I’ll be the first to admit it: I’m not a picture book’s target audience. Right now I neither have children of my own nor do I work with children young enough to appreciate them anymore. (Protip: If you’re taking a dozen five year olds camping, always always take all the Hairy Maclary books. You’ll need them.) But there is one picture book that I pick up every so often and re-read solely as an adult who thinks it’s a great book.
So, like any good bookworm, I have a to-real pile. Although when I look at it properly – and especially if I were to add in the ebook library – it would be more like a tower. There are a lot of memes out there dedicated to showing off unread books, but if I were to give one book a week some focus it would take forever. And I suspect I am not the only one in this position.
So behold, five tales from my to-read tower: one adult, one YA, one non-fiction, one comic/manga, and one audiobook.
Like the rest of the world it seems sometimes, I too got caught up in the wave that was Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin in Japan). There was an explosion of cosplayers at Armageddon immediately after, and I was infinitely grateful that Madman NZ had the entire subbed series on their site for viewing. I binged it then, and now that I have Netflix I’m watching it again (the dub this time, because I like to compare these things).
From the first time I saw the opening credits I knew the show was something special. I mean, how can Feuerroter Pfeil und Bogen not pump you up?
The first of December means two things for me. The first is that it’s my birthday. The second is NaNoWriMo is finally over! I didn’t win, which came as no surprise as I previously blogged about giving up (and why that’s not always a bad thing). Also, earthquakes suck.
So to celebrate, I am posting a small fragment of The Cantia Covenant, which I have dubbed How Einar Got A Job Instead Of Arrested. Be warned: it is terrible in all the ways a NaNo novel can be. The only edits have been to fully excise the segments I would have deleted while writing, only instead struckthrough because NaNo.
So my birthday Christmas is next month, and I’ve been using that fact as an excuse to trawl through Etsy and look at all the cool things I want but cannot have.
Let me tell you, there is a lot of vampire-themed items on Etsy. Like, lots and lots and lots. So here is just five things, one from a different category, to… get your blood pumping? Puns are so terrible.
A well-known YA author acts like an arse on the internet? Must be a day ending in Y.
A sensitive, intelligent article on diversity and representation in YA fiction is met with anger from a well-known YA who is upset that people aren’t focusing on what he deems the ‘real’ issue? Here we go again.
So, it’s been not quite two weeks since my last blog entry, and since I have not much to say beyond a whole lot of stuff happening, I thought I’d do an update post instead of something long and interesting.
So we’re halfway through the first week of NaNoWriMo! Woohoo! And after meeting up with my fellow Wellington WriMos I have been thinking about the tools people write their novels with. We had laptops and tablets galore, and even one person who was aiming to write all 50k by hand! (In previous years we even had a person show up with a typewriter.)
I have three main writing set-ups, depending on my location: my laptop, my tablet, and my phone.
So I’m still working on a blurb for my NaNo novel – something that is always super super hard – but what I have finished is the playlist to go with that novel. And now I’m showing it off.
I don’t even remember the reason why, or how I even got there, but somehow I ended up on L.J. Smith’s page on Simon and Schuster and I noticed something that made me – and my teenage self, many many years ago – practically bounce up and down with in excitement and making grabby hand motions.