Today we have a fantastic read up for grabs, it is a signed TheFault in Our Stars, by John Green. Whether you’ve read it or not, this is a must have for any bookshelf! 😀
Book description (from amazon):
‘Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be completely rewritten.’
Latimer: If there is one thing in life that is the universal response to, well, everything – a piece of good news, bad news or a general break – it has to be tea. A good cup of tea (which must be roughly one out of three cups – I think!), a fine cup of tea, a tasty cup of tea – it must be what dreams taste like.
Dreams, they taste of good tea! At least, our dreams must (I speak for Ridley, hehe, she is like, “Err no, I’ll have you know my dreams taste of chicken! I’ve checked; took a bite out of the last one – chicken!”).
Either way, we adore tea, I mean we really do. It lately seems like we have been visiting tea houses all over the world (well, here and there, now and then!).
For example… Tea in Galway, in the lovely quaint and beautiful Cupán Tae (cup of tea in Irish!)…
And fancy tea in the Ginza district of Tokyo… (we couldn’t stop going on about how expense tea was in Tokyo – seriously to this day we still talk about it! But well, it was sooo nice here though!)
So, really how could we go to Oxford, England in general, and not have a cupan tae? Sure we couldn’t; it was top of the list, high-tea (it was something we dreamed of doing when Legend Unleashed was published – to toast it, we dreamed of high-tea in Oxford!)! We researched this a bit, and decided that The Old Parsonage seemed like the high-tea spot of Oxford.
As the name suggests it is an old parsonage from the 1660s and it’s like walking into a mini-cottage in a forest with twisted, gnarled alien trees with branches that claw at the building.
It’s fairy-tale like; quaint, English, very lovely. The fire burning in the hearth warmed our chilly bones; for whatever reason Ireland and the UK had been experiencing very cold weather and it was raining and snowing in Oxford.
It was perfect weather for a hot cup of tea and some cucumber sambos (sandwiches) (that was a first and they are very tasty!) and scones, with clotted cream (which I never really knew what that was, but it’s got the consistency of butter, but it’s yummy!) and strawberry jam. It was lovely; I had the old parsonage blend of tea and Ridley had old English breakfast tea.
Later that evening we made our way to the famous Eagle and Child pub; this was where the Inklings (a literately discussion group J.R.R Tolkien and C.S Lewis were part of) used to have their Tuesday meetings.
As we sat and tucked into our fish, chips and mushy pea (and more tea!), supper…
…we wondered if there were untold stories, or remnants of half-dreamed characters, hidden in the walls, or in conversations waiting to be had… and as we munched away, we dreamed our own Carwick dreams!
Then we toddled off back to our quarters, wandering the dark cloisters of Hogwarts… no wait, Wonderland… ha, Christ Church College 🙂
Let me in!! Latimer screams…Fine, don’t *sniffle, sobble*..
Latimer: Last weekend, I journeyed north – to the rugged and jagged cliffs of the county Antrim coast (Game of Throne’s country! :)).
Winter is Coming… Right?!The Dark Hedges Antrim
I’m just after realising… I thought ALOT of the places I saw as we drove around the coast looked like the Iron Islands from Game of Thrones… and we ended up, having missed a turn, at a tiny, tiny harbour – and!- AND I just looked it up (it’s called Ballintoy) and it was a location for the Iron Islands on Game of Thrones!
Ballintoy HarbourIron Islands, Pyke… but actually Ballintoy… I’m in aweYo, Theon Greyjoy spin around, Latimer is waving at ya!
It was the back of beyonds. Wow, I’m actually just going ‘damn, I should have gotten out and ran around or something!’ (over his shoulder on the left-hand side facing us! up there near the cove… yep :)!). I even took note of the place, thinking, I must remember this place!
Anyway, going to Antrim was a first for me. It’s not that far from home, nowhere in Ireland is in fairness, but sometimes it takes a few years before we end up going to the places that we’ve always meant to go.
I’ve always meant to go to the Giant’s causeway; it’s one of those ‘on the list, but never seem to go’ sort of places (like Sceilig Mhichíl, the tiny rock monastery out in the Atlantic ocean; but that’s another story!).
Sceilig Mhichíl… another ‘on the list’ place
As we journeyed to the tip of Northern Ireland, I started thinking back on the story of the causeway, or what I remembered of it. In school I remember that we learned lots of the old Irish stories; children of Lir, Deirdre of the sorrows, Fionn and the Fianna (band of warriors) – I even remember learning about all the tests a young warrior had to do before he could join the Fianna; we had to draw a picture for each task and I think there were 12? I remember one of them was run through the forest while picking a torn out of your foot (and another task was to run through the forest without breaking a single twig!).
We learned a lot of Irish stories; we even did plays ‘as Gaeilge’ (in Irish). Children of Lir was a popular one (I played Fiachra? I think! In the act where the children are turned into swans… I play a child being turned into a swan very well, as it turns out! HA!).
The story of the causeway was a little fuzzy for me. The giant’s name was all I really remembered: Fionn Mac Cumhaill.
When we got to the causeway visitors centre, the story started to come back to me as I watched the CGI Fionn (known as ‘Finn Mac Cool’ in Northern Ireland, but ‘Fionn Mac Cumhaill’ in Irish) on the explanatory video they played.
This story, and the one that I remembered, was where Fionn was mocked by a Scottish giant who he could see beyond the sea in Scotland (jumping up and down and making gestures – the Scottish giant wanted a fight).
Fionn was enraged and threw stones into the sea to build a bridge to get to Scotland (one of the sods of earth became the Isle of Man – that’s a side-story!). He built the causeway, and traveled all the way to Scotland to confront this would-be foe.
Fionn crept along the final steps of the causeway. He started to haul himself up the Scottish cliffs then paused. The Scottish giant, Cuhullin, was far bigger than Fionn. So, like any sensible person (and giant!), Fionn fecked off back home and shut the door. As his wife stared at him, with a ‘what have you gone and done?’ look on her face, the ground beneath them started to tremble! BOOM, BOOM, BOOM! Cuhullin was racing across the causeway to fight Fionn!
Fionn’s wife, proving the clever one, told Fionn to get into their baby’s cot. She dressed him up as their baby and pulled the curtains to hide him from view.
Cuhullin banged on the door and she let him in. Fionn’s wife told Cuhullin that her husband was out. The giant pulled back the curtains and saw Fionn ‘the baby’ in his cot. What a massive baby, he thought, shaking in his boots – how big would his father be?! Fearing for his safety, Cuhullin raced back to Scotland.
I remembered the name Fionn Mac Cumhaill as also being ‘Fionn and the Fianna’, the story of an Irish warrior and the fearsome Fianna warriors. As it turns out this Fionn and the giant share the name, but the two have very different stories.
If you have ever heard the story of Tir na nÓg (the land of the young) and the young Oisín who journeyed there on a white horse with a girl called Niamh; well, Fionn Mac Cumhaill (of Fionn and the Fianna fame) was Oisín’s father.
The causeway was beautiful, despite the typical Irish bad weather (winds that would whistle right through your bones and icy cold rain!). The rocks were a little dangerous, because of the wet and the wind, but never one to care I scrambled across them and out as far as I could go – by law! The rocks of the causeway are made of basalt, which is solidified lava. It was caused, in reality, by a volcanic eruption.
Apparently at one point in its life (around 1901), it was rumoured that the causeway was going to be moved to a Philadelphia park (stone by stone and rebuilt there). Thankfully it wasn’t, but lots of the stones were taken away and can be found all over the world.
This box shows some of the places where you can find some of the Giants causeway! It’s very unlucky to remove stones and you are definitely not allowed anymore (my Mam kept saying; ‘wouldn’t you love some of those stones for your garden?’).
Back at the visitors centre we saw a collection of postcards from years ago, from people who visited the causeway (some would have been from the early 1900s). Very interesting to read voices from the past 🙂
We also saw some lovely jewellery made from buttons by a woman called Jane Walsh (Button Studio) in Athlone Ireland. I couldn’t leave without one!
The things you can do with buttons! Button rings!My button necklace
Also lots of Irish fudge and chocolate, yummers!
Chocolate and fudge! Yummy! (That bench read; ‘can you fit in a giant teaspoon?’ and had a teaspoon drawn on it 🙂 )
We had another site to see while on the Antrim coast, the Carrack-a-Rede rope bridge. It’s a short rope bridge that leads over to an island where fishermen used to cast salmon nets (back in the old days they would cross the, then, one-rope bridge to collect their catch and haul it back over the nauseating cliff gap).
Not my picture, but this is clearer I think
A view from a parallel cliff of the bridge. That island/rock is what you are crossing the bridge to get to.
I really, really wanted to cross the bridge (even though I was afraid). But the winds were far too dangerous and the bridge was closed for the day. The sharp, icy winds would have swept you right off the bridge, so no good, we weren’t getting across. It was annoying, but being that close to the cliff, I felt pretty scared anyway. I kept saying I would have done it anyway, and I would have, but it looked really scary.
Uh-oh… the long way down! EekBe brave Latimer… you will return to cross one day!!
There were steel steps leading downward to the bridge itself at a very steep angle. If I have a fear of something, it is the sea. I really don’t like it. But heights aren’t great either, and it was high up over the waves crashing violently against the cliffs, so… I’ll put it back on the list for a later date!
We saw a lot of stunning views of the rugged coastline and also stopped by a small ‘village’ (I’m not sure it was a village exactly, maybe a small collection of private houses right on the coast more like?).
(I notice these pictures look like the place was warm… hmm, it was freezing and the wind would cut right through you!)
This was home to what is called (apparently) the smallest church in the world! It was basically in someone’s garden.
Smallest church in the world
They had a gorgeous view of the sea and the loveliest little place to sit and watch the wave’s crash along the pebble-dash shore. It was very beautiful.
This was a great trip – the causeway, the bridge and the Antrim coast should definitely be on the list of places you have to visit if you ever come to Ireland 🙂
The trip really made me think of all the old stories I learned in the past and I had this nice re-connect with my Irish-ness – all in perfect time for Lá Fhéile Pádraig (Paddy’s Day) this week 🙂
Latimer: I just saw the Game of Thrones Season 3 trailer this week. God, it looks good! Mostly it reminded me of the brilliance of Tyrion Lannister.
He must be the top reason for watching Game of Thrones. He’s my top reason at least. He’s witty, intelligent and calculating. He’s not good by any means, he’s in it for himself, but you have to respect him like you can’t respect many of the other characters, because Tyrion knows how to play the game.
His dwarfism makes him an unsuspecting player, it defines him a little at the start, but eventually he just becomes one of those characters almost Sherlock-like in his quickness. He’s got the best comebacks and in Peter Dinklage’s hands he is portrayed in such a cool way. Every moment he’s on screen, you find yourself screaming; “You rock!”
I’m starting to think about the quality of TV shows lately and how some books and comic book series make excellent TV shows.
I heard that Lauren Oliver’s Delirium series (which shamefully I have but haven’t read yet! Grr, bad Latimer!), is being made into a TV series instead of a movie.
Supposedly there is a lot in it that is more suited to TV than a movie. I think Game of Throne’s is the same, it makes an excellent TV show, but lots of the richness (and grim roughness) would have been lost in a movie.
And of course The Walking Dead is a comic book series that makes a fantastic TV show (that I have yet to fully watch, I’m so behind! :()
I wonder what Harry Potter the TV series would have been like? In a parallel world where it was a TV series, maybe produced by HBO with astronomical financing and effects (and I bet it was epic!).
The Vampire Diaries makes a good TV series, but it would have been a bad movie. And then I do think that Hunger Games and Twilight make better movies (the TV series’ would have been a bit too drawn out).
And then there’s The Sandman by Neil Gaiman. I’m reading it at the moment (and enjoying it, but that’s a later post!), and I keep thinking… ‘this would be a great TV series’. Apparently it’s one of those ‘it’s on, it’s off’ series. But… wow, seriously, watch out for it if it ever comes!
It seems to be a good time for TV! I can’t wait to hear of the next series to make it onto the little screen! Derek Landy’s Skulduggery, or Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl maybe? They might be fun to have running through our weeks 🙂
Ridley: Old movies. I love them. I have done since I was quite young. In particular, the old black and white, or barely just colour, love stories. To me, they’re infused with barely restrained passion. They adhere to the notion of, less is more. There was no bed hopping or clothes ripping in these films, just fiery declarations of love and desperate kisses, which made your heart swell as you looked on with a box of tissues, clutching a cushion to your chest and hoping everything would all work out for them.
I don’t quite know why this fascination with old films originally started, but I do know where it all began, with one my very favourite black and white films; The Ghost and Mrs Muir. Now Latimer has heard me mention this maybe a time or two…dozen…down through the years, I’ve seen it around four times. Not that many times for a favourite something of mine,( usually it gets worn out) but for some reason I’ve refused to buy a copy, I’ll only watch it when they show it on television, which is something thatrarely happens now.
It is one of the most unconventional love stories- well when it first came out anyway, possibly not now, in a world where vampires and werewolves and fairies and what not are potential love interests. Though I would argue it’s still pretty unique!
It’s a 1947 film, (based on a novel, all the good ones are-teehee…) where a young widow, Lucy Muir, played by Gene Tierney, moves to an English seaside town and rents Gull Cottage, a house haunted by the ghost of it’s former owner, a roguish, irascible, surly (and down right smexy) sea captain, Daniel Gregg (Rex Harrison, who I again love in another movie, My Fair Lady, as the Professor!).
They have a rocky, tit-for-tat relationship, she’s the first woman who hasn’t run out of the house screaming at the sight of an apparition appearing in the darkness beside her and who is able to give as good as she gets. (Booyaa for strong female characters everywhere! 😀 )
After her refusal to leave the cottage, they settle into an uneasy living arrangement, slowly beginning to enjoy each other’s company. However, it soon becomes clear to Captain Gregg that Lucy’s finances are drying up and she may have to leave the house anyway, so he decides that he will dictate his memoirs to her, entitled Blood and Swash, and then sell them.
As they write the book together, their friendship deepens into something neither of them ever name as they both begin to realise just how hopeless their situation is.
Lucy Muir: It’s no crime to be alive! Captain Gregg: No, my dear, sometimes it’s a great inconvenience. The living can be hurt.
It is the Captain who begins to insist that Lucy should find a man who can be with her, in all senses of the word, so she doesn’t spend her life alone. (I am at this point shouting at the TV going, ‘Nooo, Captain Gregg, she wants you!! Don’t be a fool! Who cares if you’re a ghost, it could still work….somehow!’)
When they finish writing the book, after some trials and tribulations, it is published and with Captain Gregg’s racy recollections, the novel becomes a bestseller.
Captain Gregg: I’ve lived the life of a man and I’m not ashamed to admit it!
This of course, gives Lucy the money to allow her to stay in the house, with him. (Ridley: *cheesy grin*)
It is on a visit to her publisher in London, though, that Lucy meets and becomes attracted to suave Miles Fairley (George Sanders). (Ridley: ‘Run away from nasty hobbities man, Lucy! Me no trust him!’)
Captain Gregg is jealous of their relationship (swoon!).
Lucy Muir: You, yourself, said I should mix with people, that I should see… men. Captain Gregg: I said men, not perfumed parlour snakes!
Captain Gregg: And the way he was smirking at you, like a cat in the fishmonger’s! You should have slapped his face! Lucy Muir: Why? I found him… rather charming! Captain Gregg: “Rather charming!” Now you’re starting to talk like him! Lucy Muir: How in blazes do you want me to talk? Captain Gregg: That’s better!
Captain Gregg soon begins to realise, though, that he is the main obstacle to her happiness. While he’s around, she won’t truly allow herself to find someone else, and so, while Lucy is asleep, the Captain convinces her that he was nothing but a dream…(cue Ridley’s heart shattering into millions of tiny pieces)
“Oh, Lucia, you are so little and so lovely. How I would have liked to have taken you to Norway and shown you the fiords in the midnight sun, and to China- what you’ve missed, Lucia, by being born too late to travel the Seven Seas with me! And what I’ve missed, too.”
(Ridley: *clasping hands together with a giant sigh*)
Of course, i’m not going to continue to spoil the whole film for you. GO and watch it. Get a nice cup of tea, a good squishy cushion and soft tissues. Sometimes the oldies really are the best!
Of course, it’s not hard to see how my younger self ended up devouring other old films in search of more epic romances such as that one, and down through the years I’ve found many, such as Sabrina (with Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart), The Philadelphia Story (Cary Grant), Casablanca (Humphrey again), My Fair Lady (Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison), Gone with the Wind (Clark Gable), Gigi (Latimer put me wise to this about nine years ago!), and quite a few Fred Astaire films, but to name a few!
If you’ve any similar old movie suggestions for me, let me have them, I can set myself up for a long overdue film marathon!! 😀
One of our favourite artists on deviantart, mseregon, is current creating a new series of drawings which we’ve been following! We pop over often to see what new image has been uploaded. What is this series I hear you ask? It’s a brilliant idea, she’s drawing women who are main characters in various fantastic novels that she’s read. Fan art is such a fantastic way to express and share your feelings with others about a particular book and to extend your time in the world of the characters. So this series is fan art at it’s finest.
Ridley: I just love the way mseregon picks one colour per character and implements it in various parts of the picture, simplistic but very beautiful and effective! It’s also given me more of an appreciate for how many brilliant, strong female main characters there are now in literature. I don’t know why, but when I was much younger, I seemed to find it hard to find books without male leads. Not so now!!
Latimer: I’ve really been enjoying this series so much! mseregon has such a wealth of book knowledge behind her; she’s always picking such great characters to draw! Every time she uploads a new image I’m over in her gallery 🙂 The one colour per character really works so well, very graphic (I can’t wait for the next images!!).
Here we’ve been given permission to share her pictures with you. Each image has a link to it’s place on her gallery so if you’d like to you can pop over to see more, leave a comment or just tell her how great she is! 🙂
First up we’ve Katniss from the Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. If you haven’t read these books, definitely check them out! A great series and the reason behind the new popularity in dystopian novels at the moment!
Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Our favourite novel with one of the best independent, smart female main characters ever, and not to mention the ultimate fictional crush that can be found in the swoon-worthy Mr Darcy! Elizabeth’s dress is adorable in this and the colour is so pretty.
Jane Eyre from Jane Eyre 🙂 by Charlotte Bronte. There is something very beautiful about Jane’s plainness. The grey-blue really suits the character of Jane. This picture conjures up a great image of such a strong character. Makes us want to delve back into Charlotte’s world!
Karou from Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor. With her dramatic blue hair in the book, it is the absolutely perfect colour to have picked for her picture. Her laid back pose in this is just brilliant. The book by Laini is a real page turner, some really magical world building to be found in it too.
Tris from Divergent by Veronica Roth. Now we are both ashamed to say we haven’t read these books yet! They are on our list!! This picture definitely peeks our interest, if we hadn’t already bought the books, we would be a-buying after this. Tris looks like one kick-ass character!
Sookie from The Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris. Everyone knows Sookie by now, even if you haven’t read the books you’ve surely seen True Blood, with the handsome Eric Northman?
Tessa from The Infernal Devices series by Cassandra Clare. If you are currently clueless as to who this is and have never heard of Cassandra Clare, for shame! Get thee to a bookshop, or Amazon! I would recommend City of Bones as your first venture into the Shadowhunter Chronicles.
The purple is really spectacular in this and it’s very similar to how I’ve pictured Tessa too!
Alina from Shadow and Bone of The Grisha series by Leigh Bardugo. Honestly can’t say too much about this yet, it’s one of the next books on the reading list… really can’t wait, it looks like a fantastic story!! Alina looks brilliant in her regal gown 🙂
Claire Fraser from the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon. The frills of her dress and her hair are brilliant. Again….Outlander is a series that we need to check out, mseregon is a fountain of knowledge when it comes to book ideas!
And finally, Temperance from Legend Unleashed by M. Latimer-Ridley…. yes, us! Wow. We were surprised and so happy when one of the next images in the series was our Temperance Levinthal! Look at her, the pose really captures her nonchalant personality!
This isn’t the end of the series, not yet! mseregon has a few more images up her sleeve, we’ll be certain to follow along until the end!
Look up at them all, they’re so pretty!
If you want to keep up-to-date on mseregon’s works or get some really brilliant book suggestions: you can follow her on twitter, tumblror deviantart!
Here’s a short story with characters from our young adult fantasy book, Legend Unleashed. Hope you like it and we’d love to hear what you think!
Temperance Levinthal is the main character in the novel, Legend Unleashed by M. Latimer-Ridley, which is set fourteen years after this story.
“There are moments within our lives that define us.
In this short story we witness some of these events in the life of eight year old Temperance Levinthal, when she is forced to face school yard bullies, town gossips and a mother, devastated by circumstance.”
You can download this free short story for your ereader here in the most popular formats, such as Epub and Mobi. We’ll hopefully adding a link to Amazon too when it’s up! 😀
You may not know this, but it is a truth, universally acknowledged, that we are fan-girls of the highest order! We search high and low for the ‘squee’; which can be defined as
“The battle-cry of a rabid fan-girl” or more specifically; “To express joy of something”. It’s a happy fuzzy feeling 🙂
The thing that makes us ‘squee’ the most are little relationship moments in stories 🙂
We love, well… love!
For us, love is key to young adult (YA) and urban fantasy (UF) stories. The development of characters and their relationships, a string of moments, is what makes our hearts soar as readers.
When it came to writingLegend Unleashed, we took what we had learned and tried our hardest to develop character relationships that would make our fan-girl selves happy!
Relationship moments are magnificent really; in reality and fiction! They can make you sigh with happiness, recoil in fear or sob with disappointment. And they are the wonderful, glittery glue that sticks a YA story together.
We wanted to share some of our favourite ‘book relationship’ moments!
1.) Power; the men usually have too much of it (physically, magically or intellectually)! They’re dangerous. But their great power comes at a price; fear. If the girl is afraid, it unsettles the men. We realise they would never hurt her but the fact that the girl believes they could, upsets the men! 🙂
The Awakening: Book 2 in The Darkest Power Trilogy by Kelley Armstrong
A favourite example of ours comes from Kelley Armstrong’s YA series, The Darkest Powers. The werewolf character, Derek, saves the girl, Chloe, when she is attacked by several knife-wielding youths. His display of strength is so intense that it leaves Chloe afraid of him. He is left mumbling that she must know he would never hurt her. It matters that she shouldn’t be afraid of him.
2.) Jealousy; there is always a rival for the girl’s attention. And there is no reason for the men to be jealous, unless they care for the girl! That’s how we know 🙂
Cybeles Secret by Juliet Marillier
This can be wonderfully seen in Juliet Marillier’s YA book, Cybele’s Secret. Got to say we really love Wildwood Dancing and Cybele’s Secret (two really lovely books).
Set in Istanbul (which is a very exotic location for a story, really adds atmosphere); there are two men vying for Paula’s hand; Stoyan, the warrior and Duarte, the dashing, intelligent, pirate. Stoyan is jealous of Duarte’s ability to arouse Paula’s passion for reading and learning, to talk to her about the things she loves most. Stoyan, by comparison, cannot read or write. It causes him to become easily embarrassed, frustrated and angry.
3.) Tenderness; even when spurned the men can show great kindness to the girl that makes us all swoon. Who better to inspire, than Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Mr Darcy is surely the best literary man!
Even when Elizabeth Bennet has completely rejected him (and basically told him off, in a great, and terrible, way… we often wonder, could we have said no to Mr Darcy in the first place? Miss Bennet you are a stronger woman than Latimer or Ridley!!); Mr Darcy does everything in his power to make sure Mr Wickham marries Lydia Bennet (saving the Bennet family honour). His love for Elizabeth makes him compassionate (and we realise how much he cares for her!).
4.) Urgency; as the relationship hits its highest points, there is a sense of urgency. Some terrible thing has happen to the characters and there is a struggle, which might endanger the girl.
The Realms of the Gods, Book 4 in The Immortals Series by Tamora Pierce
This is beautifully shown in Tamora Pierce’s YA series, The Immortals Series, after Numair and Daine are torn apart from each other by magical stone monsters. When Numair fights his way back to the cliff edge, where they were separated, he is completely inconsolable. He destroys everything in his path to get to her.
It’s the moments that make the story – they are wonderful to read and create! We hope you can find favourite moments in Legend Unleashed too and that it makes your inner (or outer!) fan-girl or boy smile!
If you have any favourite moments let us know!! The hunt for magical moments is never-ending for a fan-girl :)!!
Don’t forget to click and enter the LEGEND UNLEASHED GIVEAWAY, It’s still on! Ends a few days before Christmas!
Latimer and I have a happiness curve. Well, it should be a happiness slope really. It goes from the lofty level of the thrilled ‘Huzzah’ and plummets down to the blue depths of the ‘Bleugh’. We thought we were great, making up the name, ‘happiness curve’ but after a quick Google search, it turns out it’s already in existence…darn it. But! This is our version, and it’s a little different.
While both ends represent happiness in the usual curve, with ours, one end is total happiness and the other is…not. Both points are so extreme, only sounds can truly express them. There are, of course, little steps along the sloping road, the ‘that was epic!’ the ‘yay, yay!’, the ‘oh noo!’ and the ‘why me!’.
Throughout the process of our book being published, Latimer and I have swung from both extremes, pinged and ponged from one to the other. From when we finished writing it with premature ‘huzzahs’ to the double synchronised ‘bleughs’ as we forced ourselves to format, ‘one more time’.
Despite this though, skating up and down the slope has to be one of the most exhilarating and fun experiences that we’ve had in our short lives. We’ve had the ecstatic arrival of our book cover, where we spent over a week frequently wandering around staring at the image with dopey smiles while bumping into people, poles, bins and getting tangled in dog leads. To the following week where we nursed the resulting bruises, and started the brain-hurting job of teasing out the tangles within our manuscript.
But publishing is not the only place you’ll find happiness curves; there are those that occur within a really good book, well mini ones anyway. Actually, it is always more of a happiness squiggle. Once sucked into another world, you can roll along through moments of sqwee-ing, jealousy, danger, action and sadness. It can often be like a rollercoaster. This fantastic ride is something we’ve always strived to achieve in our own writing. So we hope you enjoy the skating along the happiness squiggle within our book, Legend Unleashed (which you could win in our new giveaway, see below!).
Huzzah!! Free things! 😀
Don’t forget to click and enter the LEGEND UNLEASHED GIVEAWAY, ah go on, you know you want to. Click it! Haha. 😀
Do you have a happiness curve, squiggle, line or circle? We love to hear about all your different shapes and where you are on them!
Carwicky 