Latest Posts by seashellsakura - Page 5

Giveaway Contest: We’ve partnered with Alma Books to give away five of their beautiful Alma Classics Evergreens editions (pictured above)! Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on June 4, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, Alma Books has agreed to make this an International giveaway! Good luck!

Giveaway Contest: We’ve partnered with Alma Books to give away five of their beautiful Alma Classics Evergreens editions (pictured above)! Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on June 4, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, Alma Books has agreed to make this an International giveaway! Good luck!

Giveaway Contest: We’ve partnered with Alma Books to give away five of their beautiful Alma Classics Evergreens editions (pictured above)! Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on June 4, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, Alma Books has agreed to make this an International giveaway! Good luck!

Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away ten vintage paperback classics by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Harper Lee, Walt Whitman, George Orwell, and others. Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on April 22, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

March 2017 Book Discussion Challenge, day 9

Guilty Pleasure

I was well into typing this post about my consumption of Sophie Kinsella books in my teens, when I realised two things:

First, it’s been years since I read those books, so they’re not really my guilty pleasure, or any kind of pleasure for that matter.

Second, I don’t think chick lit as a genre really needs any more hate, even if a good portion of these books perpetuate heteronormative gender roles and idealised fantasies of what romance is.

Consequently, my question is this: why should anything you read be considered a guilty pleasure? If you enjoy it, why should you feel guilty? And if you feel guilty for reading it, maybe you shouldn’t be reading it at all?

Great heroes need great sorrows and great burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed. It’s all part of the fairy tale.

Peter S. Beagle (via thewritersguardianangel)

“My parents are very selfish and I have to thank them for that because I’m selfish enough not to have children. Because they were so self-involved, for most of my life I’ve wandered around like a kid lost at a mall just screaming “mommy!”, “daddy!”. I didn’t talk to my father for years but it solved nothing ‘cause I was living in the anger. At some point you’re just gonna have to realize that they’re not going to be the parents you want them to be. That window has closed. You’re going to have to accept them the way that they are and learn how to parent yourself.“

Marc Maron (via catbean715)

The volume of your voice does not increase the validity of your argument.

Steve Maraboli (via onlinecounsellingcollege)

You’re not a burden, not to anyone.

A truly strong person does not need the approval of others any more than a lion needs the approval of sheep.

Vernon Howard (via my-lifestyle-of-meow)

In case nobody’s told you today, you’re worthy. You’re valid. I’m glad you exist

Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away ten vintage paperback classics by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Harper Lee, Walt Whitman, George Orwell, and others. Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on April 22, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

on fanfic & emotional continuity

Writing and reading fanfic is a masterclass in characterisation. 

Consider: in order to successfully write two different “versions” of the same character - let alone ten, or fifty, or a hundred - you have to make an informed judgement about their core personality traits, distinguishing between the results of nature and nurture, and decide how best to replicate those conditions in a new narrative context. The character you produce has to be recognisably congruent with the canonical version, yet distinct enough to fit within a different - perhaps wildly so - story. And you physically can’t accomplish this if the character in question is poorly understood, or viewed as a stereotype, or one-dimensional. Yes, you can still produce the fic, but chances are, if your interest in or knowledge of the character(s) is that shallow, you’re not going to bother in the first place. 

Because ficwriters care about nuance, and they especially care about continuity - not just literal continuity, in the sense of corroborating established facts, but the far more important (and yet more frequently neglected) emotional continuity. Too often in film and TV canons in particular, emotional continuity is mistakenly viewed as a synonym for static characterisation, and therefore held anathema: if the character(s) don’t change, then where’s the story? But emotional continuity isn’t anti-change; it’s pro-context. It means showing how the character gets from Point A to Point B as an actual journey, not just dumping them in a new location and yelling Because Reasons! while moving on to the next development. Emotional continuity requires a close reading, not just of the letter of the canon, but its spirit - the beats between the dialogue; the implications never overtly stated, but which must logically occur off-screen. As such, emotional continuity is often the first casualty of canonical forward momentum: when each new TV season demands the creation of a new challenge for the protagonists, regardless of where and how we left them last, then dealing with the consequences of what’s already happened is automatically put on the backburner.

Fanfic does not do this. 

Fanfic embraces the gaps in the narrative, the gracenotes in characterisation that the original story glosses, forgets or simply doesn’t find time for. That’s not all it does, of course, but in the context of learning how to write characters, it’s vital, because it teaches ficwriters - and fic readers - the difference between rich and cardboard characters. A rich character is one whose original incarnation is detailed enough that, in order to put them in fanfic, the writer has to consider which elements of their personality are integral to their existence, which clash irreparably with the new setting, and which can be modified to fit, to say nothing of how this adapted version works with other similarly adapted characters. A cardboard character, by contrast, boasts so few original or distinct attributes that the ficwriter has to invent them almost out of whole cloth. Note, please, that attributes are not necessarily synonymous with details in this context: we might know a character’s favourite song and their number of siblings, but if this information gives us no actual insight into them as a person, then it’s only window-dressing. By the same token, we might know very few concrete facts about a character, but still have an incredibly well-developed sense of their personhood on the basis of their actions. 

The fact that ficwriters en masse - or even the same ficwriter in different AUs - can produce multiple contradictory yet still fundamentally believable incarnations of the same person is a testament to their understanding of characterisation, emotional continuity and narrative. 

Hard Times, Charles Dickens

This is 1 of 15 Evergreens editions by Alma Books you can vote on with your likes/reblogs. The five Alma Classics that receive the most notes will comprise our next giveaway, generously sponsored by Alma Classics! (Here’s our current giveaway.)

Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away ten vintage paperback classics by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Harper Lee, Walt Whitman, George Orwell, and others. Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on April 22, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

do people actually read books while in the bathtub

how do you not get everything wet

Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away ten vintage paperback classics by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Harper Lee, Walt Whitman, George Orwell, and others. Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on April 22, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away ten vintage paperback classics by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Harper Lee, Walt Whitman, George Orwell, and others. Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on April 22, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away ten vintage paperback classics by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Harper Lee, Walt Whitman, George Orwell, and others. Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on April 22, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

I think it’s important to realize you can miss something, but not want it back.

Paulo Coelho (via wordsthat-speak)

Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away ten vintage paperback classics by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Harper Lee, Walt Whitman, George Orwell, and others. Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on April 22, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

Every post just makes this better

A Holiday Story

So this is a Chistmas story my mom told me while I was home recently and i thought y’all might enjoy.

So, one Christmas back in the 60′s, my great-grandmother was reminiscing about Christmas in England, and how they used to have pheasant for Christmas, but Ohio sucks and they’d never get to do something like that.

Well Shit!  goes my grandfather,  them woods are full of pheasants, I’ll get you one.  So grandpa and a dubiously related man named “uncle popeye” went out with shotguns to get great-grandma a pheasant for Christmas dinner.

They’re gone for a LONG time.  according to mom, they were basically expecting grandpa and Popeye to be gone for a few hours and come back with a store-bought chicken and apologies.

Instead, they come back eight hours later, covered in mud and freezing cold from the Cleveland winter, but Surprise!  they have a Pheasant.  Great-grandma gives them a lecture about staying out so long and worrying her, but agrees to dress the bird so they can all have a traditional English Roast Pheasant.   Grandpa and Popeye retire to the living room to drink beer and talk about what great woodsmen they are when Great-grandma screams from the kitchen. “TOM!!”  She bellows and literally every male in the house jumps because literally every man has been named “Tom” for three generations at that point.  “THERE’S NO BULLET HOLE IN THIS BIRD.”

They both look massively sheepish and eventually admit that they hadn’t had much luck finding pheasants in the woods and were about to go to the store to get her a chicken when they… backed over the pheasant.

“Then what were you idiots doing in the woods for eight hours?” “We weren’t out there for THAT long-” Popeye starts before grandpa decks him.    Grandma and Great-grandma have to menace them with wooden spoons to get the truth out, but eventually they take thier oversize hiking boots off to reveal bandages. Turns out they had only been in the woods for Two hours looking for pheasants before LITERALLY tripping over one, and they both reflexively aim at the ground and… Shoot each other in the foot.  They hadn’t backed over the Pheasant in the woods.  They’d backed over it in the Hospital parking lot.

And that’s the story of how my great-grandmother made a Roast Pheasant and the ladies of the house got to eat the whole thing while Grandpa and Popey had to watch.

What is the most devastatingly beautiful thing you have ever read?

This passage from Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. *sigh*

How about you?

are you happy with that?

Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away ten vintage paperback classics by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Harper Lee, Walt Whitman, George Orwell, and others. Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on April 22, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

10 poems written by women everyone should read

In honor of International Women’s Day I decided to compile a list of some of the amazing works written by some of the just as amazing and lovely women poets

1. Siren Song by Margaret Atwood

2. Phenomenal Women by Maya Angelou

3. Palanquin Bearers by Sarojini Naidu

4. Fearful Women by Carolyn Kizer

5. Be Nobody’s Darling by Alice Walker

6. Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath

7. On Imagination by Phillis Wheatley

8. Chocolate by Rita Dove

9. Awed By Her Splendor by Sappho

10. I Died For Beauty by Emily Dickinson

Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away ten vintage paperback classics by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Harper Lee, Walt Whitman, George Orwell, and others. Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on April 22, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away ten vintage paperback classics by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Harper Lee, Walt Whitman, George Orwell, and others. Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on April 22, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

These are Alma Classics editions by Alma Books. I seriously can’t take how gorgeous these are. *sigh* I’ve reached out to Alma Books about sponsoring one of our giveaways, so if you want a chance to win some of these editions, please reblog to help me convince them! :D

Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away ten vintage paperback classics by Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Kate Chopin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ray Bradbury, and others. Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on March 5, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!