Words by Jocelyn Actual
So you know where I’ve been, because you read this. (The pic above is the nook where I wrote each day until the sun superheated the room, at which point I migrated to the area in the pic below.)
Now I’ll tell you what I did for the actual writing part of my writing retreat.
I went in with a few goals. I wanted to complete two specific short stories, and make a serious progress toward a fantasy
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I grew up reading Christopher Pike, so I was interested to see how his style might have changed in the million years since I devoured his teen thrillers Weekend and Slumber Party.*
The answer: not a whole lot. In The Secret of Ka, American teen Sara is killing time in Turkey, while her father works on some excavation project at an ancient religious site. She’s, like, totally bored, but a chance encounter with the Turkish Amesh, a cute boy
Read MoreThis is the first in a theoretically regular series where I post interesting links to places on the webs that discuss fairy tales in some form or fashion.
Black Swan was a movie that annoyed me a lot while I watched it. A new review of it over at Cabinet des Fees, however, goes more into the symbolism throughout, and gives a new spin (pirouette?) on the story, suggesting a richer interpretation than what I originally came away with. Also
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You can't sleep. Oh, you can get to sleep. Sometimes. An hour here, a few hours there. But never the night through. The dead of night, when the air is too hot and the sky is too dark, that's when you wake up and can't get back to sleep.
Maybe it was a dream. The one with the stairs? Up, down, over and over again. Or the dream with the doors. Or the task you need to complete but can't
In The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom, Christopher Healy seems to have distilled all the elements of the most entertaining Disney movies, and then carefully reassembled them into this book, which leaves the famous princesses alone (for the most part) to focus on Prince Charming, or rather Princes Charming, since no less than four young men get saddled with the moniker at the beginning of the story. Irritated by negative-to-nonexistant media portrayal (and the media here means bards' tales
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How will we react when the worst happens? Will we curl up and despair? Or will we rise up and endure?
The answer to that question lies at the heart of Hoffman’s deceptively slender novel Green Angel. Taking equal inspiration from not only traditional fairy tales, but also the September 11 attacks, Hoffman spins a story of loss, grief, and grace.
The setting is very much like our own world, but with hints of a deeper reality. Green is
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