that has floated on by that I've often given up without even trying to climb back onto my blogging boat! I decided I would do a bit of show-and-tell while I get my sea legs back! So, here goes....
(Quick! Look away now, if crafty show-and-tell annoys you.)
This winter I knitted up neckwarmers and mitts for family, friends, neighbors, and teachers. The neckwarmers are great for littles because they don't experience the "unwrapped & dragging on the ground" effect that often happens when you put scarves on small children and send them out to play. Mitts are always just so good. For the littles' knitted goods, I used a wool-blend yarn that was safe to launder, and didn't have a dye lot. I did everything in garter stitch, with bulky yarn and big needles. Not only do things knit up quickly this way, replacing a missing mitt is easy enough to do.
Here are a few of the pieces:
neckwarmers and mitts for Sunny and Maggie
The "masculine" neckwarmers for Gryphon and Joe (along with mitts for Gryph.)
neckwarmers that headed out as gifts...
mitts that headed to a neighbor's (terrible photo; sorry.)
my set
Other notes:
I made the various flowers and leaves from bits of felted sweaters I have in my fabric stash. The felt balls were from a pack given to me by a friend several years ago.
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